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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Market-Place
+
+Author: Harold Frederic
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2008 [EBook #298]
+Last Updated: March 14, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARKET-PLACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Hamm
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MARKET-PLACE
+
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the field--sitting alone
+with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.
+
+His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat
+shapeless to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried
+to define to himself what its limits would probably be. Vistas of
+unchecked, expanding conquest stretched away in every direction. He held
+at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, it rested entirely with
+him to say whether there should be any such thing as mercy at all--and
+until he chose to utter the restraining word the rout of the vanquished
+would go on with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush and
+torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired. The responsibility
+of having to decide when he would stop grinding their faces might come
+to weigh upon him later on, but he would not give it room in his mind
+to-night.
+
+A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames
+in the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom
+visages: they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright.
+They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself above rage
+and cunning. Only here and there did he recall a name with which to
+label one of these countenances; very few of them raised a memory of
+individual rancour. The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt,
+but their persecution of him had been impersonal; his great revenge was
+equally so. As he looked, in truth, there was only one face--a composite
+mask of what he had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample
+implacably under foot. He stared with a conqueror's cold frown at it,
+and gave an abrupt laugh which started harsh echoes in the stillness of
+the Board Room. Then he shook off the reverie, and got to his feet. He
+shivered a little at the sudden touch of a chill.
+
+A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the table where the
+two least-considered of his lieutenants, the dummy Directors, had left
+it. He poured a small quantity and sipped it. During the whole eventful
+day it had not occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat
+liquor seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain. With more
+deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad, floridly-decorated
+open box beside the bottle, lit it, and blew a long draught of smoke
+thoughtfully through his nostrils. Then he put his hands in his pockets,
+looked again into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile. God in heaven!
+it was actually true!
+
+This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel exhilaration,
+which yet was not novel. Upon reflection, he perceived that he felt as
+if he were a boy again--a boy excited by pleasure. It surprised as much
+as it delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy of a
+child. He caught the inkling of an idea that perhaps his years were an
+illusion. He had latterly been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the
+grey hairs thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him. Now all
+at once he saw that he was not old at all. The buoyancy of veritable
+youth bubbled in his veins. He began walking up and down the room,
+regarding new halcyon visions with a sparkling eye. He was no longer
+conscious of the hated foe beneath his feet; they trod instead elastic
+upon the clouds.
+
+The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside, and of trying
+a door near by, suddenly caught his attention. He stood still and
+listened with alertness for a surprised instant, then shrugged his
+shoulders and began moving again. It must be nearly seven o'clock;
+although the allotment work had kept the clerks later than usual that
+day, everybody connected with the offices had certainly gone home. He
+realized that his nerves had played him a trick in giving that alarmed
+momentary start--and smiled almost tenderly as he remembered how notable
+and even glorious a warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state.
+They would be all right after a night's real rest. He would know how to
+sleep NOW, thank God!
+
+But yes--there was somebody outside--and this time knocking with
+assurance at the right door, the entrance to the outer office. After a
+second's consideration, he went into this unlighted outer office, and
+called out through the opaque glass an enquiry. The sound of his voice,
+as it analyzed itself in his own ears, seemed unduly peremptory. The
+answer which came back brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes. He
+hurriedly unlocked and opened the door.
+
+“I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room,” said
+the newcomer, as he entered. “I assumed it must be you. Hope I don't
+interrupt anything.”
+
+“Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden,” replied
+the other, leading the way back to the inner apartment. “In fact, I
+couldn't have asked anything better.”
+
+The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it not quite
+in harmony with this declaration. He turned, under the drop-light
+overhanging the Board-table, and shook hands with his guest, as if to
+atone for this doubtful accent. “I shake hands with you again,” he
+said, speaking rapidly, “because this afternoon it was what you may call
+formal; it didn't count. And--my God!--you're the man I owe it all to.”
+
+“Oh, you mustn't go as far as that--even in the absence of witnesses,”
+ replied Lord Plowden, lightly. “I'll take off my coat for a few
+minutes,” he went on, very much at his ease. “It's hot in here. It's by
+the merest chance I happened to be detained in the City--and I saw your
+lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity whatever for a quiet
+talk. No--I won't drink anything before dinner, but I'll light a cigar.
+I want to say to you, Thorpe,” he concluded, as he seated himself
+“that I think what you've done is very wonderful. The Marquis thinks so
+too--but I shouldn't like to swear that he understands much about it.”
+
+The implication that the speaker did understand remained in the air
+like a tangible object. Thorpe took a chair, and the two men exchanged a
+silent, intent look. Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from
+the fire, pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them
+from above, had for a moment a mysterious something in common. Then
+the tension of the glance was relaxed--and on the instant no two men in
+London looked less alike.
+
+Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man. Thorpe had even
+heard him called the handsomest man in England--though this seemed in
+all likelihood an exaggeration. But handsome he undoubtedly was--tall
+without suggesting the thought of height to the observer, erect yet
+graceful, powerfully built, while preserving the effect of
+slenderness. His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful
+guardsman-type--regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness. When he
+talked, or followed with interest the talk of others, it revealed almost
+an excess of animation. Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his
+glance, the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows, and saw
+that it was not the guardsman face at all. His skin was fresh-hued, and
+there was a shade of warm brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche,
+but his hair, wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black. There
+were perceptible veins of grey in it, though he had only entered his
+thirty-fifth year. He was dressed habitually with the utmost possible
+care.
+
+The contrast between this personage and the older man confronting him
+was abrupt. Thorpe was also tall, but of a burly and slouching figure.
+His face, shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard, invited no
+attention. One seemed always to have known this face--thick-featured,
+immobile, undistinguished. Its accessories for the time being were even
+more than ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were ragged with
+neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes looked as if he had slept in
+them. The hands resting on his big knees were coarse in shape, and
+roughened, and ill-kept.
+
+“I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in,” he
+repeated now, speaking with a drag, as of caution, on his words.
+“Witnesses or no witnesses, I'm anxious to have you understand that I
+realize what I owe to you.”
+
+“I only wish it were a great deal more than it is,” replied the other,
+with a frank smile.
+
+“Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands,” said Thorpe.
+
+He could hear that there was a kind of reservation in his voice; the
+suspicion that his companion detected it embarrassed him. He found
+himself in the position of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings
+impelled him to be perfectly open. He paused, and was awkwardly
+conscious of constraint in the silence which ensued. “You are very kind
+to put it in that way,” said Lord Plowden, at last. He seemed also to be
+finding words for his thoughts with a certain difficulty. He turned
+his cigar round in his white fingers meditatively. “I gather that
+your success has been complete--as complete as you yourself could have
+desired. I congratulate you with all my heart.”
+
+“No--don't say my success--say our success,” put in Thorpe.
+
+“But, my dear man,” the other corrected him, “my interest, compared with
+yours, is hardly more than nominal. I'm a Director, of course, and I'm
+not displeased that my few shares should be worth something instead of
+nothing, but----”
+
+Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands. “That isn't my view of the thing
+at all. To be frank, I was turning over in my mind, just awhile ago,
+before you came in, some way of arranging all that on a different
+footing. If you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's all right.”
+
+Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore to Lord Plowden
+his accustomed fluency of speech.
+
+“I came here to say precisely that thing,” he began--“that I do trust
+it to you. We have never had any very definite talk on the subject--and
+pray don't think that I want to go into details now. I'd much rather
+not, in fact. But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe in
+you. I feel sure that you are going to go far, as the saying is. Well,
+I want to tie myself to your star. Do you see what I mean? You are going
+to be a power in finance. You are going to be able to make and unmake
+men as you choose. I should be very much obliged indeed if you would
+make me.”
+
+Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion with what seemed
+to the other a lethargic gaze. In truth, his mind was toiling with
+strenuous activity to master, in all its bearings, the significance of
+what had been said. This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye,
+the while he was hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous asset which he
+had never up to that time learned that he possessed. Unconsciously, he
+dampened the spirits of his companion.
+
+“Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you,” Lord Plowden said,
+growing cool in the face of this slow stare. “I'm asking nothing at all.
+I had the impulse to come and say to you that you are a great man, and
+that you've done a great thing--and done it, moreover, in a very great
+way.”
+
+“You know how it was done!” The wondering exclamation forced itself from
+Thorpe's unready lips. He bent forward a little, and took a new visual
+hold, as it were, of his companion's countenance.
+
+Lord Plowden smiled. “Did you think I was such a hopeless duffer, then?”
+ he rejoined.
+
+For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs, and patted
+his knee contentedly. All at once his face had lightened; a genial
+speculation returned to his grey eyes.
+
+“Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see,” he began to
+explain. The relief with which he spoke was palpable. “I could not for
+the life of me make up my mind whether to tell you about it or not.
+Let's see--this is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the
+scheme didn't dawn on me myself until toward evening Tuesday.
+But yesterday, of course, I could have told you--and again this
+afternoon--but, as I say, I couldn't make up my mind. Once I had it on
+the tip of my tongue--but somehow I didn't. And you--you never gave me a
+hint that you saw what was going on.”
+
+Again Lord Plowden smiled. “I voted with you,” he put in softly.
+
+Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar. “Well, I couldn't have asked
+anything better than this,” he declared once again. “It beats all the
+rest put together, to my mind.”
+
+“Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning,” commented the other
+tentatively.
+
+“Why man,” Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his choice of words,
+but speaking with evident fervour; “I was more anxious about you--and
+the way you'd take it--than about anything else. I give you my word I
+was. I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing. You might
+think that it was all right, and then again you might round on me--or
+no, I don't mean quite that--but you might say it wasn't good enough for
+you, and wash your hands of the whole affair. And I can't tell you what
+a relief it is to find that you--that you're satisfied. Now I can go
+ahead.”
+
+“Ah, yes--ahead,” said the younger man, thoughtfully. “Do you mind
+telling me--you see I'm quite in the dark as to details--how much
+further ahead we are likely to go? I comprehend the general nature of
+our advance--but how far off is the goal you have in sight?”
+
+“God knows!” answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of excitement in his
+voice. “I don't give it any limit. I don't see why we should stop at
+all. We've got them in such a position that--why, good heavens! we can
+squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz.” He chuckled grimly at
+the suggestion of his simile. “We'll get more ounces to the ton out of
+our crushings than they ever heard of on the Rand, too.”
+
+“Might I ask,” interposed the other, “who may 'they' be?”
+
+Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort to remember names.
+“Oh, there are a lot of them,” he said, vaguely. “I think I told you
+of the way that Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let me
+believe they were going to take me up, and then, because I wouldn't give
+them everything--the very shirt off my back--turned and put their knife
+into me. I don't know them apart, hardly--they've all got names like
+Rhine wines--but I know the gang as a whole, and if I don't lift the
+roof clean off their particular synagogue, then my name is mud.”
+
+Lord Plowden smiled. “I've always the greatest difficulty to remember
+that you are an Englishman--a Londoner born,” he declared pleasantly.
+“You don't talk in the least like one. On shipboard I made sure you
+were an American--a very characteristic one, I thought--of some curious
+Western variety, you know. I never was more surprised in my life than
+when you told me, the other day, that you only left England a few years
+ago.”
+
+“Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen,” Thorpe corrected him. He
+studied his companion's face with slow deliberation.
+
+“I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss,” he remarked,
+after a little pause. “If you'd known that I was an Englishman, when
+we first met, there on the steamer, I kind o' suspect that you and I'd
+never have got much beyond a nodding acquaintance--and even that mostly
+on my side. I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything--that is,
+not specially--but I've often thought since that it was a mighty good
+thing I did. Now isn't that true--that if you had taken me for one of
+your own countrymen you'd have given me the cold shoulder?”
+
+“I dare say there's a good deal in what you say,” the other admitted,
+gently enough, but without contrition. “Things naturally shape
+themselves that way, rather, you know. If they didn't, why then the
+whole position would become difficult. But you are an American, to all
+intents and purposes.”
+
+“Oh, no--I never took any step towards getting naturalized,” Thorpe
+protested. “I always intended to come back here. Or no, I won't say
+that--because most of the time I was dog-poor--and this isn't the place
+for a poor man. But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it
+off--if I ever found my self a rich man--THEN I'd come piking across the
+Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would carry me.”
+
+The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam in his eye. “And you
+ARE a rich man, now,” he observed, after a momentary pause.
+
+“We are both rich men,” replied Thorpe, gravely.
+
+He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken. “This is
+how it seems to me the thing figures itself out: It can't be said that
+your name on the Board, or the Marquis's either, was of much use so far
+as the public were concerned. To tell the truth, I saw some time ago
+that they wouldn't be. Titles on prospectuses are played out in London.
+I've rather a notion, indeed, that they're apt to do more harm than
+good--just at present, at least. But all that aside--you are the man who
+was civil to me at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about my
+scheme, and you are the man who was good to me later on, when I didn't
+know where to turn for a friendly word. Very well; here I am! I've made
+my coup! And I'd be a sweep, wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so
+glad to remember a week ago. But you see, I don't forget! The capital
+of the Company is 500,000 pounds, all in pound shares. We offered the
+public only a fifth of them. The other four hundred thousand shares are
+mine as vendor--and I have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of
+them to be yours.”
+
+Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words. “It is
+too much--you don't reflect what it is you are saying,” he murmured
+confusedly. “Not a bit of it,” the other reassured him. “Everything that
+I've said goes.”
+
+The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet. “It is a preposterously
+big reward for the merest act of courtesy,” he insisted. “Of course it
+takes my breath away for joy--and yet I feel I oughtn't to be consenting
+to it at all. And it has its unpleasant side--it buries me under a
+mountain of obligation. I don't know what to do or what to say.”
+
+“Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then,” replied Thorpe, with a
+gesture before which the other resumed his seat. “Just a word more--and
+then I suppose we'd better be going. Look at it in this way. Your
+grandfather was Lord Chancellor of England, and your father was
+a General in the Crimea. My grandfather kept a small second-hand
+book-shop, and my father followed him in the business. In one sense,
+that puts us ten thousand miles apart. But in another sense, we'll say
+that we like each other, and that there are ways in which we can be of
+immense use to each other, and that brings us close together. You need
+money--and here it is for you. I need--what shall I say?--a kind of
+friendly lead in the matter of establishing myself on the right footing,
+among the right people--and that's what you can do for me. Mind--I'd
+prefer to put it all in quite another way; I'd like to say it was
+all niceness on your part, all gratitude on mine. But if you want to
+consider it on a business basis--why there you have it also--perfectly
+plain and clear.”
+
+He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well. The two men
+shook hands in silence.
+
+When the latter spoke, it was to say: “Do you know how to open one of
+those soda-water bottles? I've tried, but I can never get the trick. I
+think I should like to have a drink--after this.”
+
+When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man was getting
+into his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy and cigars within a
+cabinet at the corner of the room, and carefully turned a key upon them.
+
+“If you're going West, let me give you a lift,” said Lord Plowden, hat
+in hand. “I can set you down wherever you like. Unfortunately I've to go
+out to dinner, and I must race, as it is, to get dressed.”
+
+Thorpe shook his head. “No, go along,” he bade him. “I've some odds and
+ends of things to do on the way.”
+
+“Then when shall I see you?”--began the other, and halted suddenly
+with a new thought in his glance. “But what are you doing Saturday?”
+ he asked, in a brisker tone. “It's a dies non here. Come down with me
+to-morrow evening, to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday,
+and drive about on Sunday, if you like--and there we can talk at our
+leisure. Yes, that is what you must do. I have a gun for you. Shall we
+say, then--Charing Cross at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will
+dine at home.”
+
+The elder man pondered his answer--frowning at the problem before him
+with visible anxiety. “I'm afraid I'd better not come--it's very good of
+you all the same.”
+
+“Nonsense,” retorted the other. “My mother will be very glad indeed to
+see you. There is no one else there--unless, perhaps, my sister has some
+friend down. We shall make a purely family party.”
+
+Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. “All right. Charing Cross,
+5:15,” he said then, with the grave brevity of one who announces a
+momentous decision.
+
+He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments after his
+companion had gone. Then, going to a closet at the end of the room, he
+brought forth his coat and hat; something prompted him to hold them up,
+and scrutinize them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put
+them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused, playing in his
+beard.
+
+The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. He made
+his way out, and downstairs to the street. It was a rainy, windy October
+night, sloppy underfoot, dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a
+cabman, motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening rubber
+cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed
+him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, “Strand!” as he
+clambered into the hansom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+“LOUISA, the long and short of it is this,” said Thorpe, half an hour
+later: “you never did believe in me, as a sister should do.”
+
+He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
+dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering
+gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only
+the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.
+Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
+Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this
+portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility
+for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the
+walls of which he was dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about
+Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out
+of the mists of his childhood.
+
+Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with
+quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The
+peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like
+snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at
+the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same
+rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights,
+in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he
+was a boy?
+
+“I know you always say that,” replied Louisa, impassively.
+
+She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice
+or intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair,
+drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest
+brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
+contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of
+figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large,
+capable hands on her knees.
+
+“I believed in you as much as you'd let me,” she went on, indifferently,
+almost wearily. “But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did
+or didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What
+had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world
+you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know
+whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it
+was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London--but
+elsewhere you might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover, I
+don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something very
+different from the boy Joel that left the shop--it must be twenty years
+ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell me.”
+
+“But my point is,” pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
+intent glance, “you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to
+succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'”
+
+She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued
+failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless
+point.
+
+“No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself,” she admitted,
+listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke
+with more animation: “You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was
+very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking
+about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a
+stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your
+life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof
+over my head--to keep the little business from disappearing altogether.
+It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the
+big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the
+invalid husband to support for between three and four years--a dead
+weight on me every week--and then the children to look after, to clothe
+and educate.”
+
+At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. “Don't think
+I'm ungrateful”--she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile--“but I
+almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What
+it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't
+be able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of
+life--and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what
+will become of them.”
+
+The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam
+in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
+moustache.
+
+“But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over,” he
+persisted, doggedly--“and I told you there'd be more where that came
+from, and that I stood to pull off the great event--even then, now, you
+didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking
+about, did you?”
+
+She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. “For heaven's
+sake, Joel,” she said, sharply--“you become a bore with that stupid
+nonsense. I want to be patient with you--I do indeed sympathize with you
+in your misfortunes--you know that well enough--but you're very tiresome
+with that eternal harping on what I believed and what I didn't believe.
+Now, are you going to stop to supper or not?--because if you are I must
+send the maid out. And there's another thing--would it be of any help to
+you to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have Alfred's room
+as well as not--till Christmas, at least.”
+
+“Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel till I'd settled
+my bill,” suggested Thorpe tentatively, in a muffled voice.
+
+The practical woman reflected for an instant. “I was thinking,” she
+confessed then, “that it might be cheaper to leave your things there,
+and buy what little you want--I don't imagine, from what I've seen, that
+your wardrobe is so very valuable--but no, I suppose the bill ought to
+be paid. Perhaps it can be managed; how much will it be?”
+
+Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over to her chair. With
+his thick hands on his sister's shoulders he stooped and kissed her on
+the forehead.
+
+“You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?” he said, as he straightened
+himself behind her.
+
+The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from the perfunctory
+salute with which he had greeted her on his arrival from foreign parts,
+six months before--brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain
+face. Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted gaze she was
+bending upon the fireless grate. Something extraordinary, unaccountable,
+was in the manner of her brother. She recalled that, in truth, he was
+more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell what wild,
+uncanny second nature had not grown up in him under those
+outlandish tropical skies? He had just told her that his ruin was
+absolute--overwhelming--yet there had been a covert smile in the
+recesses of his glance. Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle
+from him, there as he stood behind her!
+
+The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain loomed up and
+possessed her. She flung herself out of the chair, and, wheeling, seized
+its back and drew it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare
+of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.
+
+“What”--she began, stammering--“What is the matter, Joel?”
+
+He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly at her for a further
+moment. Then he tossed his head, and laughed abruptly.
+
+“Sit down, old girl,” he adjured her. “Try and hold yourself together,
+now--to hear some different kind of news. I've been playing it rather
+low down on you, for a fact. Instead of my being smashed, it's the other
+way about.”
+
+She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp upon the chair-back.
+Her breathing troubled her as she regarded him, and tried to take in the
+meaning of his words.
+
+“Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about your Company?” she
+asked, confusedly.
+
+“No--no--not at all,” he replied, now all genial heartiness. “No--what
+I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking a rise out of you all the
+same.” He seemed so unaffectedly pleased by his achievement in kindly
+duplicity that she forced an awkward smile to her lips.
+
+“I don't understand in the least,” she said, striving to remember what
+he had told her. “What you said was that the public had entirely failed
+to come in--that there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
+flotation expenses--those were your own words. Of course, I don't
+pretend to understand these City matters--but it IS the case, isn't it,
+that if people don't subscribe for the shares of a new company, then the
+company is a failure?”
+
+“Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule,” he nodded at
+her, still beaming.
+
+“Well, then--of course--I don't understand,” she owned.
+
+“I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've explained it
+to you,” he said, seating himself, and motioning her to the other chair.
+“But yes, of course you will. You're a business woman. You know what
+figures mean. And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You
+remember that I told you----”
+
+“But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie out before the
+shops close.”
+
+“Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked up for that. I'll
+get something at the hotel before I go to bed, if I feel like it. But
+say!”--the thought suddenly struck him--“if you want to come out with
+me, I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London. What d'ye
+say?”
+
+She shook her head. “I shall have some bread and cheese and beer at
+nine. That's my rule, you know. I don't like to break it. I'm always
+queer next day if I do. But now make haste and tell me--you're really
+not broken then? You have really come out well?”
+
+For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height, and spread his
+bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a
+triumphant glow.
+
+“Broken?” he echoed her word, with emphasis. “My dear Louisa, I'm not
+the sort that gets broken. I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall
+break them!”
+
+He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender,
+excitedly telling his story to her. Sometimes he threw the words over
+his shoulder; again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his
+hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the
+meaning of his speech--and then she found it peculiarly difficult to
+realize that he was her brother.
+
+Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced
+this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for
+her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with
+the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings
+in strange lands--and these he had frequently told her about before.
+Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a
+new thread. One after another, these experiences of his, as he related
+them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and
+malice had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a
+hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch
+Indies, in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
+waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were
+yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled
+him--everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden
+consummation. In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself. There
+had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before the Empire fell,
+in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in British Columbia when the
+first rumours of rich ore were whispered about--many times when fortune
+seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had always played him
+false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the
+temptation of profitable treason.
+
+But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession slipping
+through his fingers, only to strain and tighten them for a clutch at
+another. It did not surprise his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly
+attract her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
+comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the wage-earning
+sort. Apparently, he had done no work at all, in the bread-winner's
+sense of the word. This was so like Joel that it was taken for granted
+in his sister's mind. All his voyages and adventures and painful
+enterprises had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer--the
+passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst, to get
+something for nothing.
+
+The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last
+it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and
+crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that
+place that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago.
+Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his narrative that he
+now became vague as to details. There were concessions of rubber forests
+mentioned, and the barter of these for other concessions with money
+to boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about where the true
+boundary of Guatemala ran--but she failed clearly to understand much
+about it all. His other schemes and mishaps she had followed readily
+enough. Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw everything
+jumbled and distorted, as through a haze. Once or twice she interrupted
+him to ask questions, but he seemed to attach such slight importance to
+her comprehending these details that she forbore. Only one fact was
+it necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode, apparently. When
+he quitted Tehuantepec, to make his way straight to London, at the
+beginning of the year, he left behind him a rubber plantation which he
+desired to sell, and brought with him between six and seven thousand
+pounds, with which to pay the expenses of selling it. How he had
+obtained either the plantation or the money did not seem to have made
+itself understood. No doubt, as his manner indicated when she ventured
+her enquiries, it was quite irrelevant to the narrative.
+
+In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that no
+villain had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans. He at least
+mentioned no one who had wronged him there. When he came to London,
+however, there were villains and to spare. He moved to the mantel, when
+he arrived at this stage of the story, and made clear a space for his
+elbow to rest among the little trinkets and photographs with which it
+was burdened. He stood still thereafter, looking down at her; his voice
+took on a harsher note.
+
+Much of this story, also, she knew by heart. This strange, bearded,
+greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often during the past
+half-year to the little book-shop, and the widow's home above it, his
+misshapen handbag full of papers, his heart full of rage, hope, grief,
+ambition, disgust, confidence--everything but despair. It was true, it
+had never been quite real to her. He was right in his suggestion that
+she had never wholly believed in him. She had not been able to take
+altogether seriously this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who
+talked about millions. It was true that he had sent her four hundred
+pounds for the education of her son and daughter; it was equally true
+that he had brought with him to London a sum which any of his ancestors,
+so far as she knew about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he
+treated as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate the machinery of
+his great enterprise. She had heard, at various times, the embittered
+details of the disappearance of this money, little by little. Nearly a
+quarter of it, all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart
+of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the belief that London
+could be best approached through him. When at last this wretch was
+kicked downstairs, the effect had been only to make room for a fresh
+lot of bloodsuckers. There were so-called advertising agents, so-called
+journalists, so-called “men of influence in the City,”--a swarm of
+relentless and voracious harpies, who dragged from him in blackmail
+nearly the half of what he had left, before he summoned the courage and
+decision to shut them out.
+
+Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands he stumbled
+next--a group of City men concerned in the South African market, who
+impressed him very favourably at the outset. He got to know them by
+accident, and at the time when he began to comprehend the necessity of
+securing influential support for his scheme. Everything that he heard
+and could learn about them testified to the strength of their position
+in the City. Because they displayed a certain amiability of manner
+toward him and his project, he allowed himself to make sure of their
+support. It grew to be a certainty in his mind that they would see him
+through. He spent a good deal of money in dinners and suppers in their
+honour, after they had let him understand that this form of propitiation
+was not unpleasant to them. They chaffed him about some newspaper
+paragraphs, in which he was described as the “Rubber King,” with
+an affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed that he
+detected a genuine respect for his abilities.
+
+Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for the better part
+of two months, he laid before them, at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a
+dinner in a private room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
+They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property, and place it
+upon the market; in consideration of their finding the ready money for
+this exploitation, they were to have for themselves two-fifths of the
+shares in the Company ultimately to be floated. They listened to these
+details, and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself, with
+rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves that evening to
+nothing definite. It took him nearly a week thereafter to get an answer
+from any of them. Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at
+all, it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving nine-tenths
+of the shares.
+
+He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his original amazement,
+that they named these preposterous terms merely because they expected
+to be beaten down, and he summoned all his good nature and tact for
+the task of haggling with them. He misunderstood their first show of
+impatience at this, and persevered in the face of their tacit rebuffs.
+Then, one day, a couple of them treated him with overt rudeness, and
+he, astonished out of his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he
+could hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his. They
+closed their office doors to him; even their clerks treated him with
+contemptuous incivility.
+
+This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him, curiously enough, as
+no other misadventure of his life had done.
+
+Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her, at the
+time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why it should disturb
+him so profoundly: to her mind, these men had done nothing so monstrous
+after all. But to him, their offense swallowed up all the other
+indignities suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. A
+sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated
+nobody else as he hated them. How often she had heard him swear, in
+solemn vibrating tones, that to the day of his death his most sacred
+ambition should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust and
+mire!
+
+And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant against
+the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took point and shape. It was
+about these very men that he was talking.
+
+“And think of it!” he was saying, impressively. “It's magnificent enough
+for me to make this great hit--but I don't count it as anything at
+all by comparison with the fact that I make it at their expense. You
+remember the fellows I told you about?” he asked abruptly, deferring to
+the confused look on her face.
+
+“Yes--you make it out of them,” she repeated, in an uncertain voice. It
+occurred to her that she must have been almost asleep. “But did I miss
+anything? Have you been telling what it is that you have made?”
+
+“No--that you shall have in good time. You don't seem to realize it,
+Louisa. I can hardly realize it myself. I am actually a very rich man.
+I can't tell how much I've got--in fact, it can be almost as much as I
+like--half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want to make
+it that much. Yes--it takes the breath away, doesn't it? But best of
+all--a thousand times best of all--practically every dollar of it comes
+out of those Kaffir swine--the very men that tried to rob me, and
+that have been trying to ruin me ever since. I tell you what I wish,
+Louise--I wish to God there could only be time enough, and I'd take it
+all in half-sovereigns--two millions of them, or three millions--and
+just untwist every coin, one by one, out from among their heart-strings.
+Oh--but it'll be all right as it is. It's enough to make a man feel
+religious--to think how those thieves are going to suffer.”
+
+“Well” she said, slowly after reflection, “it all rather frightens me.”
+
+As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly
+accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and,
+stooping, lit the fire.
+
+He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff awkwardness
+over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note
+of the room--the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that
+had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and
+begrimed low ceiling--all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to which
+she had been condemned.
+
+“Frightens you?” he queried, with a kind of jovial tenderness, as she
+got to her feet; “frightens you, eh? Why, within a month's time, old
+lady, you'll be riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers
+folding their arms up behind, and you'll be taking it all as easy and as
+natural as if you'd been born in a barouche.”
+
+He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows: “Barouche?
+That's what we'd call in England a landau.”
+
+She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined
+meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the
+snapping sparks. “No,” she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling
+with pride in her voice. “I was born here over the shop.”
+
+“Well, good God! so was I,” he commented, lustily. “But that's no reason
+why I shouldn't wind up in Park Lane--or you either.”
+
+She had nothing to say to this, apparently. After a little, she seated
+herself again, drawing her chair closer to the hearth. “It's years since
+I've lit this fire before the first of November,” she remarked, with the
+air of defending the action to herself.
+
+“Oh, we're celebrating,” he said, rubbing his hands over the reluctant
+blaze. “Everything goes, tonight!”
+
+Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment of her
+mind. “You set out to tell me what it was all about,” she reminded him.
+“You see I'm completely in the dark. I only hear you say that you've
+made a great fortune. That's all I know. Or perhaps you've told me as
+much as you care to.”
+
+“Why, not at all,” he reassured her, pulling his own chair toward him
+with his foot, and sprawling into it with a grunt of relief. “If you'll
+draw me a glass of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. It's
+not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed to a human being,
+for that matter--but you'll enjoy it, and it'll be safe enough with
+you.”
+
+As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily after her: “No
+more beer when that keg runs dry, you know. Nothing but champagne!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister brought him.
+
+“Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty,” he said, when he put the glass
+down. “Truth is--I've lost track of myself altogether since--since the
+big thing happened. I seem to be somebody else--a comparative stranger,
+so to speak. I've got to get acquainted with myself, all over again. You
+can't imagine what an extraordinary feeling it is--this being hit every
+few minutes with the recollection that you're worth half a million.
+It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down. There are such
+thousands of things to do--you dance about, all of a flutter. You don't
+know where to begin.”
+
+“Begin where you left off,” suggested Louisa. “You were going to tell me
+how--how 'the big thing' happened. You're always coming to it--and never
+getting any further.”
+
+Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification, he plunged
+forthwith into the tale.
+
+“You remember my telling you at the time how I got my Board together.
+I'm speaking now of the present Company--after I'd decided to be my own
+promoter, and have at least some kind of 'a look-in' for my money. There
+wasn't much money left, by the way; it was considerably under three
+thousand. But I come to that later. First there was the Board. Here was
+where that Lord Plowden that I told you about--the man that came over on
+the ship with me--came in. I went to him. I--God! I was desperate--but I
+hadn't much of an idea he'd consent. But he did! He listened to me, and
+I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the Syndicate would have cut my
+throat if I hadn't pulled away,--and he said, 'Why, yes, I'll go on your
+Board.' Then I told him more about it, and presently he said he'd get me
+another man of title--a sky-scraper of a title too--to be my Chairman.
+That's the Marquis of Chaldon, a tremendous diplomatic swell, you know,
+Ambassador at Vienna in his time, and Lord Lieutenant and all sorts of
+things, but willing to gather in his five hundred a year, all the same.”
+
+“Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?” asked the
+sister.
+
+“Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten quid a week, and a
+few extras. The other Directors get three hundred. This Lord Plowden
+is one of them--but I'll tell you more about him later on. Then there's
+Watkin, he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson, he's a
+wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm in Dundee, but gets along
+the best way he can on a very dicky business here in London, now. And
+then there's General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say,
+but I guess he needs all he can get. He's started wearing his fur-coat
+already. Well, that's my Board. I couldn't join it, of course, till
+after allotment--that's because I'm the vendor, as they call it--but
+that hasn't interfered at all with my running the whole show. The Board
+doesn't really count, you know. It only does what I want it to do. It's
+just a form that costs me seventeen hundred a year, that's all.”
+
+“Seventeen hundred a year,” she repeated, mechanically.
+
+“Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see. Or first, there were
+other things to be done. I saw that a good broker's name counted for
+a lot on a prospectus. I picked out one that I'd heard was
+reasonable--it'd been a splendid name if I could have got it--but he
+calmly said his price was two thousand pounds, all cash down--and I came
+away. Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much of anything yet, and
+so wasn't so stiff about his figure. He agreed to take 500 pounds cash,
+and 2,000 in shares. It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned
+out, at the pinch, to be the one man in a million for me. But I'll tell
+you about him later. He's the Broker, mind; you mustn't forget him.
+Well, then, he and I got a Solicitor--he took 200 pounds cash, but he
+had to have 2,000 shares--and the firm of Auditors--they were 100 pounds
+cash and 1,000 shares. Every company has to have these people pasted on
+to it, by law. Oh yes, and then you must have your Bankers. You
+don't pay them anything, though, thank God! Well, then, there was
+the machinery complete, all ready to start. I took a handsome set of
+offices, and furnished them up to the nines--but that I was able to do
+pretty well on credit. You see, ready money was getting short.
+
+“And now came the biggest pull of all. There was the press to be
+worked.”
+
+He spoke as if there were no other papers in London but the financial
+journals.
+
+“I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up. You've got no more
+idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have of--of a coil of
+snakes thawing out hungry in the spring. Why, if one blackmailer came
+to me, I swear a hundred did. They scared the life out of me, the first
+month or so. And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say
+they can keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it worth their
+while. But they all wanted too much money for me--and for a while I was
+at my wits' ends. At last I got a fellow--he's not behaved so badly, all
+things considered--who had some sporting blood in his veins, and he was
+willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds, if I could pay 1,500
+pounds down, and the rest in shares. But that was just what I couldn't
+do, you see, so finally he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in
+shares--and as I say he's done it tolerably well. There was one editor
+that I had to square personally--that is to say, 100 pounds cash--it
+had to be in sovereigns, for notes could be traced--and a call of 2,000
+shares at par,--he's the boss pirate that everybody has to square--and
+of course there were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule
+I just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out. The moment a
+fellow came in, and handed me his card, and said he had proofs of two
+kinds of articles in his pocket, one praising me, one damning me, I told
+him to go and see my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then
+to go to hell. That's the way you've got to talk in the City,” he added,
+as if in apologetic explanation.
+
+Louisa looked impassively at her brother. “Oh, I've heard the expression
+as far west as the Strand,” she remarked.
+
+“Well, then came the issue. That was last Saturday. You saw the
+prospectus in Saturday morning's papers, and in the weeklies. The
+list was to be kept open, it said, till Wednesday morning--that was
+yesterday. That is to say, during all that time, people could apply for
+shares.”
+
+“Which they didn't do--according to your account,” the sister suggested,
+dryly.
+
+Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair, and eyed her with
+a momentary quizzical gleam in his eye. Then he became serious again.
+The recollection of what he was now to narrate brought a frown to his
+brows.
+
+“On Tuesday afternoon,” he began, with portentous deliberation--“Or no,
+first I must explain something. You see, in bringing out a company, you
+can't put up too stout a bluff. I mean, you've got to behave as if
+you were rolling in wealth--as if everything was coming your way, and
+fortunes were to be made by fastening to you. I don't know that it often
+fools anybody very much, but it's part of the game, and you must play
+it. Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday morning, and
+has his jobber shout out that he'll buy 'Rubber Consols'--that's what
+our shares are called on the street--at an eighth premium; that is to
+say, he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were offering to
+the public for twenty shillings. Of course, you see, the object of that
+was to create the impression that there was a regular God-almighty
+rush for our shares. As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled
+anybody--but at least there was the chance that it might start up some
+dealing in the shares--and all those things help. Besides, you got the
+sales noticed in the papers, and that might start up applications from
+the public. Well, the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday.
+On Monday, when it might still be possible to change the luck, he bought
+3,500 more, still at that premium of an eighth. He bought some Tuesday
+morning too--say 4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and
+keep an eye on the Broker. He's worth watching--as you'll see.”
+
+“What's his name?” asked the sister, with an accession of alertness in
+her face. “You call him 'Broker'--and that doesn't mean anything to me.
+They're all brokers, aren't they?”
+
+“Semple--Colin Semple, that's his name. He's a young Scotchman--father's
+a Presbyterian minister. He's a little, insignificant runt of a chap to
+look at--but I learned a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by his
+looks. However--where was I?”
+
+“You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon, weren't you?”
+
+He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long breath in
+preparation for the dramatic recital before him. “On Tuesday afternoon,”
+ he began again, with impressive slowness, “I was walking on Throgmorton
+Street, about four o'clock. It was raining a little--it had been raining
+on and off all day--a miserable, rotten sort of a day, with greasy mud
+everywhere, and everybody poking umbrellas into you. I was out walking
+because I'd 'a' cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office another
+ten minutes. All that day I hadn't eaten anything. I hadn't slept worth
+speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was worse
+than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds
+in the bank--and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I tell you, I
+was just plumb busted.
+
+“There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen the cuss before
+during the day, walking up and down near my offices. I took notice
+of him, because he was the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking
+cripple you ever saw in your life. Now I read what was on his boards. It
+was the bill of a paper that I had refused to be bled by, and there
+it was in big letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!' 'Thorpe's Audacity
+Punished!' Those were the words. I can see them with my eyes shut. I
+stood there, looking at the fellow, and I suppose there was something in
+the way I looked, for he stopped too. Of course, he didn't know me from
+Adam, but all the same, I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me--as
+if we two had a joke between us. And at that I burst out laughing--I
+simply roared with laughter, like a boy at a pantomime--and I took that
+last half-crown out of my pocket, and I gave it to the sandwich-man.
+God! you should have seen his face.”
+
+“I don't particularly mind, Joel,” said his sister, “but I never heard
+you swear so much before.”
+
+“Oh, what the--what the deuce!” he protested, impatiently. “Don't
+interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street. The members of the
+Stock Exchange were coming out of 'the house,' and making up little
+groups on the pavement. They do business inside, you know, until closing
+time--this day it happened to be four o'clock--and then they come out
+and deal in the street with one another, with the kerb-stone mob, who
+are not allowed inside, standing round to watch the thing. I came along
+into the thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts of
+things--'East Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,' and what not, but
+these went in one ear and out the other. If there ever was a man with no
+stomach for the market it was me. But then someone roared out:
+
+“'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five hundred Rubber at
+seven-eighths! Sell five hundred at three-quarters! At three-quarters
+you have 'em! Rubber Consols! Sell a thou. at three-quarters!'
+
+“This thing went into my brain like a live coal. I stopped and looked
+up at the fellow--and by God, it was one of the men I've been
+talking about--one of those Kaffir scoundrels. I wish I was better at
+remembering names--but I knew his face. There were some of the others
+around him, and they laughed at me, and he laughed at me. Oh, they had
+a heap of fun out of me--for a minute or two. Pretty good fun, too! I
+guess they'll remember it quite a while.”
+
+“Go on!” Louisa adjured him. The obvious proximity of the dramatic
+climax drew her forward in her chair, and brought a glow of expectation
+to her eyes.
+
+“I got myself away from that crowd somehow--I think I was afraid if I
+stayed I'd strangle the one who was shouting on the steps--and I went
+toward my office. But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage
+to go in. I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any other office
+in Austin Friars, and I had a kind of feeling that the sight of those
+carpets, and oak-tables and desks, and brass-railings and so on would
+make me sick. I owed for 'em all, bear in mind----”
+
+“But--Joel,” the sister interposed. “One thing I don't understand. How
+many people had applied for shares? You haven't mentioned that.”
+
+A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of his present mood. “It
+was hardly worth mentioning,” he answered, with bitter mirth. “Between
+five and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. I think the
+withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand.
+We offered a hundred thousand, you know.--But let me go on with my
+story. I stood there, in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance.
+The words of that Jew--'Sell Rubber Consols at three-quarters!'--buzzed
+inside my head as if they would burst it open. I turned--and I happened
+to see my Broker--the Scotchman, Semple, you know--coming along toward
+me. Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on me. In less
+than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten outfit turned upside down,
+with me on top. I made a jump, and ran to meet Semple.
+
+“'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him, with a grip
+tight on his arm.
+
+“The little chap was looking mighty sick. He figured up in his mind.
+'I'm afraid it's eight thousand five hundred, all told,' he said, in a
+sort of Presbyterian whimper.
+
+“'Well--how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver their
+goods--that is, supposing we got a settlement?'
+
+“I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face. He looked puzzled for a
+minute. Then he put out his lip. Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a
+razor, and we looked into one another's eyes.
+
+“'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters, a minute ago,' I
+told him.
+
+“He was onto the game like lightning. 'Wait for me in the office,' he
+whispered. 'We'll go nap on this!'
+
+“With that he was off like a streak. He stopped running just before he
+got to the corner, though, and began walking slowly, sauntering along,
+you know, as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books. I watched
+him out of sight--and then I went back, and up to the offices. The
+furniture didn't scare me a bit this time. Why, I stopped and felt
+of the brass-railing just outside the Board Room, and I said to
+myself--'Pshaw! We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'”
+
+He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she felt was intended
+to be a significant look. She shrank from the confession that its
+meaning was Greek to her. “Well--and what next?” she asked, guardedly.
+
+“Semple came back in twenty minutes or so--and the next morning he was
+at it again--and what with him and his jobber, by George, on the quiet,
+they picked up nearly eighteen thousand of our shares. Some they paid
+fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six and even ten.
+That doesn't matter; it's of no more importance than the coppers you
+give to crossing-sweepers. The thing was to get the shares--and by God
+we've got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares, that's what
+we've got. Now, do you see what that means?”
+
+“Why yes,” she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption of confidence.
+“Of course, you know the property is so good that you'll make a profit
+on the shares you've bought far below their value. But I don't think I
+quite see----”
+
+He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter. “Don't think you
+quite see?” he gurgled at her, with tears of pleasure in his eye. “Why,
+you dummy, you haven't got the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's
+all about. The value of the property's got nothing in the world to
+do with it. That's neither here nor there. If there wasn't any such
+property in existence, it would be just the same.”
+
+He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this, and explained
+more gently: “Why, don't you see, Lou, it's this way. This is what has
+happened. We've got what's called a corner on the bears. They're caught
+short, and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content. What--you don't
+understand now? Why, see here! These fellows who've sold twenty-six
+thousand of our shares--they haven't got them to sell, and they
+can't get them. That is the point--they can't get them for love nor
+money--they must pay me my own price for them, or be ruined men. The
+moment they realize the situation, they will begin offering a premium
+for Rubber Consols. The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds,
+then four--six--ten--twenty--thirty--whatever I want to drive it to.”
+
+Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes. It seemed to her that she
+understood now. It was very exciting.
+
+“You see,” he went on, taking approving note of the new light of
+comprehension in her glance, “we did something that Tuesday afternoon
+beside buy up these shares. Semple rushed off to his office, and he and
+his clerks got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out in
+all the different names they could be safe in using, and they put these
+into the bank with the application money--Semple found that--and next
+day he went and saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
+auditors--and got them to pool the shares that I've promised to give
+them. A pool? That means they agree to transfer their shares to me
+as trustee, and let me deal with them as I like--of course to their
+advantage. In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't
+be dealt with in this transaction. So you see the thing is hermetically
+sealed. Nobody can get a share except from me, and at my price. But
+these fellows that have sold them--they've got to have them, don't you
+see. They had their little temporary joke with me on the street that
+afternoon--and now they must walk up to the captain's office and settle.
+They've got to pay me at least half a million pounds for that few
+minutes' fun of theirs. I may make it a good deal more; I don't know
+yet.”
+
+“Oh, Joel!” she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction. His rather
+languid indecision as to whether half a million was going to be enough,
+impressed her more powerfully than had any detail of his narrative.
+
+In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for her what there was
+to tell. “This afternoon my Board met to allot the shares. They saw the
+applications, amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares. It took
+their breath away--they had heard that things were going quite the
+other way with us. They were so tickled that they asked no questions The
+allotment went through like a greased pig. About 5,000 shares went to
+those who had actually applied for them, and 88,000 were solemnly given
+to the dummy applicants. Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these
+dummies. Nobody winked so much as an eyelash. But I've found since that
+one of the directors--that Lord Plowden I told you about--was onto
+the thing all the while. But he's all right. Everybody's all right. Of
+course the dummies' shares still stand in their names--on paper--but in
+reality I've got them all in my safe--in my pocket you might say. They
+are really mine, you understand. So now there's nothing for us to do
+but to apply to the Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and
+meanwhile lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. Or fry
+in their own fat, eh? That's better.”
+
+“But,” she commented slowly, “you say there are no shares to be
+bought--and yet as I understand it, there are those five thousand that
+were sent out to the people who really applied.”
+
+“Bravo, Lou!” he answered her jovially. “You actually do understand the
+thing. You've put your finger straight on the point. It is true that
+those shares are out against us--or might be turned against us if they
+could be bought up. But in reality, they don't count at all. In the
+first place, you see, they're scattered about among small holders,
+country clergymen and old maids on an annuity and so on--all over the
+country. Even if these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose
+it was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell. The bigger the
+price they were offered, the more mulish they would be about holding.
+That's always the way with them. But even if they did all sell, their
+five thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket. There would be over
+twenty thousand others to be accounted for. That would be quite enough
+for my purposes. Oh, I figured all that out very carefully. My own first
+notion was to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand, and
+even a little over. Then, you see, we might have allotted everything
+to the dummies, and sent back the money and applications of the genuine
+ones. But that would have been rather hard to manage with the Board. The
+Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made pro rata--that
+is, giving everybody a part of what they applied for--and that would
+have mixed everything up. And then, too, if anybody suspected
+anything, why the Stock Exchange Committee would refuse us a special
+settlement--and, of course, without that the whole transaction is
+moonshine. It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny.”
+
+“It's all pretty risky, I should think,” she declared as she rose. “I
+should think you'd lie awake more than ever now--now that you've built
+your hopes so high and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing.”
+
+He smilingly shook his head. “No, it can no more fail than that gas
+can fail to burn when you put a light to it. It's all absolute. My
+half-million is as right as if it were lying to my credit in the Bank of
+England. Oh, that reminds me,” he went on in a slightly altered
+tone--“it's damned comical, but I've got to ask you for a little money.
+I've only got about seven pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it
+would give me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. Of course
+he'd let me have anything I wanted--but, you can see--I don't like to
+ask him just at the moment.”
+
+She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a wistful gaze. “You're
+quite sure, Joel?”--she began--“and you haven't told me--how long will
+it be before you come into some of this money?”
+
+“Well,”--he in turn paused over his words--“well, I suppose that by next
+week things will be in such shape that my bank will see I'm good for an
+overdraft. Oh heavens, yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some
+ready. But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I tell
+you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill, paying one
+hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me have now. Come, old lady:
+you don't get such interest every day, I'll bet.”
+
+“I don't want any interest from you, Joel,” she replied, simply. “If
+you're sure I can have it back before Christmas, I think I can manage
+thirty pounds. It will do in the morning, I suppose?”
+
+He nodded an amused affirmative. “Why--you don't imagine, do you,”
+ he said, “that all this gold is to rain down, and none of it hit you?
+Interest? Why of course you'll get interest--and capital thrown in. What
+did you suppose?”
+
+“I don't ask anything for myself,” she made answer, with a note of
+resolution in her voice. “Of course if you like to do things for the
+children, it won't be me who'll stand in their light. They've been
+spoiled for my kind of life as it is.”
+
+“I'll do things for everybody,” he affirmed roundly. “Let's see--how old
+is Alfred?”
+
+“He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months older than he is.”
+
+“Gad!” was Thorpe's meditative comment. “How they shoot up! Why I was
+thinking she was a little girl.” “She never will be tall, I'm afraid,”
+ said the literal mother. “She favours her father's family. But Alfred is
+more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer--but of
+course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them--and
+they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in
+the country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age:
+he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's not a bit
+fonder of hard work.”
+
+“There's one mighty big difference between us, though,” remarked Thorpe.
+“He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old
+father hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich
+man.”
+
+“I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,” she replied,
+with visible apprehension. “You mustn't encourage him to build too high
+hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know--and anything might happen to
+you. And then--you may marry, and have sons of your own.”
+
+He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new to his mind. A
+slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his
+lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.
+
+“Well,” he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an
+eye about for his coat and hat. “I'll be round in the morning--on my way
+to the City. Good-bye till then.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by
+the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.
+This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the
+last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud
+nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some
+quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a
+piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the
+general upheaval in the routine of his life.
+
+From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that
+his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar
+things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to
+him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now,
+as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all
+disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With
+the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
+disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and shining
+hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of
+discovery in the unknown.
+
+Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to
+the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after
+breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in
+the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin,
+tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence;
+the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen
+years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
+misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant
+where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he
+had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the
+looking-glass. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most
+in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all
+the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous
+distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an
+average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.
+
+His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old
+book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his
+own clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring
+implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived
+his youth. The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man
+spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing
+all earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he
+had had during the day in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and
+embroidered braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors,
+toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the
+gratified tradesmen to give him the best of everything--this delight had
+been distinctively boyish. He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could
+have risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected
+upon the contents of his portmanteaus. To apprehend their full value one
+must have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful
+advantage--that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
+nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could
+be without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and
+mostly unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to
+appreciate to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.
+
+It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good
+tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and
+his evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume
+for shooting harassed his mind. He had brought along with him, for
+this eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and
+leather, much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable
+by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic
+country. At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had
+packed it, to be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject
+had soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy
+as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's
+investigations and purchases. He had reached the point now of hoping
+that it would rain bitterly on the morrow.
+
+It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since
+he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time
+was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in
+this matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
+He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in
+readiness on the arrival of his host. As it was, he could not even tell
+the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now
+less than two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of
+intercepting his friend at the front of the station; then halted, and
+went back, upon the recollection that while he was going out one way,
+Plowden might come in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now,
+became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere
+beyond the barrier provoked within him an impulse to tearful profanity.
+
+Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken
+young man came up, touched his hat, and asked: “Will you kindly show me
+which is your luggage, sir?”
+
+Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the
+glaringly new bags--and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at
+discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.
+
+“It's all right; my man will look out for your things,” said the latter,
+as they shook hands. “We will go and get our places.”
+
+The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. A lean, elderly man
+in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled obsequiously before them down the
+platform, opened to them a first-class compartment with a low bow and a
+deprecatory wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door upon
+them. “The engine will be the other way, my Lord, after you leave Cannon
+Street,” he remarked through the open window, with earnest deference.
+“Are there any of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?”
+
+Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook his head at the second.
+The elderly man at this, with still another bow, flapped out a green
+flag which he had been holding furled behind his back, and extended it
+at arm's length. The train began slowly to move. Mr. Thorpe reflected to
+himself that the peerage was by no means so played-out an institution as
+some people imagined.
+
+“Ho-ho!” the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed his hat into the
+rack above his head. “We shall both be the better for some pure air.
+London quite does me up. And you--you've been sticking at it months
+on end, haven't you? You look rather fagged--or at all events you did
+yesterday. You've smartened yourself so--without your beard--that I
+can't say I'd notice it to-day. But I take it every sensible person is
+glad to get away from London.”
+
+“Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put my nose outside
+London since I landed here.” Thorpe rose as he spoke, to deposit his hat
+also in the rack. He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's
+was an ordinary low black bowler. “I can tell you, I SHALL be glad of
+the change. I would have bought the tickets,” he went on, giving words
+at random to the thought which he found fixed on the surface of his
+mind, “if I'd only known what our station was.”
+
+Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss the subject.
+He took a cigar case from his pocket, and offered it to Thorpe.
+
+“It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether,” he said, as they
+lighted their cigars. “I was up late last night--turned out late this
+morning, been late all day, somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock
+for the life of me. Your statement to me last night--you know it rather
+upset me.”
+
+The other smiled. “Well, I guess I know something about that feeling
+myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today like a hen with her head cut
+off. But it's fun, though, aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every
+once in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course it means a
+thousand times more to me than it does to you.”
+
+The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern of Cannon
+Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro on the platform, and a
+number of them shook the handle of the locked door. There was an effect
+of curses in the sound of their remarks which came through the closed
+window. Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.
+
+“Ah, that's where you mistake,” said Plowden, contemplating the mouthful
+of smoke he slowly blew forth. “My dear man, you can't imagine anybody
+to whom it would mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those
+fellows have a key. They're an awful bore on this train. I almost
+never go by it, for that reason. Ah, thank God we're off!--But as I was
+saying, this thing makes a greater difference to me than you can think
+of. I couldn't sleep last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me
+so. I take it you--you have never had much money before; that is, you
+know from experience what poverty is?”
+
+Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.
+
+“Well--but you”--the other began, and then paused. “What I mean is,”
+ he resumed, “you were never, at any rate, responsible to anybody but
+yourself. If you had only a sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for
+that matter, you could accommodate yourself to the requirements of
+the situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy it any more than I
+should--but at least it was open to you to do it, without attracting
+much attention. But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty
+has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine. You see, there is
+no way in which I can earn a penny. I had to leave the Army when I was
+twenty-three--the other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it
+was impossible for me to drag along with a title and an empty pocket. I
+daresay that I ought to have stuck to it, because it isn't nearly so bad
+now, but twelve years ago it was too cruel for any youngster who had any
+pride about him--and, of course, my father having made rather a name in
+the Army, that made it so much harder for me. And after that, what was
+there? Of course, the bar and medicine and engineering and those things
+were out of the question, in those days at least. The Church?--that was
+more so still. I had a try at politics--but you need money there as
+much as anywhere else--money or big family connections. I voted in
+practically every division for four years, and I made the rottenest
+speeches you ever heard of at Primrose League meetings in small places,
+and after all that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet
+in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took in depreciated
+rupees. When I tried to talk about something at home, they practically
+laughed in my face. I had no leverage upon them whatever. They didn't
+care in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home. Their
+majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty to one. So that door
+was shut in my face. I've never been inside the House since--except once
+to show it to an American lady last summer--but when I do go again I
+rather fancy”--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome head
+significantly--“I rather fancy I shall turn up on the other side.”
+
+“I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics,” interposed Thorpe.
+
+Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left London
+Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions, and leant back
+comfortably. “Of course there was the City,” he went on, speaking
+diagonally across to his companion, between leisurely intervals of
+absorption in his cigar. “There have been some directors' fees, no
+doubt, and once or twice I've come very near to what promised to be a
+big thing--but I never quite pulled it off. Really, without capital what
+can one do?--I'm curious to know--did you bring much ready money with
+you to England?”
+
+“Between six and seven thousand pounds.”
+
+“And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you got left?”
+
+Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question,
+but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to
+answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. “Oh, less than a hundred,” he
+said, and laughed aloud.
+
+Plowden also laughed. “By George, that's fine!” he cried. “It's
+splendid. There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know.
+Something told me it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was
+that that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you were
+a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of
+courage is so rare! When a man has it, he can stand the world on
+its head.” “But I was plumb scared, all the while, myself,” Thorpe
+protested, genially. “Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots.”
+
+“Ah, yes, but that's the great thing,” insisted the other. “You didn't
+look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was
+sublime. And nothing else matters--it was sublime.”
+
+“Curious--that thing happened to me once before,” commented Thorpe, with
+ruminating slowness. “It was out on the plains, years ago, and I was
+in pretty hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north, and
+some cowboys held me up, and were going to make kindling wood of me,
+they being under the impression that I was a horse-thief they were
+looking after. There was five or six minutes there when my life
+wasn't worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was the
+scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life. And then something
+happened to be said that put the matter right--they saw I was the wrong
+man--and then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. They half
+emptied their flasks down my throat, and they rode with me all the way
+to the next town, and there they wanted to buy everything liquid in the
+place for me. But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows got
+a tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much that they told me
+so, but they told others about it. They really thought I was game to the
+core--when in reality, as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you
+ever heard of.”
+
+“That's just it,” said Plowden, “the part of you which was engaged in
+making mental notes of the occasion thought you were frightened; we will
+say that it was itself frightened. But the other part of you, the part
+that was transacting business, so to speak--that wasn't in the least
+alarmed. I fancy all born commanders are built like that. Did you ever
+see General Grant?”
+
+Thorpe shook his head.
+
+“What reminded me of him--there is an account in his Memoirs of how he
+felt when he first was given a command, at the beginning of the Civil
+War. He was looking about for the enemy, who was known to be in the
+vicinity, and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was, the
+more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed as if cowardice
+were getting complete mastery of him. And then suddenly it occurred to
+him that very likely the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of
+the enemy, and that moment his bravery all returned to him. He went in
+and gave the other man a terrible thrashing. It doesn't apply to your
+case, particularly--but I fancy that all really brave men have those
+inner convictions of weakness, even while they are behaving like
+lions. Those must have been extraordinarily interesting experiences of
+yours--on the plains. I wish I could have seen something of that part
+of America when I was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come my
+way.”
+
+“I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West.”
+
+Plowden smiled. “I'm afraid I did think it was West at the time. But
+since my return I've been warned that I mustn't call Chicago West. That
+was as far as I went. I had some business there, or thought I had. When
+my father died, that was in 1884, we found among his papers a lot of
+bonds of some corporation purporting to be chartered by the State of
+Illinois. Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find out
+nothing about them, and there the matter rested. Finally, last year,
+when I decided to make the trip, I recollected these old bonds, and
+took them with me. I thought they might at least pay my expenses. But
+it wasn't the least good. Nobody knew anything about them. It seems they
+related to something that was burned up in the Great Fire--either that,
+or had disappeared before that time. That fire seems to have operated
+like the Deluge--it cancelled everything that had happened previously.
+My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment. I shall
+have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow, a very picturesque and
+comprehensive collection of Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I
+remember it, eighty thousand dollars--that is, sixteen thousand pounds.
+I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot.
+My dear father bought them--I should not be surprised to learn that he
+bought them at a premium. If they ever touched a premium for a day, that
+is certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too
+rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of
+paper--that is, on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I
+think it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine how he got
+them--but there were actually bonds among them issued by Kossuth's
+Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well--now you can see the kind of
+inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and sister more or less to
+look after, too.”
+
+Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated
+expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now
+betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.
+
+“Yes, I see that well enough,” he remarked. “But what I don't perhaps
+quite understand--well, this is it. You have this place of yours in the
+country, and preserve game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
+It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable
+living, is poverty to a man in your position.”
+
+“Oh, the place,” said Plowden. “It isn't mine at all. I could never have
+kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has
+been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you
+know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three
+daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest,
+got the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me
+eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as
+my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to
+explain to everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's
+enough. It's a dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that
+you're going to see it.”
+
+“I'm very glad, too,” said the other, with unaffected sincerity.
+
+“All the ambitions I have in the world,” the nobleman went on, sitting
+upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, “centre round
+Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are
+things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very
+small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud
+voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics.
+He got a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a
+soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart. He gave a certain military
+distinction to the peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the
+fortune. And then I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General,
+and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think of a more
+idiotic box for a man to be in. But now--thanks to you--there comes
+this prospect of an immense change. If I have money at my back--at once
+everything is different with me. People will remember then promptly
+enough that I am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party
+whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet in India at
+four hundred a year that they'll offer me, but a Governorship at six
+thousand--that is, if I wish to leave England at all. And we'll see
+which set of whips are to have the honour of offering me anything. But
+all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment, to realize that
+things have really come my way. And about that--about the success of the
+affair--I suppose there can be no question whatever?”
+
+“Not the slightest,” Thorpe assured him. “Rubber Consols can go up to
+any figure we choose to name.”
+
+Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped
+himself after he had given his companion a light. Then he threw himself
+back against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. “I'm not going
+to say another word about myself,” he announced, pleasantly. “I've had
+more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a
+moment the reverse of the medal. You're doing wonderful things for me. I
+only wish it were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I can
+do for you.”
+
+“Oh, that'll be all right,” said the other, rather vaguely.
+
+“Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind
+just what you want to do,” Plowden reflected aloud. “Of course it has
+come suddenly upon you--just as it has upon me. There are things in
+plenty that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a
+long way off. It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we
+shall proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands. But have
+you any plans at all? Do you fancy going into Parliament, for example?”
+
+“Yes,” answered Thorpe, meditatively. “I think I should like to go into
+Parliament. But that would be some way ahead. I guess I've got my plans
+worked out a trifle more than you think. They may not be very definite,
+as regards details, but their main direction I know well enough. I'm
+going to be an English country gentleman.”
+
+Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. He seemed
+annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so, turning abruptly first
+to stare out of the window, then shifting his position on the seat, and
+at last stealing an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his
+tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment.
+
+Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. Plowden
+saw that at once, but it relieved even more than it surprised him to see
+also that Thorpe appeared not to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in
+good-natured if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.
+
+“Oh, that'll be all right, too,” he said, with the evident intention
+of reassurance. “I can do it right enough, so far as the big things are
+concerned. It'll be in the little things that I'll want some steering.”
+
+“I've already told you--you may command me to the utmost of my power,”
+ the other declared. Upon reflection, he was disposed to be ashamed
+of himself. His nerves and facial muscles had been guilty of an
+unpardonable lapse into snobbishness--and toward a man, too, who
+had been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its courtesy and
+generosity than any he had encountered in all the “upper circles” put
+together. He recalled all at once, moreover, that Thorpe's “h's” were
+perfect--aud, for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.
+
+“My dear fellow”--he began again, confronting with verbal awkwardness
+the other's quizzical smile--“don't think I doubt anything about you. I
+know well enough that you can do anything--be anything--you like.”
+
+Thorpe laughed softly.
+
+“I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-school man,” he said.
+
+Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. “No--I didn't know
+that,” he admitted, frankly.
+
+“Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon,” Thorpe went on, “as they called them in
+my day. That's gone out now, I'm told, since they've moved to the big
+buildings in Hammersmith. I did very well at school, too; came out in
+the first fourteen. But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further.
+He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's and
+learning the book-business. He had precisely the same kind of dynastic
+idea, you know, that you fellows have. His father and his grand-father
+had been booksellers, and he was going to hand on the tradition to me,
+and my son after me. That was his idea. And he thought that Paul's would
+help this--but that Oxford would kill it.
+
+“Of course, he was right there--but he was wrong in supposing there was
+a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough, mind you--but damn
+the people that came to buy them, I couldn't stand it. You stood two
+hours watching to see that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and
+at the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. While you
+were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off with a book worth
+eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. I didn't hit it off with the old
+man, either. We didn't precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook.
+I hung about London for some years, trying this thing and that. Once I
+started a book-shop of my own--but I did no good here. Finally I turned
+it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been in
+almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to be
+shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting
+to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger--but
+I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my father's
+book-shop.”
+
+Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the other's mood.
+He was silent for a moment, then lifted his head as if something had
+occurred to him. “You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed
+to your father's business--and your son after you--you're not married,
+are you?”
+
+Thorpe slowly shook his head.
+
+“Our station is the next,” said the younger man. “It's a drive of
+something under two miles. You'd better light another cigar.” He added,
+as if upon a casual afterthought: “We can both of us think of marrying
+now.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied
+with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed
+suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively
+by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
+horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins,
+and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial
+silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them
+from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close
+behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the
+question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst
+forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
+once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies
+to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the
+animal--“So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so”--and
+his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
+strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth
+of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a
+modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed,
+in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good
+deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence
+was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could
+not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.
+
+It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the
+most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily
+developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower
+than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all
+at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel
+road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse.
+Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a
+low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
+curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
+conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
+front of the central portion of this house.
+
+A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the
+vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what
+the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
+comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
+There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
+and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
+massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
+Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
+broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing
+richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.
+
+What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
+swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
+somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once
+there were a number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back
+and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and
+beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica
+of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them
+apart.
+
+Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at
+his watch. “We did it in a bit over eight minutes,” he remarked, with
+obvious satisfaction. “With four people and heavy roads that's not so
+bad--not so bad. But come inside.”
+
+They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like
+of which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with
+a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and
+left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old
+and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of
+tigers and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase
+about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic
+weapons caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer
+peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of
+hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a
+fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low
+chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic
+occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table in
+the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books,
+flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers,
+and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides--all this
+self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a
+profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
+to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to
+overflowing with servants, amazed him.
+
+The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His
+mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished
+at nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
+Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.
+
+“If you will follow Pangbourn,” said his host, indicating this second
+domestic, “he will look after you. You would like to go up and change
+now, wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room.”
+
+Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus,
+taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low
+passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing
+of the house. The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite of
+himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and
+most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be--spacious and quaintly
+rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
+effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and
+chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm,
+cozy glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at
+the photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
+posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted
+face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.
+
+This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe
+looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was
+conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to
+unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel
+after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa
+beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he
+had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.
+
+Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of
+his tongue--but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands
+in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented
+something which it seemed better for him to say.
+
+“I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,” he remarked,
+casually. “My man has been buying them today--and I don't know what he
+mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray
+or was stolen at some station or other--the first part of the week--I
+think it must have been Leeds.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said Pangbourn, without emotion. “They're very careless,
+sir.”
+
+He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading
+them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging
+the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to
+foresee everything--for there was not an instant's hesitation in the
+clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in
+one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set
+the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican
+shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its
+constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
+sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the
+trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been
+fashioned expressly for them.
+
+Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for
+Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now
+he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind.
+Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though
+he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why not
+Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became
+apparent that the man's task was nearing completion--and then frowned
+at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the
+end of a visit.
+
+“Will you dress now, sir?” asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct
+enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.
+
+“Eh?” said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's
+thought.
+
+“Shall you require me any further, sir?” the man reframed the question,
+deferentially.
+
+“Oh! Oh--no,” replied Thorpe. “No--I'll get along all right.”
+
+Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing.
+The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror
+presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he
+was used to--but upon second thought he preferred this restrained
+aristocratic glimmer.
+
+He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with
+his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the
+darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait
+for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before
+he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and
+firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward
+to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a
+cigarette.
+
+“Have they looked after you all right?” said Plowden, nonchalantly.
+“Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never
+will keep matches in a bedroom.”
+
+He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and
+stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. “I thought I'd tell
+you before we went down”--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the
+mantel, looked down at his handsome head--“my sister has a couple of
+ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on
+shipboard a Miss Madden--an American, you know--very tall and fine, with
+bright red hair--rather remarkable hair it was?”
+
+“I remember the lady,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “but we didn't
+meet.” He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those
+days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to
+him to know them.
+
+Lord Plowden smiled a little. “Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun--if
+she's in the mood. My mother and sister--I had them call on her in
+London last spring--and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no
+end of money, you know--at least a million and a half--dollars,
+unfortunately. Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
+waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if they'd crossed
+over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous
+country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told
+you--it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you
+were English.”
+
+Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence.
+This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was
+not altogether grateful to his ears.
+
+“The other one,” continued Plowden, “is Lady Cressage. You'll be
+interested in her--because a few years ago she was supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder--he
+would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he was
+drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!” he
+started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face--“it didn't in
+the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How
+did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?”
+
+Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. “Why, you introduced me to him
+yourself, didn't you?” he asked, slowly.
+
+Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it
+over in his mind. “By George! I think you're right,” he said. “I'd quite
+forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
+readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he can get. He was
+bothering her about money--that was it, I remember now--but what an
+idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying--there's no one else but
+my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty or
+thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army.
+If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but
+cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the
+party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If
+you've finished your cigarette”--he threw his own into the grate, and
+rose as he spoke--“we may as well be moving along. By the way,” he
+concluded, as they walked toward the door, “I've an idea that we won't
+say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to
+keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister, you know.”
+
+Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored
+equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He
+had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in
+the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much
+at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had
+feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had
+wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with
+serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious
+of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a
+new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of
+everything.
+
+The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous
+shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows
+and eyelashes--had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for
+his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
+connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers
+toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy
+firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated
+at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent
+his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened
+to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were
+concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He
+said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed
+to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
+motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor
+throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and
+smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him,
+whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original
+half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify
+itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the
+other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent
+smile that he could command. He reasoned it out that Plowden must have
+said something pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to
+the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
+fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth
+to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own
+merits--and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her
+where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
+white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of
+alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.
+
+He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder,
+of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all
+a busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
+young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She
+was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner
+life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired
+to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate
+aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few
+words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve
+close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only
+that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did--but to him,
+really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago--why, yes, even a
+fortnight ago--the golden rumour of millions would have shone round
+her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
+Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a
+mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman
+to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference
+with which he considered her.
+
+The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a
+sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in
+part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano.
+Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told
+him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's
+hand. This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung
+together, these two young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions
+all the evening, that this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady
+Cressage, and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the
+house, peering through her pince-nez from under unduly thick black
+brows, formed a party of their own. Their politeness toward him had been
+as identical in all its little shades of distance and reservation as if
+they had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would be unfair
+to them to assume from their manner that they disliked him, or were even
+unfavourably impressed by him. The finesse of that manner was far too
+delicate a thing to call into use such rough characterizations. It was
+rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. He thought he
+could see that they united upon a common demeanour toward the American
+girl, although of course they knew her much better than they knew
+him. It was not even clear to him that there were not traces of this
+combination in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. The
+bond between them had twisted in it strands of social exclusiveness, and
+strands of sex sympathy.
+
+He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the
+impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed
+these impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him
+consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He
+had formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the
+idea that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest
+weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
+his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions
+about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had
+scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
+which included ladies--certainly never in the presence of such
+certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however,
+was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this
+briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of
+the great subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women
+sticking together, for example--here before his eyes was one of the
+prettiest instances of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two
+figures on the sofa, so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit
+to each other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really
+touching.
+
+Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the
+piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of
+it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline--sensitive,
+high-spirited, somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. He
+moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces,
+and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the
+Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious
+wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
+the music said less than nothing to his ears--that it was the face that
+had beckoned him to advance.
+
+Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
+this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
+beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
+thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and
+chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he
+could not be sure.
+
+So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said
+to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which
+belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in
+diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of
+the great lady--they were all there in their supreme expression. And
+yet--why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his
+old General Kervick--the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military
+gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did
+what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three
+hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter, and she also was poor.
+Plowden had said so.
+
+Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
+father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to
+have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a
+directorship. But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
+forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have
+been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady
+Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he
+could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
+military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by
+directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered
+Kervick's name, when the chance arose to give the old boy a leg up, and
+then had clean forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
+his liking for Plowden.
+
+He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer
+sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so
+nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of
+him but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
+Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's
+daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him,
+and about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial
+position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very
+fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should
+render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the
+piano before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from
+the others a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and
+enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been
+deaf to something that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks
+which seemed to be regarded as apposite.
+
+“What IS it?” asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. “I don't know
+when anything has touched me so much.”
+
+“Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or
+two,” replied Miss Madden. “I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly
+enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?”
+
+“We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and musicians--like
+this,” affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.
+
+With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the
+conversation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs next
+morning before anybody else in the house, apparently, was astir. At all
+events, he saw no one in either the hall or the glass vestibule, as he
+wandered about. Both doors were wide open, however, to the mild,
+damp morning air. He found on one of the racks a cap that was less
+uncomfortable than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.
+
+His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason told him
+they ought to be. The disquieting impression of bad dreams hung about
+him. The waking hour--always an evil time for him in these latter days
+of anxiety--had been this morning a peculiarly depressing affair. It had
+seemed to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness, that he
+was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man; the illusion of disaster
+had been, indeed, so complete and vivid that, even now, more than an
+hour later, he had not shaken off its effects.
+
+He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along the gravel paths,
+to the task of reassuring himself. There were still elements of chance
+in the game, of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight,
+to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum--that it was
+nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed the situation in
+painstaking detail, and at every point it was all right, or as nearly
+all right as any human business could be. He scolded himself sharply for
+this foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. “Look at
+Plowden!” he bade his dolorous spirit. “See how easy he takes things.”
+
+It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very easily indeed.
+He had talked with eloquence and feeling about the miseries and
+humiliations of a peerage inadequately endowed with money, but no traces
+of his sufferings were visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman
+himself looked the very image of contented prosperity--handsome,
+buoyant, light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London.
+And this ancestral home of his--or of his mother's, since he seemed to
+insist upon the distinction--where were its signs of a stinted income?
+The place was overrun with servants. There was a horse which covered a
+distance of something like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out,
+Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty. Yet its master told
+the most unvarying tales of poverty, and no doubt they were in one sense
+true. What he wished to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for
+himself from, was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved as
+if they were rich.
+
+The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by high hedges and
+trees from what seemed to be a public road beyond, were fairly spacious,
+but the sleek decorum of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was
+scarcely interesting. He liked better to study the house itself, which
+in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal of what a historic English
+country-house of the minor class should be.
+
+There had been a period in his youth when architecture had attracted him
+greatly as offering a congenial and lucrative career. Not much remained
+to him now of the classifications and phraseology which he had gone to
+the trouble of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked at
+buildings with a kind of professional consciousness. Hadlow House
+said intelligible things to him, and he was pleased with himself for
+understanding them. It was not new in any part, apparently, but there
+was nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never been a castle,
+or a fortified residence. No violent alteration in habits or needs
+distinguished its present occupants from its original builders. It
+had been planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
+not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle people to
+have homes, without fighting to defend them. One could fancy that its
+calm and infinitely comfortable history had never been ruffled from that
+day to this. He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening
+that the house stood upon the site of an old monastery. No doubt that
+accounted for its being built in a hollow, with the ground-floor on the
+absolute level of the earth outside. The monks had always chosen these
+low-lying sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they have done
+so? he wondered--and then came to a sudden mental stop, absorbed in a
+somewhat surprised contemplation of a new version of himself. He was
+becoming literary, historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open
+again, to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors. He had
+read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old book-shop! For many years
+that boyhood of eager concern in the printed page had seemed to him to
+belong to somebody else. Now, all at once, it came back to him as his
+own possession; he felt that he could take up books again where he had
+dropped them, perhaps even with the old rapt, intent zest.
+
+Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he would gather for
+himself. And it should be in no wise for show--the gross ostentation of
+the unlettered parvenu--but a genuine library, which should minister
+to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon his
+interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be
+smooth and simple. He seemed not to have reasoned it out to himself in
+detail before, but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough.
+Why should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings about himself, as
+if he had come out of the gutter?
+
+Why indeed? He had passed through--and with credit, too--one of the
+great public schools of England. He had been there on a footing of
+perfect equality, so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic
+families or of great City potentates. And as to birth, he had behind him
+three generations at least of scholarly men, men who knew the contents,
+as well as the commercial value, of the books they handled.
+
+His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling. The tradition of
+Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of how he requited it by
+securing Caxton's “Golden Legend” for the library of that distinguished
+collector, under the very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of
+Marlborough, was tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop.
+And Thorpe's father, too, though no such single achievement crowned his
+memory, had been the adviser and, as one might say, the friend of many
+notable writers and patrons of literature. The son of such forbears
+needed only money to be recognized by everybody as a gentleman.
+
+On his mother's side, now that he thought of it, there was something
+perhaps better still than a heritage of librarians' craft and tastes.
+His mother's maiden name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the
+solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact, in the course
+of domestic discussions. Who the Stormonts were he could not recall that
+he had ever learned, but his mother had been very clear indeed about
+their superiority to the usual ruck of people. He would ask his sister
+whether she knew anything about them. In the meantime there was no
+denying that Stormont was a fine-sounding name. He reflected that it
+was his own middle name--and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him a
+card-plate on which appeared the legend--“Mr. Stormont Thorpe.”
+
+It was an inspiration! “Joel” he had not used for so many years that now,
+after six months' familiarity with it on his sister's lips, he could not
+get accustomed to it. The colourless and non-committal style of “J. S.
+Thorpe,” under which he had lived so long, had been well enough for the
+term of his exile--the weary time of obscure toil and suspense. But now,
+in this sunburst of smiling fortune, when he had achieved the right to a
+name of distinction--here it was ready to his hand. A fleeting question
+as to whether he should carry the “J” along as an initial put itself
+to his mind. He decided vigorously against it. He had always had a
+prejudice against men who, in the transatlantic phrase, parted either
+their hair or their names in the middle.
+
+He had made his unheeding way past the house to the beginning of the
+avenue of trees, which he remembered from the previous evening's drive.
+To his right, an open space of roadway led off in the direction of the
+stables. As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take, the
+sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear, and he stood still. In a
+moment there came into view, round a curve in the leafy distance, two
+horses with riders, advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that
+the riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him, and then
+it was to be seen that they were the pair he had judged to be such close
+friends last night--Lady Cressage and the daughter of the house.
+
+They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his cap and bowed.
+Their cheeks were glowing and their eyes sparkling with the exhilaration
+of their ride. Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished
+in his eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity. She seemed to
+carry herself better in the saddle than she did out of it; the sweep of
+her habit below the stirrup lent dignity to her figure.
+
+But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly toward the
+stepping-block--how should he bring within the compass of thought the
+impressions he had had of her as she passed? There seemed to have been
+no memory in his mind to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she
+had made. Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like
+some queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable. He stared after
+her, mutely bewildered at the effect she produced upon him--until he saw
+that a groom had run from the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity
+to dismount. The angry thought that he might have done this himself rose
+within him--but there followed swiftly enough the answering conviction
+that he lacked the courage. He did not even advance to proffer his
+services to the other young lady, while there was still time. The truth
+was, he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him.
+
+He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company of which
+they made part, the previous evening. There had been an hour or more,
+indeed, before the party broke up, in which he had borne the lion's
+share of the talk--and they had appeared as frankly entertained as the
+others. In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he
+had addressed his monologue of reminiscences--curious experiences and
+adventures in Java and the Argentine, in Brazil and the Antilles and
+Mexico and the far West--it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he
+seemed to discern the most genuine interest.
+
+Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The whimsical theory
+that the wine at dinner had given him a spurious courage occurred
+to him. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his
+pockets, turned toward the stables.
+
+The stable-yard is, from some points of view, the prettiest thing about
+Hadlow. There is a big, uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of
+which, from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous girth
+and height. All around this enclosure are buildings of the same pale
+yellowish brick as the mansion itself, but quaintly differing one
+from another in design and size. Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a
+laundry, a brewery, and half a dozen structures the intention of which
+is now somewhat uncertain--some flat-topped, some gabled, others with
+turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging timbered upper
+stories--form round this unkempt, shadowed green a sort of village, with
+a communal individuality of its own.
+
+A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great
+house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices
+of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge
+themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the
+enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might
+think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since
+man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck.
+Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here; half the
+buildings on the side nearest the house belong to their time, and one
+of them still bears a partially-defaced coat of arms that must have
+belonged to an Abbot. And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb
+and vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. Its population
+crossed themselves less, and worked much harder, but they remained in a
+world of their own, adjacent aud subject to the world of their masters,
+yet separated from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances.
+
+Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. He counted three men
+and a boy who visibly belonged to this department. The dog-cart of the
+previous evening had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained
+the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now beneath the
+sponge of one of the hostlers. Under cover, he discerned two other
+carriages, and there seemed to be at least half a dozen horses. The
+men who, in the half gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these
+animals made a curious whistling noise as they worked. Everybody in the
+yard touched a forelock to him as he passed.
+
+From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at his leisure,
+through an open gate in the wall at the back, into the gardens behind
+the house. There was not much in the way of flowers to look at, but
+he moved about quite unconscious of any deprivation. A cluster of
+greenhouses, massed against the southern side of the mansion, attracted
+his listless fancy, and he walked toward what appeared to be an entrance
+to them. The door was locked, but he found another further on which
+opened to his hand. The air was very hot and moist inside, and the place
+was so filled with broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants that he had
+to stoop to make his way through to the end. The next house had a more
+tolerable atmosphere, and contained some blossoms to which he gave
+momentary attention. In the third house, through the glass-door, he
+could see a man--evidently a gardener--lifting some pots to a shelf
+overhead.
+
+The thought occurred to him that by entering into conversation with this
+man, he might indirectly obtain a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at
+Hadlow. It was now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry.
+Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something? he wondered.
+Perhaps there had been some such summons, and he had not heard it. It
+might be the intelligent thing for him to return to the house, at all
+events, and sit in the hall where the servants could see him, in case
+the meal was in progress.
+
+Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile, it suddenly
+dawned upon him that the face and figure were familiar. He stared more
+intently at the man, casting about in his memory for a clue to his
+identity. It came to him that the person he had in mind was a fellow
+named Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished and down-at-the-heels
+sort of hotel and general store on the road from Belize to Boon Town, in
+British Honduras. Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson. What on earth was
+he doing here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration to this problem.
+It was of more immediate importance to recall the circumstances of his
+contact with the man. He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel
+his headquarters for the better part of a month--the base of supplies
+from which he made numerous prospecting tours into the mountains of the
+interior. Had he paid his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about
+that. He could even recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like
+scale of charges, and the lack of perception of opportunity, which
+characterized the bill in question. He remembered now his impression
+that Gafferson would never do any good. It would be interesting to know
+what kind of an impression he, in turn, had produced on his thriftless
+host. At any rate, there was no good reason why he should not find out.
+He opened the door and went in.
+
+The gardener barely looked up from his occupation, and drew aside to
+let the newcomer pass with no sign of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe
+halted, and tried to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about
+such things.
+
+“What are you doing?” he asked, in the tentative tone of one who is in
+no need of information, but desires to be affable.
+
+“Drying off the first lot of gloxinias,” answered the other. “Some
+people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright, close to the
+glass. It stands to reason, if you think about it.”
+
+“Why, certainly,” said Thorpe, with conviction. In his mind he
+contrasted the independence of Gafferson's manner with the practised
+servility of the stable-yard--and thought that he liked it--and then
+was not so sure. He perceived that there was no recognition of him. The
+gardener, as further desultory conversation about his work progressed,
+looked his interlocutor full in the face, but with a placid, sheep-like
+gaze which seemed to be entirely insensible to variations in the human
+species.
+
+“How did you ever get back here to England?” Thorpe was emboldened to
+ask at last. In comment upon the other's stare of puzzled enquiry, he
+went on: “You're Gafferson, aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw
+you, you were running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize.
+That was in '90.”
+
+Gafferson--a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a straggling
+reddish beard--turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. “I suppose
+you would have been stopping at Government House,” he remarked. “That
+was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to see
+my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because of
+the Gaffersoniana hybrids. There was a good bit in the papers about them
+last spring.” Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put
+into words. “Well, it beats all,” he mused aloud. “Why, man, there's
+gold in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed
+as you were. And there's cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in
+rubber, too. All that country's waiting for is better communications.
+And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land--and yet here
+you are back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in
+the mud.”
+
+He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond his earlier
+limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness. “No, I wasn't in the
+Governor's outfit at all. I was looking for gold then--with occasionally
+an eye on rubber. I stopped at your place. Don't you remember me? My
+name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one of your niggers
+were with me three or four days once, up on the ridge beyond the Burnt
+Hills--why, you remember, the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was
+forever bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those on the
+mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby wrinkle his nose, and you
+found a pepper coming through the swamp, and you tipped me the wink,
+and you handed that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him.
+Hell! You must remember that!”
+
+“That would have been the Chavica pertusum,” said Gafferson,
+thoughtfully. He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in the story
+itself with some difficulty. “Yes--I remember it,” he admitted, finally.
+“I shouldn't have known you though. I'm the worst in the world about
+remembering people. It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I
+go up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men that I had the
+longest talks with the time before. Once you get wrapped up in your
+flowers, you've got no room in your head for anything else--that's the
+way of it.”
+
+Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. “So this is the sort of
+thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be doing this, eh? than making
+your pile in logwood and mahogany out there, or floating a gold mine?”
+ Gafferson answered quite simply: “I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile.
+I got led into going out there when I was a youngster, and there didn't
+seem to be any good in trying to get back, but I wasn't making more than
+a bare living when you were there, and after that I didn't even do that
+much. It took me a good many years to find out what my real fancy was. I
+hated my hotel and my store, but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an
+American gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place, and
+he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em, and he says to me,
+'You're no good to run a hotel, nor yet a store, and this aint your
+country for a cent. What you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't
+afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it, but you gather
+up your seeds and roots and so on, and come along with me to Atlanta,
+Georgia, and I'll put fat on your bones.'
+
+“That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word, and I was with
+him two years, and then I thought I'd like to come to England, and since
+then I've worked my way up here, till now I take a Royal Horticultural
+medal regular, and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll
+be in the market next spring that's named after my master. And what
+could I ask more 'n that?”
+
+“Quite right,” said Thorpe. “What time do they have breakfast here?”
+
+The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild
+glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the
+advent of this new topic.
+
+“It seems to me they eat at all hours,” he said. “But if you want to see
+his Lordship,” he went on, considering, “about noon would be your best
+time.”
+
+“See his Lordship!” repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin. “Why I'm a
+guest here in the house. All I want is something to eat.”
+
+“A guest,” Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was nothing
+unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp glance failed to detect
+any trace of offensive intention in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet
+it seemed to pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised, and
+that there were abundant grounds for his surprise.
+
+“Why, yes,” said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he could summon,
+“your master is one of my directors. I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm
+going to make a rich man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place
+here, and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away over
+Sunday to oblige him. By the way--I shall buy an estate in the country
+as soon as the right thing offers, and I shall want to set up no end of
+gardens and greenhouses and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a
+better man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole arrangement
+of it in your hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”
+
+“Whatever his Lordship agrees to,” the gardener replied, sententiously.
+He turned to the staging, and took up one of the pots.
+
+Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door,
+which he could see opened upon the lawn. He was conscious of annoyance
+with this moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a
+splendid chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship--it might even
+be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship--and who had so
+clumsily failed to rise to the situation. The bitter thought of going
+back and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he
+paused for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. The
+gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit
+in which it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And
+moreover, was it so certain that he would take it? He had not said “sir”
+ once, and he had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. The
+rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course,
+but if there was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided
+that he could not afford the risk.
+
+He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward
+the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful
+and resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw
+that a white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him
+beside the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two
+padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian
+workmanship. The sound was delightful, but even more so was the
+implication that it betokened breakfast.
+
+With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been
+fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. “That's
+the kind of concert I like,” he declared, bestowing the patronage of a
+jovial smile upon her pleased and comely face. “Show me the way to this
+breakfast that you've been serenading about.”
+
+Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly
+the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. “Thorpe,”
+ he said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia--“Thorpe--yes--I
+remember his initials--J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me
+about him? and what was it he told me?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe
+found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of
+embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight
+to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined
+himself seated with four ladies at a table--three of them, moreover,
+ladies of title--and doing it all so well.
+
+For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to
+speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their
+deportment the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and
+fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with
+an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right
+places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.
+
+The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well,
+accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the
+outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which
+had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most
+fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything
+he said as amusing.
+
+“Oh, when we're by ourselves,” the kindly little old hostess explained
+to him, “my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour
+yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's
+farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind
+of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of
+habits. Why we do it I couldn't say--because he never comes down in any
+event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps
+very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining. We're only too
+glad--for his sake.”
+
+“And Balder,” commented the sister, “he's as bad the other way. He
+gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the
+still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we
+never see him till luncheon.”
+
+“I've been on the point of asking so many times,” Miss Madden
+interposed--“is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in
+Matthew Arnold's poem?”
+
+“It was his father's choice,” Lady Plowden made answer. “I think the
+Viking explanation is the right one--it certainly isn't in either
+family. I can't say that it attracted me much--at first, you know.”
+
+“Oh, but it fits him so splendidly,” said Lady Cressage. “He looks the
+part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier
+names--and you have only to look at him to see that he was predestined
+for a soldier from his cradle.”
+
+“I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then,”
+ put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. “The
+poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous,
+as his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a
+soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition
+with the Army, and he's mad about everything military--and surely he's
+as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
+of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and yet that
+suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. And all over England there
+are young gentlemen like that--the very pick of the hunting-fields,
+strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men
+England wants to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
+in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief over last
+time?--because they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran
+that's the capital of Persia.
+
+“They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the
+point of the bayonet--and find out their names afterward--but it seems
+that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior
+clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages--and much good they
+will do us when the time of trouble comes!”
+
+“Then you think the purchase-system was better?” asked the American
+lady. “It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously.”
+
+“Prefer it?” said Lady Plowden. “A thousand times yes! My husband made
+one of the best speeches in the debate on it--one do I say?--first and
+last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
+the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it
+would have been those speeches. He pointed out all the evils that
+would follow the change. You might have called it prophetic--the way
+he foresaw what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular, of
+course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.
+
+“As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower
+classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered
+about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do
+they respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his
+learning? Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him
+with the greatest contempt. The man they will serve is the man whose
+birth gives him the right to command them, or else the man with money in
+his pockets to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders
+they understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace,
+among our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away
+from England, in a time of war?”
+
+“But, mamma,” the Hon. Winifred intervened, “don't you see how badly
+that might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little
+money, and all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people--and
+so on? It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and I'm
+sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot.”
+
+Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness. “You see so
+little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of
+its movements. The people who make fortunes in England are every whit
+as important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually
+I'm sure they are often much more deserving. Every generation sniffs
+at its nouveaux riches, but by the next they have become merged in the
+aristocracy. It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been
+that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start from a wealthy
+merchant, or some other person who made a fortune. They are really the
+back-bone of England. You should keep that always in mind.”
+
+“Of course--I see what you mean”--Winnie replied, her dark cheek
+flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. She had passed her
+twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had in it the docile
+self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke with diffident slowness,
+her gaze fastened upon her plate. “Of course--my grandfather was
+a lawyer--and your point is that merchants--and others who make
+fortunes--would be the same.”
+
+“Precisely,” said Lady Plowden. “And do tell us, Mr. Thorpe”--she turned
+toward where he sat at her right and beamed at him over her spectacles,
+with the air of having been wearied with a conversation in which he
+bore no part--“is it really true that social discontent is becoming more
+marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?”
+
+“I'm not an American, you know,” he reminded her. “I only know one or
+two sections of the country--and those only as a stranger. You should
+ask Miss Madden.”
+
+“Me?” said Celia. “Oh, I haven't come up for my examinations yet. I'm
+like Balder--I'm preparing.”
+
+“What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us,” suggested Lady Cressage,
+mildly, “is about the flowers in the tropics--in Java, for example, or
+some of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them.”
+
+“Speaking of flowers,” Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact; “I
+met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning, an old acquaintance
+of mine, the gardener, Gafferson. The last time I saw him, he was
+running the worst hotel in the world in the worst country in the
+world--out in British Honduras.”
+
+“But he's a wonderful gardener,” said Lady Cressage. “He's a magician;
+he can do what he likes with plants. It's rather a hobby of mine--or
+used to be--and I never saw his equal.”
+
+Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn environment on the
+Belize road, and his success in making them laugh drew him on to other
+pictures of the droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. The
+ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen to him; the
+charm of having them all to himself, and of holding them in interested
+entertainment by his discourse--these ladies of supremely refined
+associations and position--seemed to provide an inspiration of its own.
+He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating itself to
+their critical ears. His language was producing itself with as much
+delicacy of selection as if it came out of a book--and yet preserving
+the savour of quaint, outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly
+liked. Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts, and
+glance across the table, warned him that they were to rise, he said
+deliberately to himself that this had been the most enjoyable episode of
+his whole life.
+
+There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel, out in the hall, and
+Winnie indicated them to him with the obvious suggestion that he was
+expected to smoke. He looked her over as he lit his cigar--where she
+stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs, and concluded
+that she was much nicer upon acquaintance than he had thought. Her
+slight figure might not be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were
+ladylike. The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind to her
+thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features. They bore the stamp
+of caste, and so did the way she looked at one through her eye-glasses,
+from under those over-heavy black eyebrows, holding her head a little
+to one side. Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit of
+her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her mother had shown
+that she had it under admirable control.
+
+He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's book-shop the
+previous day. Unfortunately it did not give her age, but that was not so
+important, after all. She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter
+of one Viscount and the sister of another. Her grandfather had been
+an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess a bewildering number
+of relationships among titled folks. All this was very interesting to
+him--and somewhat suggestive. Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in
+his brain as he looked at her.
+
+“I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions of entertaining his
+guests,” she remarked to him, over her shoulder. The other ladies had
+not joined them.
+
+“Oh, I'm all right,” he protested cordially. “I should hate to have
+him put himself out in the slightest.” Upon consideration he added: “I
+suppose he has given up the idea of shooting to-day.”
+
+“I think not,” she answered.” The keeper was about this morning, that
+is--and he doesn't often come unless they are to go out with the guns. I
+suppose you are very fond of shooting.”
+
+“Well--I've done some--in my time,” Thorpe replied, cautiously. It did
+not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire his first gun on
+English soil. “It's a good many years,” he went on, “since I had the
+time and opportunity to do much at it. I think the last shooting I did
+was alligators. You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of a
+hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't the least idea. Is
+the shooting round I here pretty good?”
+
+“I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says my brother
+Balder kills all the birds off every season. Balder's by way of being
+a crack-shot, you know. There are some pheasants, though. We saw them
+flying when we were out this morning.”
+
+Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her upon the question
+of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make some difference in his garb, yet
+the mental vision of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed
+itself now as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out of his mind
+to have conceived anything so preposterous as rigging himself out, among
+these polished people, like a cow-puncher down on his luck.
+
+“I wonder when your brother will expect to start,” he began, uneasily.
+“Perhaps I ought to go and get ready.”
+
+“Ah, here comes his man,” remarked the sister. A round-faced,
+smooth-mannered youngster--whom Thorpe discovered to be wearing
+cord-breeches and leather leggings as he descended the stairs--advanced
+toward him and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. “His
+Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes--and he hopes you'll be
+ready, sir,” the valet said.
+
+“Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room,” Miss Winnie bade him, and
+with a gesture of comprehensive submission he went away.
+
+The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution for his
+difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. It would never have occurred to
+him that Pangbourn was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
+obvious it had been to her. These old families did something more than
+fill their houses with servants; they mastered the art of making these
+servants an integral part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a
+man to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then dress you,
+into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.
+
+“It seems that we're going shooting,” Thorpe found himself explaining, a
+few moments later in his bedroom, to the attentive Pangbourn. He
+decided to throw himself with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful
+good-feeling. “I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I
+got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead--and so I fetched
+along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make me feel more at home
+in the saddle than anything else would. You know how fond a man gets of
+old, loose things like that. But about this shooting--I want you to fix
+me out. What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You can
+manage them for me, can't you?”
+
+Pangbourn could and did--and it was upon his advice that the Mexican
+jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt
+uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe,
+as he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe,
+felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of
+pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent to his appearance.
+
+“We will find a cap below, sir,” Pangbourn announced, with serenity, and
+Thorpe, who had been tentatively fingering the big, flaring sombrero,
+thrust it back upon its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.
+
+Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done, and there was
+nobody now to bear him company. He lit another cigar, tried on various
+caps till he found a leathern one to suit him, and then dawdled about
+the room and the adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than
+half an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt, did not
+commend itself so warmly to him as did some others. Everybody else,
+however, seemed to regard it as so wholly a matter of course that
+Plowden should do as he liked, that he forbore formulating a complaint
+even to himself.
+
+At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs once more. “His
+Lordship will be down very shortly now, sir,” he declared--“and will you
+be good enough to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?”
+
+Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase--the existence
+of which he had not suspected--into a bare-looking apartment fitted like
+a pantry with shelves. After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost
+glaringly lighted. The windows and another door opened, he saw, upon a
+court connected with the stable-yard. By this entrance, no doubt, had
+come the keeper, a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature
+years, with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood looking at
+the contents of the shelves. He mechanically saluted Thorpe in turn, and
+then resumed his occupation. There were numerous gun cases on the lower
+shelf, and many boxes and bags above.
+
+“Did his Lordship say what gun?” the keeper demanded of the valet. He
+had a bright-eyed, intent glance, and his tone conveyed a sense of some
+broad, impersonal, out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.
+
+The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders and eloquently
+shook his head.
+
+“Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?” the keeper turned to Thorpe.
+
+To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out the meaning of the
+query. “Oh, anything'll do for me,” he said, awkwardly smiling. “It's
+years since I've shot--I daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another
+to me.”
+
+He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking all his
+measurements as a sportsman. “You'd do best with 'B,' sir, I fancy,” the
+functionary decided at last, and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the
+notion that “B” must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys. He
+watched the operation of putting the gun together, and then took it, and
+laid it over his arm, and followed the valet out into the hall again, in
+dignified silence. To the keeper's remark--“Mr. Balder has its mate with
+him today, sir,” he gave only a restrained nod.
+
+There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord Plowden appeared.
+He came down the stairs then with the brisk, rather impatient air of a
+busy man whose plans are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others.
+He was fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat and cap,
+gloves, scarf round his throat and all--and he behaved as if there was
+not a minute to lose. He had barely time to shake perfunctorily the
+hand Thorpe offered him, and utter an absent-minded “How are you this
+morning?”
+
+To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door, bearing his
+master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully, “We are very late
+today, Barnes.” They went out, and began striding down the avenue of
+trees at such a pace that the keeper and his following of small boys and
+dogs, who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot to keep up
+with it.
+
+Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would afford
+exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate talk with his host,
+but he perceived very soon that this was not to be the case. They walked
+together for half a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and
+then across some fields, but the party was close at their heels, and
+Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort, save an occasional
+remark about the birds and the covers between him and the keeper, was
+impracticable. The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
+leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course was deflected
+toward him, but even when they came up to him, the expedition seemed
+to gain nothing of a social character. The few curt words that were
+exchanged, as they halted here to distribute cartridges and hold brief
+consultation, bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.
+
+The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe, breathing heavily over
+the unwonted exercise and hoping for nothing so much as that they would
+henceforth take things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that
+the two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders of this
+elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed to a certain point in one
+direction, and that nobleman, followed by his valet with the gun and
+the stool, set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility,
+vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the bidding of the
+keeper. Neither of them had intervened to mitigate the destiny of their
+guest, or displayed any interest as to what was going to become of him.
+
+Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and though afterward,
+when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station under a
+clump of trees at the autocrat's behest, he strove to soothe his ruffled
+feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely correct
+deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
+Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction
+about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of
+which nettled him.
+
+To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from
+the spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the
+skyline of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool
+which his valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment
+that he had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and he
+turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.
+
+This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had
+begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses
+of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he
+hastened back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when
+he heard the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came
+his way, he liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended
+pride with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the
+responsibility he had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden's guest had
+no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant
+keeper. Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears,
+punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of “mark!” These cries,
+and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied
+and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own.
+He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by
+instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and
+followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then,
+taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first
+pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a
+plummet.
+
+He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for
+joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never
+have been a cleaner “kill.” In the warming glow of his satisfaction in
+himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden
+and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel
+delight of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the
+shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was
+conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and again the
+cry of “mark!” rose, strenuously addressed to him.
+
+Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest
+of the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but
+when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with
+as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously
+that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by
+way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game
+carried by two of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a
+rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.
+
+“Well, Thorpe?” asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and
+the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his
+mood. “I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?”
+
+Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. “Let some of the
+boys run over,” he said slowly. “There are nine birds within sight, and
+there are two or three in the bushes--but they may have got away.”
+
+“Gad!” said Balder.
+
+“Magnificent!” was his brother's comment--and Thorpe permitted himself
+the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.
+
+The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything
+that remained of Thorpe's visit. He set down to it without hesitation
+the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The
+temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of
+the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him,
+but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred
+little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally
+at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own
+restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to
+the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the
+man of the pheasants.
+
+Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was
+alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was
+much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to
+himself.
+
+On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town,
+his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day.
+He had been so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were some
+things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt
+most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses
+and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his
+guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of
+what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music
+of the voice lingered in his ears.
+
+“And she is old Kervick's daughter!” he said to himself more than once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London
+nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in
+indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be
+so brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage
+irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged
+dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which
+the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke
+about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
+to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid
+gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South
+Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its
+wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however, upon
+this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said
+he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the
+idea that any other railway could be half so bad.
+
+The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the
+champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up
+additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay
+and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the
+newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing
+a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and
+inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues,
+was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive
+and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed
+either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the
+Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.
+
+But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost too short.
+The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the
+Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the
+window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit
+from which he was returning.
+
+When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his
+mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to
+him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
+superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over
+and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself
+with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at
+the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street
+through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.
+
+Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small, huddled
+rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a
+corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like
+one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.
+
+The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk
+who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish
+this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in
+a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the
+personification of business--without an ounce of distracting superfluous
+flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary
+politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine
+perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a
+joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke
+cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to
+belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing
+anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was
+more than a touch of what the rustic calls “ginger” in his hair and
+closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid
+skin. His eyes--notably direct, confident eyes--were of a grey which had
+in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
+and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.
+
+He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin
+lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. “Well?” he asked,
+impassively.
+
+“Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?” asked Thorpe in turn. “I want a
+talk with you.”
+
+For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two,
+he remarked, “Go ahead till we're stopped,” and seated himself on the
+corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig.
+Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.
+
+“I've worked out the whole scheme,” he began, as if introducing the
+product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. “I'm going to leave
+England almost immediately--go on the Continent and loaf about--I've
+never seen the Continent.”
+
+Semple regarded him in silence. “Well?” he observed at last.
+
+“You see the idea, don't you?” Thorpe demanded.
+
+The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. “Go on,” he said.
+
+“But the idea is everything,” protested the other. “We've been thinking
+of beginning the campaign straight away--but the true game now is to lie
+low--silent as the grave. I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular
+is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
+I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else--and so
+there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me,
+d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The
+Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of
+course, and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show,
+but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general
+impression that I've gone to pieces. Now d'ye see?”
+
+“It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,” commented Semple.
+
+“Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would move heaven
+and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind
+of what was going on. The only weak point in our game is just there.
+Absolutely everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally,
+then, our play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We
+don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we're
+up to, till after we're safe past that rock. So we go on in the way
+to attract the least possible attention. You or your jobber makes the
+ordinary application for a Special Settlement, with your six signatures
+and so on; and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as shut
+up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols--and the thing works
+itself. You do see it, don't you?”
+
+“I see well enough the things that are to be seen,” replied Semple, with
+a certain brevity of manner. “There was a sermon of my father's that I
+remember, and it had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are
+seen, but at the things which are not seen.'”
+
+Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. “Semple,” he said,
+bringing his chair forward to the desk, “that's what I've come for. I
+want to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you've laid
+out already, in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid
+back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that to one side.
+Now then, leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought
+to have out of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not
+thinking of your 2,000 vendor's shares----”
+
+“No--I'm not thinking much of them, either,” interposed Semple, with a
+kind of dry significance.
+
+“Oh, they'll be all right,” Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as
+he did so. “No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come
+to you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board.”
+
+“Twenty thousand pounds,” said Semple, readily.
+
+Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. “I had thought thirty would be
+a fairer figure,” he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.
+
+The broker put out his under-lip. “You will find people rather disposed
+to distrust a man who promises more than he's asked,” he remarked
+coldly.
+
+“Yes--I know what you mean,” Thorpe hurried to say, flushing awkwardly,
+even though the remark was so undeserved; “but it's in my nature. I'm
+full of the notion of doing things for people that have done things
+for me. That's the way I'm built. Why”--he halted to consider the
+advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord Plowden,
+and decided against it--“why, without you, what would the whole
+thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone--the money for the
+applications--I could have no more got at it than I could at the Crown
+Jewels in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once--if you don't
+mind the question--how did you happen to have so much ready money lying
+about.”
+
+“There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for
+them,” the broker explained. “If they get five per cent. for the four
+months, they'll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take
+thirty thousand instead of twenty--if it presents itself to your mind in
+that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course.”
+
+“Of course,” assented Thorpe. “Write it now, if you like.” He pushed his
+chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. “What
+I want to do is this,” he said, looking up. “I'll make the promise for
+thirty-two thousand, and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in
+cash now--a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang about on
+the Continent for four months. I judge you think it'll be four months
+before things materialize, eh?”
+
+“The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come
+shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then
+the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin--and it is for you to
+say how long you allow that to go on.”
+
+“But about the two thousand pounds now,” Thorpe reminded him.
+
+“I think I will do that in this way,” said Semple, kicking his small
+legs nonchalantly. “I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you,
+for cash down, NOT vendor's shares, you observe--and then I will take
+your acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given
+date. In that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would
+have a stake in the game.” “Your stake's pretty big, already,” commented
+Thorpe, tentatively.
+
+“It's just a fancy of mine,” said the other, with his first smile. “I
+like to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very
+exciting.”
+
+“All right,” said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two
+letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on
+the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and
+wrote a cheque.
+
+“Do you want it open?” he asked over his shoulder. “Are you going to get
+it cashed at once?”
+
+“No--cross it,” said the other. “I want it to go through my bankers.
+It'll warm their hearts toward me. I shan't be going till the end of the
+week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart.”
+
+“On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business in Frankfort
+once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all.”
+
+“But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?” Thorpe asked him, as he
+folded the cheque in his pocket-book.
+
+“Oh yes--many things,” responded the broker, lightly. “It's a pleasure,
+for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par.”
+
+“Oh, if you call it buying,” said Thorpe, and then softened his words
+with an apologetic laugh. “I didn't tell you, did I? I've been spending
+Saturday and Sunday with Plowden--you know, the Lord Plowden on my
+Board.”
+
+“I know of him very well,” observed the Scotchman.
+
+“Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual
+form with guinea-pigs.”
+
+“Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,” Thorpe asserted,
+warmly. “He's really a splendid fellow--with his little oddities, like
+the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place?
+I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
+country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and it's kept
+up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his
+real income is supposed to be?”
+
+Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly
+with the palm of his hand.
+
+“I asked,” Thorpe went on, “because he had so much to say about his
+poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his
+doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all
+over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of
+England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I
+knocked the pheasants!” A clerk showed his head at the door, with a
+meaning gesture. “I must go now,” said Semple, briskly, and led the way
+out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
+brief injunction, “Don't go away without seeing me.”
+
+It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's
+slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe
+noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of
+fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him
+luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had
+been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only
+a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab,
+and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very
+agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the “Court” section of
+a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two
+messages. They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick
+at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square
+country--and the other looked for him at his club. Both begged him to
+lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.
+
+There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his
+hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to
+his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway,
+and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned
+presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop
+of his family.
+
+In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks
+and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy
+to his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a
+dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
+It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that
+the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of
+different planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and
+she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the
+doorway bore still its century-old legend, “Thorpe, Bookseller.”
+
+He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the
+books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy
+guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious
+recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
+very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its
+expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions
+if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with
+a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
+brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered
+if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young
+fool. No--no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day--and
+especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of
+what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague
+as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those
+days there still were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
+bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.
+
+Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to
+apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's
+servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before
+how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men.
+The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two
+generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named
+Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of
+buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked
+acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and
+friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the
+law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a
+book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as
+the Plowdens.
+
+A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way
+along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small
+open space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a
+high desk. She did not look up.
+
+“Well--I visited his Lordship all right.” He announced his presence thus
+genially.
+
+“I hope you're the better for it,” she remarked, turning to him, after a
+pause, her emotionless, plain face.
+
+“Oh, immensely,” he affirmed, with robust jocularity. “You should have
+seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe'
+there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself at
+breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer than silk. Oh, it's
+clear as daylight--I was intended for a fashionable career.”
+
+She smiled in a faint, passive way. “Well--they say 'better late
+than never,' you know.” “And after all, IS it so very late?” he said,
+adopting her phrase as an expression of his thought. “I'm just turned
+forty, and I feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
+the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first
+Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into
+the House of Commons until he was seven-and-forty.”
+
+“You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,” she commented.
+
+“I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The
+mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me feel as if I was at the very
+least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me,
+and listened to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
+might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her.”
+
+Louisa laughed in his face. “Don't be a fool, Joel,” she adjured him,
+with a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience
+with the buoyancy of his smile. “Why, of course, you'll know her,” he
+protested. “What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going
+to allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in
+your window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm
+a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a
+thing!”
+
+“There's no good talking about it at all,” she observed, after a little
+pause. “It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And as I said the other
+night, if you want to do things for the children, that's another matter.
+They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody chooses to teach
+them.”
+
+“Where are they now?” he asked. Upon the instant another plan began to
+unfold itself in the background of his mind.
+
+“They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at different places, of
+course. I was recommended to send Julia there--one of our old customers
+is a Governor, or whatever it's called--and he got special terms for
+her. She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged it
+very nicely for her--and there is such a good boys' college there,
+it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. Julia is to finish at
+Christmas-time--and what I'm going to do with her afterward is more than
+I know.”
+
+“Is she pretty?” the uncle of Julia enquired.
+
+“She's very nice,” the mother answered, with vague extenuation in her
+tone. “I don't know about her looks--she varies so much. Sometimes I
+think she's pretty--and then again I can't think it. She's got
+good features, and she holds herself well, and she's very much the
+lady--rather too much, I think, sometimes--but it all depends upon what
+you call pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after her father's
+family. The Dabneys are all little people.”
+
+Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. “And what's Alfred like?”
+ he asked.
+
+“He wants to be an artist!” There was a perceptible note of apprehension
+in the mother's confession.
+
+“Well--why shouldn't he--if he's got a bent that way?” demanded Thorpe,
+with reproof in his tone. “Did you want him to be a shop-keeper?”
+
+“I should like to see him a doctor,” she replied with dignity. “It was
+always my idea for him.”
+
+“Well, it's no good--even as an idea,” he told her. “Doctors are like
+parsons--they can't keep up with the times. The age is outgrowing them.
+Only the fakirs in either profession get anything out of it, nowadays.
+It's all mystery and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick--medicine
+is--and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist, you're not
+in it. But an artist stands on his merits. There is his work--done by
+his own hands. It speaks for itself. There's no deception--it's easy
+enough to tell whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good,
+people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them. Of course, it
+won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking, whether his pictures sell
+well or not. But probably he'd give it up, if he didn't make a hit of
+it.
+
+“I don't know that there's any crying need that he should do anything.
+My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army, but I wouldn't dream of
+forcing it on him against his will. I had a bitter enough dose of that,
+myself, with father. I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps
+argue with him, if I thought he was making a jack of himself--but I
+wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he wants to be an artist, in God's
+name let him go ahead. It can be made a gentlemanly trade--and the main
+thing is that he should be a gentleman.”
+
+Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. “If you
+don't mind, I don't know that I do,” she said when it was finished.
+“Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick
+temper. He reminds me of father--oh, ever so much more than you do. He
+contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows it all.”
+
+“But he's a good fellow, isn't he?” urged Thorpe. “I mean, he's got his
+likable points? I'm going to be able to get along with him?”
+
+“I didn't get along with him very well,” the mother admitted,
+reluctantly, “but I daresay with a man it would be different. You see,
+his father was ill all those four years, and Alfred hated the shop as
+bad as you did, and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair.
+I want to be fair to him, you know.”
+
+“But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word,” Thorpe insisted.
+
+“Oh, mercy yes,” Louisa made ready answer. “My only fear is--whether you
+won't find him too much of a gentleman.”
+
+Thorpe knitted his brows. “I only hope we're talking about the same
+thing,” he said, in a doubtful tone. Before she could speak, he lifted
+his hand. “Never mind--I can see for myself in ten minutes more than you
+could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan. I'm going on the Continent
+in a few days' time, to stay for three or four months. I've got nothing
+special to do--just to travel about and see things and kill time--I
+shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland and Paris and the Rhine
+and all sorts of places--and it occurred to me that I'd take the two
+youngsters with me. I could get acquainted with them, that way, and
+they'd be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would feel good
+to have some of my own flesh and blood about me--and I suppose they'd be
+tickled to death to go.”
+
+“Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,” Mrs. Dabney
+objected, blankly.
+
+“Bah!” Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something
+good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. “What on earth
+difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and
+let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl
+was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four
+months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around
+in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?
+
+“And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought
+to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him.
+Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special
+start for it.” He added, upon a luminous afterthought: “Perhaps his
+seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of
+wanting to be an artist.”
+
+The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction.
+“Well--if you really think it's best,” she began, “I don't know that
+I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
+Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if
+they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now
+you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and all
+I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write
+them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have
+some travelling clothes.”
+
+“I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry up about it.”
+
+Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on
+the desk. “I will give you back that thirty,” he said, as he wrote, “and
+here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
+will you? and if you want more tell me.”
+
+A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for
+leaving.
+
+His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand,
+was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible
+letters before her mental vision. “Even now I don't believe in him,” the
+impalpable legend ran.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him
+hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the
+luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of
+the appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were
+fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently
+removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.
+
+By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon, speaking French to
+the waiter throughout. Divested of his imposing great-coat, he was seen
+to be a gentleman of meagre flesh as well as of small stature. He had
+the Roman nose, narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth
+and chin of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits of the
+Duke of Wellington. His face and neck were of a dull reddish tint, which
+seemed at first sight uniformly distributed: one saw afterward that
+it approached pallor at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in
+minute patches on the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose. Against
+this flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair and small, neatly-waxed
+moustache were very white indeed. It was a thin, lined, care-worn face,
+withal, which in repose, and particularly in profile, produced an effect
+of dignified and philosophical melancholy. The General's over-prominent
+light blue eyes upon occasion marred this effect, however, by glances
+of a bold, harsh character, which seemed to disclose unpleasant depths
+below the correct surface. His manner with the waiters was abrupt and
+sharp, but undoubtedly they served him very well--much better, in truth,
+than Thorpe had ever seen them serve anybody before.
+
+Thorpe observed his guest a good deal during the repast, and formed
+numerous conclusions about him. He ate with palpable relish of every
+dish, and he emptied his glass as promptly as his host could fill
+it. There was hardly a word of explanation as to the purpose of their
+meeting, until the coffee was brought, and they pushed back their
+chairs, crossed their legs, and lighted cigars.
+
+“I was lucky to catch you with my wire, at such short notice,” Thorpe
+said then. “I sent two, you know--to your chambers and your club. Which
+of them found you?”
+
+“Chambers,” said the General. “I rarely dress till luncheon time. I read
+in bed. There's really nothing else to do. Idleness is the curse of my
+life.”
+
+“I've been wondering if you'd like a little occupation--of a well-paid
+sort,” said Thorpe slowly. He realized that it was high time to invent
+some pretext for his hurried summons of the General.
+
+“My dear sir,” responded the other, “I should like anything that had
+money in it. And I should very much like occupation, too--if it were, of
+course, something that was--was suitable to me.”
+
+“Yes,” said Thorpe, meditatively. “I've something in my mind--not at all
+definite yet--in fact, I don't think I can even outline it to you
+yet. But I'm sure it will suit you--that is, if I decide to go on with
+it--and there ought to be seven or eight hundred a year for you in
+it--for life, mind you.”
+
+The General's gaze, fastened strenuously upon Thorpe, shook a little.
+“That will suit me very well,” he declared, with feeling. “Whatever
+I can do for it”--he let the sentence end itself with a significant
+gesture.
+
+“I thought so,” commented the other, trifling with the spoon in his cup.
+“But I want you to be open with me. I'm interested in you, and I want to
+be of use to you. All that I've said, I can do for you. But first,
+I'm curious to know everything that you can tell me about your
+circumstances. I'm right in assuming, I suppose, that you're--that
+you're not any too well-fixed.”
+
+The General helped himself to another little glass of brandy. His mood
+seemed to absorb the spirit of the liqueur. “Fixed!” he repeated with a
+peevish snap in his tone. “I'm not 'fixed' at all, as you call it. Good
+God, sir! They no more care what becomes of me than they do about
+their old gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position--and
+everything--and they round on me like--like cuckoos.” His pale, bulging
+eyes lifted their passionless veil for an instant as he spoke, and
+flashed with the predatory fierceness of a hawk.
+
+Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom “they” might mean. The temper
+visibly rising in the old man's mind was what he had hoped for. He
+proceeded with an informed caution. “Don't be annoyed if I touch upon
+family matters,” he said. “It's a part of what I must know, in order to
+help you. I believe you're a widower, aren't you, General?”
+
+The other, after a quick upward glance, shook his head resentfully.
+“Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy with HER son-in-law--and her daughter.
+He is a man of property--and also, apparently, a man of remarkable
+credulity and patience.” He paused, to scan his companion's face.
+“They divide him between them,” he said then, from clenched teeth--“and
+I--mind you--I made the match! He was a young fellow that I found--and I
+brought him home and introduced him--and I haven't so much as an Italian
+postage-stamp to show for it. But what interest can you possibly take
+in all this?” The unamiable glance of his eyes was on the instant
+surcharged with suspicion.
+
+“How many daughters have you?” Thorpe ventured the enquiry with inward
+doubts as to its sagacity.
+
+“Three,” answered the General, briefly. It was evident that he was also
+busy thinking.
+
+“I ask because I met one of them in the country over Sunday,” Thorpe
+decided to explain.
+
+The old soldier's eyes asked many questions in the moment of silence.
+“Which one--Edith?--that is, Lady Cressage?” he enquired. “Of course--it
+would have been her.”
+
+Thorpe nodded. “She made a tremendous impression upon me,” he observed,
+watching the father with intentness as he let the slow words fall.
+
+“Well she might,” the other replied, simply. “She's supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in England.”
+
+“Well--I guess she is,” Thorpe assented, while the two men eyed each
+other.
+
+“Is the third sister unmarried?” it occurred to him to ask. The tone of
+the question revealed its perfunctory character.
+
+“Oh--Beatrice--she's of no importance,” the father replied. “She goes in
+for writing, and all that--she's not a beauty, you know--she lives with
+an old lady in Scotland. The oldest daughter--Blanche--she has some good
+looks of her own, but she's a cat. And so you met Edith! May I ask where
+it was?”
+
+“At Hadlow House--Lord Plowden's place, you know.”
+
+The General's surprise at the announcement was undoubted. “At
+Plowden's!” he repeated, and added, as if half to himself, “I thought
+that was all over with, long ago.”
+
+“I wish you'd tell me about it,” said Thorpe, daringly. “I've made it
+plain to you, haven't I? I'm going to look out for you. And I want you
+to post me up, here, on some of the things that I don't understand. You
+remember that it was Plowden who introduced you to me, don't you? It was
+through him that you got on the Board. Well, certain things that
+I've seen lead me to suppose that he did that in order to please your
+daughter. Did you understand it that way?”
+
+“It's quite likely, in one sense,” returned the General. He spoke with
+much deliberation now, weighing all his words. “He may have thought
+it would please her; he may not have known how little my poor affairs
+concerned her.”
+
+“Well, then,” pursued Thorpe, argumentatively, “he had an object in
+pleasing her. Let me ask the question--did he want to marry her?”
+
+“Most men want to marry her,” was the father's non-committal response.
+His moustache lifted itself in the semblance of a smile, but the blue
+eyes above remained coldly vigilant.
+
+“Well--I guess that's so too,” Thorpe remarked. He made a fleeting
+mental note that there was something about the General which impelled
+him to think and talk more like an American than ever. “But was HE
+specially affected that way?”
+
+“I think,” said Kervick, judicially, “I think it was understood that
+if he had been free to marry a penniless wife, he would have wished to
+marry her.”
+
+“Do you know,” Thorpe began again, with a kind of diffident
+hesitation--“do you happen to have formed an idea--supposing that had
+been the case--would she have accepted him?” “Ah, there you have me,”
+ replied the other. “Who can tell what women will accept, and what
+they will refuse? My daughter refused Lord Lingfield--and he is an
+Under-Secretary, and will be Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister, and a
+rich man. After that, what are you to say?”
+
+“You speak of her as penniless,” Thorpe remarked, with a casual air.
+
+“Six hundred a year,” the father answered. “We could have rubbed along
+after a fashion on it, if she had had any notions at all of taking my
+advice. I'm a man of the world, and I could have managed her affairs for
+her to her advantage, but she insisted upon going off by herself. She
+showed not the slightest consideration for me--but then I am accustomed
+to that.”
+
+Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the old gentleman read in this an
+encouragement to expand his grievances.
+
+“In my position,” he continued, helping himself to still another
+tiny glass, “I naturally say very little. It is not my form to make
+complaints and advertise my misfortunes. I daresay it's a fault. I
+know it kept me back in India--while ever so many whipper-snappers were
+promoted over my head--because I was of the proud and silent sort. It
+was a mistake, but it was my nature. I might have put by a comfortable
+provision for my old age, in those days, if I had been willing to push
+my claims, and worry the Staff into giving me what was my due. But that
+I declined to do--and when I was retired, there was nothing for me but
+the ration of bread and salt which they serve out to the old soldier
+who has been too modest. I served my Queen, sir, for forty years--and I
+should be ashamed to tell you the allowance she makes me in my old age.
+But I do not complain. My mouth is closed. I am an English gentleman and
+one of Her Majesty's soldiers. That's enough said, eh? Do you follow me?
+And about my family affairs, I'm not likely to talk to the first comer,
+eh? But to you I say it frankly--they've behaved badly, damned badly,
+sir.
+
+“Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER son-in-law. He has
+large estates in one of the healthiest and most beautiful parts; he has
+a palace, and more money than he knows what to do with--but it seems
+that he's not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well--but that
+doesn't enter into anyone's calculations. No! let the worn-out old
+soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb! That's the spirit of woman-kind.
+And my daughter Edith--does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me--I
+secured for her the very greatest marriage in England. She would have
+been Duchess of Glastonbury today if her husband had not played the fool
+and drowned himself.”
+
+“What's that you say?” put in Thorpe, swiftly.
+
+“It was as good as suicide,” insisted the General, with doggedness. His
+face had become a deeper red. “They didn't hit it off together, and
+he left in a huff, and went yachting with his father, who was his own
+sailing-master--and, as might be expected, they were both drowned. The
+title would have gone to her son--but no, of course, she had no son--and
+so it passed to a stranger--an outsider that had been an usher in a
+school, or something of that sort. You can fancy what a blow this was to
+me. Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless widow
+thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then, to cap all, she
+takes her six hundred a year and goes off by herself, and gives me the
+cold shoulder completely. What is it Shakespeare says? 'How sharper than
+a serpent's teeth'----”
+
+Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an emphasis which
+abruptly broke the quotation in half. He had been frowning moodily
+at his guest for some minutes, relighting his cigar more than once
+meanwhile. He had made a mental calculation of what the old man had had
+to drink, and had reassured himself as to his condition. His garrulity
+might have an alcoholic basis, but his wits were clear enough. It was
+time to take a new line with him.
+
+“I don't want to hear you abuse your daughter,” he admonished him now,
+with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance. “Damn it all, why
+shouldn't she go off by herself, and take care of her own money her
+own way? It's little enough, God knows, for such a lady as she is. Why
+should you expect her to support you out of it? No--sit still! Listen to
+me!”--he stretched out his hand, and laid it with restraining heaviness
+upon the General's arm--“you don't want to have any row with me.
+You can't afford it. Just think that over to yourself--you--can't
+afford--it.”
+
+Major-General Kervick's prominent blue eyes had bulged forth in rage
+till their appearance had disconcerted the other's gaze. They remained
+still too much in the foreground, as it were, and the angry scarlets
+and violets of the cheeks beneath them carried an unabated threat of
+apoplexy--but their owner, after a moment's silence, made a sign with
+his stiff white brows that the crisis was over. “You must remember
+that--that I have a father's feelings,” he gasped then, huskily.
+
+Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected. He had
+learned what he wanted to know about this veteran. If he had the fierce
+meannesses of a famished old dog, he had also a dog's awe of a stick. It
+was almost too easy to terrorize him.
+
+“Oh, I make allowances for all that,” Thorpe began, vaguely. “But
+it's important that you should understand me. I'm this sort of a man:
+whatever I set out to do, and put my strength into it, that I do! I kill
+every pheasant I fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It's a way I have.
+To those that help me, and are loyal to me, I'm the best friend in
+the world. To those that get in my way, or try to trip me up, I'm the
+devil--just plain devil. Now then--you're getting three hundred a year
+from my Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my friend
+Plowden. You don't do anything to earn this money; you're of no earthly
+use on the Board. If I chose, I could put you off at the end of the year
+as easily as I can blow out this match. But I propose not only to keep
+you on, but to make you independent. Why do I do that? You should ask
+yourself that question. It can't be on account of anything you can do
+for the Company. What else then? Why, first and foremost, because you
+are the father of your daughter.”
+
+“Let me tell you the kind of man I am,” said the General, inflating his
+chest, and speaking with solemnity.
+
+“Oh, I know the kind of man you are,” Thorpe interrupted him, coolly. “I
+want to talk now.”
+
+“It was merely,” Kervick ventured, in an injured tone, “that I can be as
+loyal as any man alive to a true friend.”
+
+“Well, I'll be the true friend, then,” said Thorpe, with impatient
+finality. “And now this is what I want to say. I'm going to be a very
+rich man. You're not to say so to anybody, mind you, until the thing
+speaks for itself. We're keeping dark for a few months, d'ye see?--lying
+low. Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well now, I wouldn't
+give a damn to be rich, unless I did with my money the things that I
+wanted to do, and got the things with it that I wanted to get. Whatever
+takes my fancy, that's what I'll do.”
+
+He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-new project which
+seemed, by some surreptitious agency, to have already taken his fancy.
+It was a curious project; there were attractive things about it, and
+objections to it suggested themselves as well.
+
+“I may decide,” he began speaking again, still revolving this
+hypothetical scheme in his thoughts--“I may want to--well, here's what
+occurs to me as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye
+see? and it seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be so
+poor. Well, then--I might say to you, here's two thousand a year, say,
+made over to you in your name, on the understanding that you turn over
+half of it, say, to her. She could take it from you, of course, as her
+father. You could say you made it out of the Company. Of course it might
+happen, later on, that I might like to have a gentle hint dropped to
+her, d'ye see, as to where it really came from. Mind, I don't say this
+is what is going to be done. It merely occurred to me.”
+
+After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added a second thought:
+“You'd have to set about making friends with her, you know. In any case,
+you'd better begin at that at once.”
+
+The General remained buried in reflection. He lighted a cigarette, and
+poured out for himself still another petit verre. His pursed lips and
+knitted brows were eloquent of intense mental activity.
+
+“Well, do you see any objections to it?” demanded Thorpe, at last.
+
+“I do not quite see the reasons for it,” answered the other, slowly.
+“What would you gain by it?”
+
+“How do you mean--gain?” put in the other, with peremptory intolerance
+of tone.
+
+General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture. These hands
+were withered, but remarkably well-kept. “I suppose one doesn't do
+something for nothing,” he said. “I see what I would gain, and what she
+would gain, but I confess I don't see what advantage you would get out
+of it.”
+
+“No-o, I daresay you don't,” assented Thorpe, with sneering serenity.
+“But what does that matter? You admit that you see what you would gain.
+That's enough, isn't it?”
+
+The older man's veined temples twitched for an instant. He straightened
+himself in his chair, and looked hard at his companion. There was a
+glistening of moisture about his staring eyes.
+
+“It surely isn't necessary--among gentlemen”--he began, cautiously
+picking his phrases--“to have quite so much that's unpleasant, is it?”
+
+“No--you're right--I didn't mean to be so rough,” Thorpe declared, with
+spontaneous contrition. Upon the instant, however, he perceived
+the danger that advantage might be taken of his softness. “I'm a
+plain-spoken man,” he went on, with a hardening voice, “and people must
+take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance, that I intended
+to be of service to you--and that that ought to interest you.”
+
+The General seemed to have digested his pique. “And what I was trying
+to say,” he commented deferentially, “was that I thought I saw ways of
+being of service to you. But that did not seem to interest you at all.”
+
+“How--service?” Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.
+
+“I know my daughter so much better than you do,” explained the other; “I
+know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar with the whole
+situation than you can possibly be--I wonder that you won't listen to
+my opinion. I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I think
+you should hear it.”
+
+“I think so, too,” Thorpe declared, readily enough. “What IS your
+opinion?”
+
+General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave an
+embarrassed little laugh. “But I can't form what you might call an
+opinion,” he protested, apologetically, “till I understand a bit more
+clearly what it is you propose to yourself. You mustn't be annoyed if I
+return to that--'still harping on my daughter,' you know. If I MUST ask
+the question--is it your wish to marry her?”
+
+Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking of
+something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness
+that the question had been unduly intimate.
+
+“I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry,” he replied,
+thoughtfully. “I may, and I may not. But--starting with that proviso--I
+suppose I haven't seen any other woman that I'd rather think about
+marrying than--than the lady we're speaking of. However, you see it's
+all in the air, so far as my plans go.”
+
+“In the air be it,” the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. “Let us consider
+it as if it were in the air--a possible contingency. This is what
+I would say--My--'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being a
+difficult lady--'uncertain, coy, and hard to please' as Scott says, you
+know--and it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which brings
+her to the surface. She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror
+of it. Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you know. I
+was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother carried it through.
+But--yes--about her--I think she is afraid to marry again. If she does
+ever consent, it will be because poverty has broken her nerve. If she is
+kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved, so to speak, into taking
+a husband. If she had sixteen hundred--either she would never marry at
+all, or she would be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught
+her fancy. That would be particularly like her. You would be simply
+endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her for yourself. D'ye
+follow me? If you'll leave it to me, I can find a much better way than
+that--better for all of us.”
+
+“Hm!” said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. “I see what you
+mean,” he remarked at last. “Yes--I see.”
+
+The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time, deferring
+to the reverie of his host. When finally he offered a diversion, in
+the form of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook himself, and then
+ponderously rose to his feet. He took his hat and coat from the waiter,
+and made his way out without a word.
+
+At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the Embankment
+garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him the fact of his
+presence. “Which way are you going?” he asked.
+
+“I don't know,” Thorpe answered absently. “I think--I think I'll take a
+walk on the Embankment--by myself.”
+
+The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. “But when am I
+to see you again?” he enquired, with an effect of solicitude that defied
+control.
+
+“See me?” Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him by surprise.
+
+“There are things to be settled, are there not?” the other faltered, in
+distressed doubt as to the judicious tone to take. “You spoke, you know,
+of--of some employment that--that would suit me.”
+
+Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort to recall his
+wandering attention. “Oh yes,” he said, with lethargic vagueness--“I
+haven't thought it out yet. I'll let you know--within the week,
+probably.”
+
+With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. Walking
+heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat
+pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the
+idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he
+gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred
+consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within
+him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter
+self-disgust.
+
+The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep,
+had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still
+regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after
+the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the
+fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. “After all,” he
+said to himself, “there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is
+a cad, in the presence of a gentleman.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his
+niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.
+
+The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at
+the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the
+steam from the window with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both
+stared a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations of
+petulance.
+
+“Isn't it too provoking!” cried the girl, turning to her uncle at last.
+“This is where we are now--according to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds
+we enjoy a view of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left,
+the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For all one can see, we
+might as well be at Redhill.”
+
+“It is pretty hard luck,” Thorpe assented, passively glancing past her
+at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured the view. “But
+hang it all--it must clear up some time. Just you have patience, and
+you'll see some Alps yet.”
+
+“Where we're going,” the young man interposed, “the head-porter told me
+it was always cloudier than anywhere else.”
+
+“I don't think that can be so,” Thorpe reasoned, languidly, from his
+corner. “It's a great winter resort, I'm told, and it rather stands to
+reason, doesn't it? that people wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as
+all that.”
+
+“The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland,” said the
+girl--“they would do anything.”
+
+Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. “Well, you can comfort
+yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again. The mountains'll
+stay here, all right,” he assured her. The young people smiled back
+at him, and with this he rearranged his feet in a new posture on the
+opposite seat, lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more
+against the hard, red-plush cushion. Personally, he did not in the least
+resent the failure of the scenery.
+
+For something more than three months, this purposeless pleasure-tour had
+been dragging him about from point to point, sleeping in strange beds,
+eating extraordinarily strange food, transacting the affairs of a
+sight-seer among people who spoke strange languages, until he was
+surfeited with the unusual. It had all been extremely interesting, of
+course, and deeply improving--but he was getting tired of talking to
+nobody but waiters, and still more so of having nothing to do which he
+could not as well leave undone if he chose. After a few days more
+of Switzerland--for they had already gazed with blank faces at this
+universal curtain of mist from such different points of view as Lucerne,
+Interlaken, and Thun--it was clear to him that they would, as he
+phrased it, to himself, make a break for home. Unless, indeed, something
+happened at Montreux. Ah, would anything happen at Montreux? For four
+days his mind had been automatically reverting to that question; it
+lurked continually in the background of his thoughts, now, as he smoked
+and idly ruminated, on his way southward through the fog.
+
+All the rest of the prolonged trip had been without any specific motive,
+so far as he was concerned. The youngsters had planned all its routes
+and halts and details of time and connections, and he had gone along,
+with cheerful placidity, to look at the things they bade him observe,
+and to pay the bills. Perhaps in all things their tastes had not been
+his tastes. He would have liked more of Paris, he fancied, and less of
+the small Dutch and North German towns which they seemed to fancy
+so much. Still, the beer was good--and really their happiness, as a
+spectacle, had given him more satisfaction than a thousand miles of
+boulevards could have done.
+
+He liked this niece and nephew of his more than he could ever have
+imagined himself liking any young people. They had been shy with him at
+the outset--and for the first week his experiment had been darkened by
+the belief that, between themselves, they did not deem him quite good
+enough. He had been wise enough, then, to have it out with the girl--she
+was the one to whom he felt it easiest to talk frankly--and had
+discovered, to his immense relief, that they conceived him to be
+regarding them as encumbrances. At breakfast next morning, with tactful
+geniality, he set everything right, and thereafter they were all
+extremely happy together.
+
+So far as he could judge, they were very superior young people, both
+intellectually and spiritually. The girl spoke French, and her brother
+German, with what seemed to him remarkable proficiency. Their young
+minds were the repositories of an astounding amount of information:
+they knew who Charles the Bold was; they pointed out to their uncle the
+distinction between Gothic and Romanesque arches; they explained what
+was the matter with the Anabaptists; they told him that the story of
+the Bishop and the rats at Bingen was a baseless myth, and that probably
+there had never been any such man as William Tell. Nor did they get all
+this out of the guide-books which they pored over with such zest. It was
+impossible not to see that they were familiar with large numbers of the
+subjects that these books discussed, and that the itinerary which
+they marked out had reference to desires and interests that they had
+cultivated for themselves.
+
+Julia, upon even first sight, made a much pleasanter impression than her
+mother's hesitating description had prepared him for. As he came to know
+her well, he ceased to remember that there was a question in any mind
+as to her being a pretty girl. There was less colour in her face than he
+could have wished. Her smooth, pallid skin, almost waxen in texture, had
+a suggestion of delicate health which sometimes troubled him a little,
+but which appealed to the tenderness in his nature all the time. The
+face was unduly thin, perhaps, but this, and the wistful glance of the
+large grey eyes in repose, made up an effect that Thorpe found touched
+him a good deal. Even when she was in visibly high spirits, the look in
+these eyes seemed to him to be laying claim to his protection. She
+could be merry upon occasion, in a gentle and tranquil way, and as her
+self-confidence expanded under the shelter of their growing intimacy,
+she disclosed to her uncle plenty of initiative and individuality--but
+what he felt in her most was a peculiarly sweet and girlish
+trustfulness, which made him like himself more than he had ever
+done before. He could feel that he was at his very best--a hitherto
+unsuspected best--when Julia was about. He wanted to buy for her
+everything in the windows upon which she bestowed the most casual
+approving glance. It was a delight merely to look at her, and to
+meditate upon the felicity of being able to do things for so charming a
+girl.
+
+Alfred made a less direct demand upon his uncle's admiration, but he
+was a very good fellow all round. He was big and fair and muscular,
+and nothing about him but his spectacles seemed in Thorpe's mind to be
+related to his choice of art as a profession. That so robust and hearty
+a young fellow should wish to put paint on a canvas with small brushes,
+was to the uncle an unaccountable thing. It was almost as if he had
+wanted to knit, or do embroidery. Of the idleness and impatience of
+discipline which his mother had seemed to allege against him, Thorpe
+failed to detect any signs. The young man was never very late in the
+morning, and, beside his tireless devotion to the task of hunting up old
+pictures in out-of-the-way places, did most of the steward's work of
+the party with intelligence and precision. He studied the time-tables,
+audited the hotel-bills, looked after the luggage, got up the
+street-maps of towns and the like, to such good purpose that they never
+lost a train, or a bag, or themselves. Truly, an excellent young man.
+Thorpe noted with especial satisfaction his fine, kindly big-brother
+attitude toward his sister Julia--and it was impossible for him to
+avoid the conviction that Louisa was a simpleton not to appreciate such
+children. They did not often allude to their mother; when they did, it
+was in language the terms of which seemed more affectionate than the
+tone--and Thorpe said often to himself that he did not blame them. It
+was not so much that they had outgrown their mother's point of view.
+They had never occupied it.
+
+The journey, so far as Thorpe comprehended its character, had been
+shaped with about equal regard for Julia's interest in the romance of
+history, and Alfred's more technical and practical interest in art.
+Each had sufficient sympathy with the tastes of the other, however, to
+prevent any tendency to separation. They took their uncle one day to see
+where William the Silent was assassinated, and the next to observe how
+Rembrandt's theory of guild portrait-painting differed from Van der
+Helst's, with a common enthusiasm. He scrutinized with patient loyalty
+everything that they indicated to him, and not infrequently they
+appeared to like very much the comments he offered. These were chiefly
+of a sprightly nature, and when Julia laughed over them he felt that she
+was very near to him indeed.
+
+Thus they saw Paris together--where Thorpe did relinquish some of the
+multiplied glories of the Louvre to sit in front of a cafe by the
+Opera House and see the funny people go past--and thence, by Bruges and
+Antwerp, to Holland, where nobody could have imagined there were as many
+pictures as Thorpe saw with his own weary eyes. There were wonderful old
+buildings at Lubeck for Julia's eyes to glisten over, and pictures at
+Berlin, Dresden, and Dusseldorf for Alfred.
+
+The assumption existed that the excursion into the Thuringenwald to see
+the memorials of Luther was especially for the uncle's benefit, and he
+tried solicitously to say or look nothing which might invalidate it.
+There were other places in Germany, from Mainz to Munich, which he
+remembered best by their different beers. They spent Christmas at
+Vienna, where Julia had heard that its observance was peculiarly
+insisted upon, and then they saw the Tyrol in its heaviest vesture of
+winter snows, and beautiful old Basle, where Alfred was crazier about
+Holbein than he had been at Munich over Brouwer. Thorpe looked very
+carefully at the paintings of both men, and felt strengthened in his
+hopes that when Alfred got a little older he would see that this picture
+business was not the thing for a young gentleman with prospects to go
+into.
+
+It was at Basle that Thorpe received a letter from London which directly
+altered the plans of the party. He had had several other letters
+from London which had produced no such effect. Through Semple, he
+had followed in outline the unobtrusive campaign to secure a Special
+Settlement, and had learned that the Stock Exchange Committee,
+apparently without opposition, had granted one for the first week in
+February.
+
+Even this news, tremendously important as it was, did not prompt Thorpe
+to interfere with the children's projects. There was no longer any point
+in remaining away from London; there were, indeed, numerous reasons
+for a prompt return. But he was loth to deprive the youngsters of that
+descent into smiling, sunlit Italy upon which they had so fondly dwelt
+in fancy, and after all Semple could do all that was needful to be done
+for another month.
+
+So they went to Basle, and here it was that another kind of letter came.
+It was in a strange hand, at once cramped and fluttering, which puzzled
+the recipient a good deal; it was a long time before even the signature
+unravelled itself. Then he forced himself to decipher it, sentence by
+sentence, with a fierce avidity. It was from General Kervick.
+
+The next morning Thorpe astonished his young companions by suggesting
+an alteration in their route. In a roundabout and tentative fashion--in
+which more suspicious observers must have detected something
+shamefaced--he mentioned that he had always heard a great deal about
+Montreux as a winter-resort. The fact that he called it Montroox raised
+in Julia's mind a fleeting wonder from whom it could be that he had
+heard so much about it, but it occurred to neither her nor her brother
+to question his entire good faith. Their uncle had displayed, hitherto,
+a most comforting freedom from discrimination among European towns; he
+had, indeed, assured them many times that they were all one to him. That
+he should suddenly turn up now with a favourite winter-resort of his
+own selection surprised them considerably, but, upon reflection, it also
+pleased them. He had humoured all their wishes with such unfailing
+and bountiful kindness, that it was a delight to learn that there was
+something he wanted to do. They could not finish their breakfast till
+the guide-book had been brought to the table.
+
+“Oh! How splendid!” Julia had cried then. “The Castle of Chillon is
+there!”
+
+“Why of course!” said Thorpe, complacently.
+
+They laughed gayly at him for pretending that he had known this, and he
+as good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew a serious long breath
+of relief, however, when their backs were turned. It had gone off much
+better than he had feared.
+
+Now, on this Sunday afternoon, as the train made its sure-footed way
+across the mountains, the thought that he was actually to alight at
+Montreux at once fascinated and depressed him. He was annoyed with
+himself for suffering it to get such a hold upon his mind. What was
+there in it, anyway? There was a big hotel there, and he and his
+youngsters were to stop at it, and if he accidentally encountered a
+certain lady who was also stopping there--and of course the meeting
+would bear upon its face the stamp of pure chance--what of it?
+
+And if he did meet her, thus fortuitously--what would happen then? No
+doubt a lady of her social position met abroad great numbers of people
+that she had met at home. It would not in any way surprise her--this
+chance encounter of which he thought so much. Were there sufficient
+grounds for imagining that it would even interest her? He forced his
+mind up to this question, as it were, many times, and invariably it
+shied and evaded the leap.
+
+There had been times, at Hadlow House, when Lady Cressage had seemed
+supremely indifferent to the fact of his existence, and there had
+been other times when it had appeared manifest that he pleased her--or
+better, perhaps, that she was willing to take note of how much she
+pleased him. It must have been apparent to her--this fact that
+she produced such an impression upon him. He reasoned this out
+satisfactorily to himself. These beautiful women, trained from
+childhood for the conquest of a rich husband, must have cultivated an
+extraordinary delicacy of consciousness, in such matters. They must have
+developed for themselves what might be called a sixth sense--a power of
+feeling in the air what the men about were thinking of them. More than
+once he had caught a glimmer of what he felt to be the operation of this
+sense, in the company of Lady Cressage. He could not say that it had
+been discernible in her glance, or her voice, or her manner, precisely,
+but he was sure that he had seen it, somehow.
+
+But even assuming all this--admitting that in October, on a wet Sunday,
+in the tedium of a small country-house party, she had shown some
+momentary satisfaction in the idea that he was profoundly impressed by
+her--did it at all follow that in February, amid the distractions of a
+fashionable winter-resort, and probably surrounded by hosts of friends,
+she would pay any attention to him whatever? The abject fear that she
+might not even remember him--might not know him from Adam when he stood
+before her--skulked about in the labyrinths of his mind, but he drove it
+back whenever it showed itself. That would be too ignominious.
+
+The young people at the other side of the compartment, forever wiping
+the window with the napkin, and straining their eyes to see the
+invisible, diverted his unsettled attention. A new perception of how
+much he liked them and enjoyed having them with him, took hold of his
+thoughts. It had not occurred to him before, with any definiteness, that
+he would be insupportably lonely when the time came to part with them.
+
+Now, when he dwelt upon it, it made him feel sad and old.
+
+He said to himself at once, with decision, that there need be no parting
+at all. He would take a house without delay, and they should live with
+him. He could not doubt that this would be agreeable to them; it would
+solve every problem for him.
+
+His fancy sketched out the natural and legitimate extensions of this
+project. There would be, first of all, a house in town--a furnished
+house of a modest sort, having no pretension save to provide a cheerful
+temporary shelter for three people who liked one another. Here the
+new household would take shape, and get its right note of character.
+Apparently Louisa would not be urged to form part of this household. He
+said to himself with frankness that he didn't want her, and there had
+been nothing to indicate that her children would pine for her. She
+showed good sense when she said that her place was in the shop, and
+in her ancestral home over the shop. No doubt there would be a certain
+awkwardness, visible to others if not to themselves, about her living in
+one part of London and her children in another. But here also her good
+sense would come on;--and, besides, this furnished house in town would
+be a mere brief overture to the real thing--the noble country mansion
+he was going to have, with gardens and horses and hounds and artificial
+lakes and deer parks and everything. Quite within the year he would be
+able to realize this consummation of his dreams.
+
+How these nice young people would revel in such a place--and how they
+would worship him for having given it to them for a home! His heart
+warmed within him as he thought of this. He smiled affectionately at the
+picture Julia made, polishing the glass with vehement circular movements
+of her slight arm, and then grimacing in comic vexation at the deadly
+absence of landscape outside. Was there ever a sweeter or more lovable
+girl in this world? Would there have to be some older woman to manage
+the house, at the beginning? he wondered. He should like it immensely if
+that could be avoided. Julia looked fragile and inexperienced--but she
+would be twenty-one next month. Surely that was a mature enough age for
+the slight responsibility of presiding over servants who should be the
+best that money could buy. Many girls were married, and given households
+of their own to manage, when they were even younger.
+
+This reflection raised an obstacle against the smooth-flowing current
+of his thoughts. Supposing that Julia got the notion of marrying--how
+miserable that would make everything. Very likely she would never do any
+such thing; he had observed in her no shadow of a sign that a thought of
+matrimony had ever crossed her brain. Yet that was a subject upon which,
+of course, she could not be asked to give pledges, even to herself.
+
+Thorpe tried to take a liberal view of this matter. He argued to himself
+that there would be no objection at all to incorporating Julia's husband
+into the household, assuming that she went to the length of taking one,
+and that he was a good fellow. On this latter point, it was only the
+barest justice to Julia's tastes and judgment to take it for granted
+that he would be a good fellow. Yet the uncle felt uneasily that
+this would alter things for the worse. The family party, with that
+hypothetical young man in it, could never be quite so innocently and
+completely happy as--for instance--the family party in this compartment
+had been during these wonderful three months.
+
+Mechanically he rubbed the window beside him, and turned to look out
+with a certain fixedness--as if he might chance to catch a glimpse of
+the bridegroom with whom Julia would have it in her power to disturb
+the serenity of their prospective home. A steep white cliff, receding
+sullenly against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse grotesquely low for
+its size, crouching under big shelving galleries heaped with snow;
+an opening in front, to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a
+valley into which they would descend--he saw these things. They remained
+in his mind afterward as a part of something else that he saw, with
+his mental vision, at the same moment--a strikingly real and vivid
+presentment of Lady Cressage, attired as he had seen her in the saddle,
+her light hair blown about a little under her hat, a spot of colour
+in the exquisite cheek, the cold, impersonal dignity of a queen in the
+beautiful profile.
+
+The picture was so actual for the instant that he uttered an involuntary
+exclamation--and then looked hastily round to see whether his companions
+had heard it. Seemingly they had not; he lolled again upon the
+comfortless cushion, and strove to conjure up once more the apparition.
+Nothing satisfactory came of the effort. Upon consideration, he grew
+uncertain as to whether he had seen anything at all. At the most it was
+a kind of half-dream which had visited him. He yawned at the thought,
+and lighted a fresh cigar. All at once, his mind had become too indolent
+to do any more thinking. A shapeless impression that there would be a
+good many things to think over later on flitted into his brain and out
+again.
+
+“Well, how are the mountains using you, now?” he called out to his
+niece.
+
+“Oh, I could shake them!” she declared. “Listen to this: 'A view of
+singular beauty, embracing the greater part of the Lake of Geneva, and
+the surrounding mountains, is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are
+now--or were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort of valley
+in front of us--but that is all. If I could only see one mountain with
+snow on it----”
+
+“Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come to that,” Thorpe
+insisted, with jocose perversity. “You're on mountains yourself, all the
+time.”
+
+“You know what I mean,” she retorted. “I want to see something like the
+coloured pictures in the hotels.”
+
+“Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow,” he said, for perhaps
+the twentieth time that day.
+
+“There--that looks like water!” said Alfred. “See? just beyond the
+village. Yes, it is water. There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events.”
+
+“But it isn't the right colour,” protested Julia, peering through the
+glass. “It's precisely like everything else: it's of no colour at all.
+And they always paint it such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss
+Government ought to return you your money.”
+
+“You wait till you see it tomorrow--or next day,” said the uncle,
+vaguely. He closed his eyes, and welcomed a drowsy mood. As he went off
+to sleep, the jolting racket of the train mellowed itself into a murmur
+of “tomorrow or next day, tomorrow or next day,” in his ears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the big hotel, Julia
+looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. She was in such haste to behold
+it that she had not so much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her
+muff still in her hand. After one brief glance, she groaned aloud with
+vexation.
+
+Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both
+dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of
+water--motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour--which at some
+small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little
+further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the
+forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, beached under the shelter
+of the pier, there was no proof in sight that this was a lake at all. It
+was as uninspiring to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a
+porch.
+
+While her uncle and brother occupied themselves with the luggage being
+brought up by the porters, she opened a window and stepped out upon
+the tiny balcony. A flaring sign on the inner framework of this balcony
+besought her in Swiss-French, in the interests of order, not to feed
+the birds. The injunction seemed meaningless to her until she perceived,
+over by the water, several gulls lazily wheeling about. They were almost
+as grey as the fog they circled in. Suddenly they seemed to perceive
+her in turn, and, swerving sharply, came floating toward the hotel, with
+harsh, almost menacing cries. She hurried in, and shut the window with
+decision. It seemed to her that the smile with which, as she turned, she
+was able to meet her uncle's look, was a product of true heroism.
+
+Apparently this smile did not altogether delude him. “Oh, now, you
+mustn't get down on your luck,” he adjured her. “We're going to be
+awfully cozy here. Have you seen your room? It's just there, in a little
+alley to the right of the door. They say it has an even finer view
+than these windows. Oh, you needn't laugh--this is the best view in the
+world, I'm told by those who know. And as a winter-resort, why----”
+
+“I say, look here!” The interruption came from Alfred, who, having gone
+out on one of the balconies, put in his head now to summon them. “Come
+here! Here's some fun.”
+
+He pointed out to Thorpe the meaning of the inscription on the sign, and
+then pulled him forward to observe its practical defiance. A score of
+big gulls were flapping and dodging in excited confusion close before
+them, filling their ears with a painful clamour. Every now and again,
+one of the birds, recovering its senses in the hurly-burly, would make a
+curving swoop downward past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly
+catch in its beak something that had been thrown into the air.
+
+Thorpe, leaning over his railing, saw that a lady on a balcony one floor
+below, and some yards to the left, was feeding the birds. She laughed
+aloud as she did so, and said something over her shoulder to a companion
+who was not visible.
+
+“Well, that's pretty cool,” he remarked to his niece, who had come to
+stand beside him. “She's got the same sign down there that we've got. I
+can see it from here. Or perhaps she can't read French.”
+
+“Or perhaps she isn't frightened of the hotel people,” suggested the
+girl. She added, after a little, “I think I'll feed them myself in
+the morning. I certainly shall if the sun comes out--as a sort of
+Thanksgiving festival, you know.”
+
+Her uncle seemed not to hear her. He had been struck by the exceptional
+grace of the gestures with which the pieces of bread were flung forth.
+The hands and wrists of this lady were very white and shapely. The
+movements which she made with them, all unaware of observation as she
+was, and viewed as he viewed them from above, were singularly beautiful
+in their unconstraint. It was in its way like watching some remarkable
+fine dancing, he thought. He could not see much of her face, from his
+perch, but she was tall and fashionably clad. There was a loose covering
+of black lace thrown over her head, but once, as she turned, he could
+see that her hair was red. Even in this fleeting glimpse, the unusual
+tint attracted his attention: there was a brilliancy as of fire in it.
+Somehow it seemed to make a claim upon his memory. He continued to stare
+down at the stranger with an indefinable sense that he knew something
+about her.
+
+Suddenly another figure appeared upon the balcony--and in a flash he
+comprehended everything. These idiotic, fighting gluttons of gulls
+had actually pointed out to him the object of his search. It was
+Lady Cressage who stood in the doorway, there just below him--and her
+companion, the red-haired lady who laughed hotel-rules to scorn, was the
+American heiress who had crossed the ocean in his ship, and whom he
+had met later on at Hadlow. What was her name--Martin? No--Madden. He
+confronted the swift impression that there was something odd about these
+two women being together. At Hadlow he had imagined that they did not
+like each other. Then he reflected as swiftly that women probably had
+their own rules about such matters. He seemed to have heard, or read,
+perhaps, that females liked and disliked each other with the most
+capricious alternations and on the least tangible of grounds. At all
+events, here they were together now. That was quite enough.
+
+The two ladies had gone in, and closed their window. The sophisticated
+birds, with a few ungrateful croaks of remonstrance, had drifted away
+again to the water. His niece had disappeared from his elbow. Still
+Thorpe remained with his arms folded on the railing, his eyes fixed on
+the vacant balcony, below to the left.
+
+When at last he went inside, the young people were waiting for him with
+the project of a stroll before dinner. The light was failing, but there
+was plenty of time. They had ascertained the direction in which Chillon
+lay; a servant had assured them that it was only a few minutes' walk,
+and Alfred was almost certain that he had seen it from the window.
+
+Thorpe assented with a certain listlessness, which they had never noted
+in his manner before, but when Julia begged him not to stir if he were
+in the slightest degree tired, he replied honestly enough that he would
+do anything rather than be left alone. Then, of course, they said, there
+should be no walk, but to this he would not listen. The party trooped
+downstairs, accordingly, and out into the street. The walking was vile,
+but, as Julia had long ago said, if they were to be deterred by slush
+they would never get anywhere or see anything.
+
+It proved to be too late and too dark to either enter the castle or get
+much of an idea of its exterior. Returning, they paused again to look
+into the lighted window of the nice little book-shop. The numerous
+photographs of what they were entitled to behold from the windows of
+their hotel seemed more convincing than photographs usually were. As the
+young people inspected them, they became reassured. It was not credible
+that such a noble vista would forever deny itself to such earnest
+pilgrims. When their uncle introduced this time his ancient formula
+about the certainty of brilliant sunshine in the morning, they somehow
+felt like believing him.
+
+“Yes--I really think it must change,” Julia declared, with her
+fascinated glance upon the photographs.
+
+Alfred looked at his watch. “We'd better get along to the hotel, hadn't
+we?” he suggested.
+
+“By the way”--Thorpe began, with a certain uneasiness of
+manner--“speaking of dinner, wouldn't you like to dine at the big table
+d'hote, instead of up in our sitting-room?”
+
+“If you're tired of our dining alone--by all means,” answered Julia,
+readily. There was obvious surprise, however, in both her look and tone.
+
+“Tired nothing!” he assured her. “I like it better than anything else in
+the world. But what I mean is--I was thinking, seeing that this is
+such a great winter-resort, and all the swagger people of Europe come
+here--that probably you youngsters would enjoy seeing the crowd.”
+
+Julia's glance, full of affectionate appreciation, showed how wholly she
+divined his spirit of self-sacrifice. “We wouldn't care in the least
+for it,” she declared. “We enjoy being a little party by ourselves every
+whit as much as you do--and we both hate the people you get at table
+d'hotes--and besides, for that matter, if there are any real swells
+here, you may be sure they dine in their own rooms.”
+
+“Why, of course!” Thorpe exclaimed swiftly, in palpable self-rebuke. “I
+don't know what I could have been thinking of. Of course they would dine
+in their rooms.”
+
+Next morning, Thorpe rose earlier than ever--with the impression of a
+peculiarly restless and uncomfortable night behind him. It was not until
+he had shaved and dressed that he noted the altered character of the
+air outside. Although it was not fully daylight yet, he could see the
+outlines of the trees and vinerows on the big, snow-clad hill, which
+monopolized the prospect from his window, all sharp and clear cut, as if
+he were looking at them through an opera-glass. He went at once to the
+sitting-room, and thrust the curtains aside from one of the windows.
+
+A miracle had been wrought in the night. The sky overhead was serenely
+cloudless; the lake beneath, stirring softly under some faint passing
+breeze, revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. Between
+sky and water there stretched across the picture a broad, looming,
+dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here and there at the top by
+little slanting patches of an intensely glowing white. He looked at this
+darkling middle distance for a moment or two without comprehension. Then
+he turned and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's room and beat upon
+it.
+
+“Get up!” he called through the panels. “Here's your sunrise--here's
+your Alpine view. Go to your window and see it!”
+
+A clear voice, not unmirthful, replied: “I've been watching it for half
+an hour, thanks. Isn't it glorious?”
+
+He was more fortunate at the opposite door, for Alfred was still
+asleep. The young man, upon hearing the news, however, made a toilet of
+unexampled brevity, and came breathlessly forth. Thorpe followed him
+to the balcony, where he stood collarless and uncombed, with the fresh
+morning breeze blowing his hair awry, his lips parted, his eyes staring
+with what the uncle felt to be a painful fixedness before him.
+
+Thorpe had seen many mountains in many lands. They did not interest him
+very much. He thought, however, that he could see now why people who
+had no mountains of their own should get excited about Switzerland. He
+understood a number of these sentimental things now, for that matter,
+which had been Greek to him three months before. Unreceptive as his
+philistinism may have seemed to these delightful youngsters, it was
+apparent enough to him that they had taught him a great deal. If he
+could not hope to share their ever-bubbling raptures and enthusiasms,
+at least he had come to comprehend them after a fashion, and even to
+discern sometimes what it was that stirred them.
+
+He watched his nephew now--having first assured himself by a
+comprehensive downward glance that no other windows of the hotel-front
+were open. The young man seemed tremendously moved, far too much so to
+talk. Thorpe ventured once some remarks about the Mexican mountains,
+which were ever so much bigger, as he remembered them, but Alfred paid
+no heed. He continued to gaze across the lake, watching in rapt silence
+one facet after another catch the light, and stand out from the murky
+gloom, radiantly white, till at last the whole horizon was a mass of
+shining minarets and domes, and the sun fell full on his face. Then,
+with a long-drawn sigh, he turned, re-entered the room, and threw
+himself into a chair.
+
+“It's too good!” he declared, with a half-groan. “I didn't know it would
+be like that.”
+
+“Why nothing's too good for us, man,” his uncle told him.
+
+“THAT is,” said the boy, simply, and Thorpe, after staring for a moment,
+smiled and rang the bell for breakfast.
+
+When Julia made her appearance, a few minutes later, the table was
+already laid, and the waiter was coming in with the coffee.
+
+“I thought we'd hurry up breakfast,” her uncle explained, after she
+had kissed him and thanked him for the sunrise he had so successfully
+predicted--“because I knew you'd both be crazy to get out.”
+
+He had not over-estimated their eagerness, which was so great, indeed,
+that they failed to note the excessive tranquility of his own demeanour.
+He ate with such unusual deliberation, on this exciting morning, that
+they found themselves at the end of their repast when, apparently, he
+had but made a beginning.
+
+“Now you mustn't wait for me at all,” he announced to them then. “I'm a
+little tired this morning--and I think I'd just like to lie around and
+smoke, and perhaps read one of your novels. But you two must get your
+things on and lose no time in getting out. This is the very best time of
+day, you know--for Alpine scenery. I'd hate to have you miss any of it.”
+
+Under his kindly if somewhat strenuous insistence, they went to their
+rooms to prepare for an immediate excursion. He was so anxious to have
+them see all there was to be seen that, when Julia returned, properly
+cloaked and befurred, and stood waiting at the window, he scolded a
+little.
+
+“What on earth is that boy doing?” he exclaimed, with a latent snarl in
+his tone which was novel to her ear. “He'll keep you here till noon!”
+
+“He's shaving, I think. He won't be long,” she replied, with great
+gentleness. After a moment's pause, she turned from the window and came
+gayly forward.
+
+“Oh, I forgot: I was going to feed the birds. There are several of them
+out there now.” As she spoke, she busily broke up some of the rolls on
+the table. Her face was bright with the pleasure of the thought.
+
+“If you don't much mind, Julia,” her uncle began, with almost pleading
+intonations, “I rather think I wouldn't feed those birds. The rule is
+there before our eyes, you know--and it's always been my idea that if
+you're at a hotel it's the correct thing to abide by its rules. It's
+just an idea of mine--and I daresay, if you think about it, you'll feel
+the same way.”
+
+The girl freed the last remaining bread-crumb from her gloves. “Why, of
+course, uncle,” she said, with promptitude.
+
+Although there was no hint of protest in her tone or manner, he felt
+impelled to soften still further this solitary demonstration of his
+authority. “You see I've been all round the world, my little girl,” he
+explained, haltingly, “and when a man's done that, and knocked about
+everywhere, he's apt to get finicking and notional about trifles every
+once in a while.”
+
+“You're less so than anybody I ever knew,” she generously interposed.
+
+“Oh, no I'm not. You don't know me well enough yet; that's what's the
+matter. And you see, Julia--another thing just because you saw that lady
+throwing out bread, that aint a very good reason why you should do it.
+You don't know what kind of a person she may be. Girls have got to be so
+frightfully careful about all that sort of thing.”
+
+Julia offered a constrained little laugh in comment. “Oh, you don't know
+how careful I can be,” she said.
+
+“But you're not annoyed?” he entreated her--and for answer she came
+behind him, and rested an arm on his shoulder, and patted it. He stroked
+her hand with his own. “That's something like the nicest niece in the
+world!” he exclaimed, with fervour.
+
+When at last she and her brother had gone, he made short work of his
+breakfast, and drank his coffee at a gulp. A restless activity suddenly
+informed his movements. He lit a cigar, and began pacing up and down the
+room, biting his lips in preoccupation as he went. After a little, he
+opened a window, and ventured cautiously as far out on the balcony
+as was necessary to obtain a view of the street below. Eventually, he
+identified his nephew and niece among the pedestrians beneath him, and
+he kept them in sight till, after more than one tiresome halt at a shop
+window, they disappeared round a bend in the road. Then he turned and
+came back into the room with the buoyant air of a man whose affairs are
+prospering.
+
+He smiled genially to himself as he gathered from the table in one
+capacious hand all the pieces of bread his beloved niece had broken
+up, and advanced again to the open window. Waiting here till one of the
+dingy gulls moving aimlessly about was headed toward him, he tossed out
+a fragment. The bird dashed at it with a scream, and on the instant the
+whole squawking flock were on wing. He suffered the hubbub to proceed
+unappeased for a little while he kept a watchful though furtive eye
+on that balcony to the left, below. Unhappily he could not get out far
+enough to see whether the inner curtains of its window were drawn. He
+threw another bit of bread, and then looked at his watch. It was a few
+minutes past nine. Surely people travelling to see scenery would be up
+by this hour.
+
+The strategy of issuing just enough bread to keep the feathered
+concourse in motion commended itself to his mind. As a precautionary
+measure, he took all the rolls remaining on the table, and put them in
+the drawer of a desk by the window. It even occurred to him to ring for
+more bread, but upon consideration that seemed too daring. The waiter
+would be sufficiently surprised at the party's appetites as it was.
+
+Half an hour later, his plan of campaign suddenly yielded a victory.
+Lady Cressage appeared on her balcony, clad in some charming sort of
+morning gown, and bareheaded. She had nothing in her hands, and seemed
+indifferent to the birds, but when Thorpe flung forth a handful of
+fragments into the centre of their whirling flock, she looked up at him.
+It was the anxious instant, and he ventured upon what he hoped was a
+decorous compromise between a bow and a look of recognition.
+
+She was in no haste to answer either. He could see rather than hear
+that she said something to her invisible companion within, the while she
+glanced serenely in the general direction of his balcony. It seemed to
+him that the answer to her remark, whatever it was, must have exerted
+a direct influence upon his destiny, for Lady Cressage all at once
+focussed her vague regard upon him, and nodded with a reasonably
+gracious smile.
+
+“It's wonderful luck to find you here,” he called down to her. Having
+played their part, he wished now that the birds were at Jericho. Their
+obstreperous racket made conversation very difficult. Apparently she
+made him an answer, but he could catch nothing of it.
+
+“I'm here with my niece and nephew,” he shouted down. “I don't hear what
+you say. May I come down and pay my respects--later on? What is your
+number, and when may I come?”
+
+These questions, as he flashed them in review through his mind, seemed
+to be all right from the most exacting social point of view. Doubtless
+it was equally all right that, before replying, she should consult her
+companion, as she did at some length. Then she replied--and he had no
+difficulty now in hearing her above the birds--that it would be
+very nice of him to come, say, in an hour's time. She told him the
+number--and then almost abruptly went in.
+
+Thorpe, during this hour that ensued, smoked with volcanic energy. He
+tried to interest himself in one after another of half a dozen Tauchnitz
+novels his niece carried about, with a preposterous absence of success.
+He strove to arrange in some kind of sequence the things that he should
+say, when this momentous interview should begin, but he could think of
+nothing which did not sound silly. It would be all right, he argued to
+himself in the face of this present mental barrenness; he always talked
+well enough on the spur of the moment, when the time came--and still was
+not reassured.
+
+He wondered if both ladies would be there to receive him, and
+decided that they would probably regard that as indispensable to the
+proprieties. In that case, their conversation would necessarily be of
+the most casual and general character. He would tell them a good deal
+about his niece, he foresaw. A man travelling about with a niece--and
+such a delightfully lady-like and engaging little niece--would take on
+some added interest and dignity, he perceived, in the eyes of ladies
+travelling alone. He essayed to estimate just how much they would
+probably like Julia. Of course he would say nothing about her mother and
+the book-shop; a vague allusion to a widowed sister would be ample on
+that head. But there could be confident references to Cheltenham; he
+knew from what Julia had said that it suggested the most satisfactory
+social guarantees, if taken strictly by itself. And then so much would
+depend upon Julia herself! If she succeeded in striking up a friendship
+with them--ah, then everything would be all right. Perhaps they would
+take a fancy to Alfred too! He was a boy, of course, but conceivably the
+fact that he wanted to paint, and knew about pictures, would appeal to
+them. He seemed to have heard somewhere that artists were the very devil
+among women.
+
+At last the weary time of waiting had worn itself out, somehow, and,
+after a final polishing before his glass, he went down, and found his
+right corridor, and knocked at the door. A pleasant voice bade him
+enter, and, hat and gloves in hand, he went in.
+
+As he had imagined, both ladies were present. He had not been prepared,
+however, for the fact that it was the American who played the part of
+hostess. It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down, and
+generally made him free of the apartment. When he shook hands with Lady
+Cressage, there was somehow an effect of the incidental in the ceremony,
+as if she were also a guest.
+
+Nothing could have been simpler or more pleasing than the little visit
+turned out to be. Miss Madden had suddenly grown tired of the snowless
+and dripping English winter, and had as promptly decided to come to
+Switzerland, where the drifts ought to be high enough, and the frosts
+searching enough, in all conscience. They had selected Territet, because
+it was familiar to her, and because it was on the way to Martigny and
+Brieg, and she had had a notion of crossing either the Simplon or the
+St. Bernard in winter. As she found now, the St. Bernard was quite
+impracticable, but admittedly a post road was kept open over the
+Simplon. It was said now that she would not be allowed to proceed by
+this, but it often happened that she did the things that she was not
+allowed to do. The hotel-people at both Brieg and Berisal had written
+refusing to let their horses attempt the Simplon journey, and they were
+of course quite within their rights, but there were other horses in
+Switzerland. One surely could buy horses--and so on.
+
+Thorpe also had his turn at autobiography. He told rather whimsically
+of his three months' experiences at the tail of the juvenile whirligigs,
+and his auditors listened to them with mild smiles. He ventured upon
+numerous glowing parentheses about Julia, and they at least did not say
+that they did not want to know her. They heard with politeness, too,
+what he could contrive to drag in about his artist-nephew, and said it
+must be very pleasant for him to have such nice company. At least Miss
+Madden said this: her companion, as he thought it over afterward, seemed
+hardly to have said anything at all. She answered the few remarks which
+he found it possible to direct to her, but the responses took no hold
+upon his memory. He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy, or both.
+
+Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension, were
+verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed itself--as
+splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing its glaciers above the mounting
+sunrise--in his brain.
+
+“We should all be charmed if you would come up and dine with us
+tonight,” he said, under the abrupt impulsion of this idea. “It's been
+such an age since we wanderers have had the privilege of company at our
+table!”
+
+The felicity of these phrases from his lips attracted his admiring
+attention, even while he waited in suspense for an answer to them.
+
+The ladies exchanged a look. “Yes,” said Miss Madden, after the
+slightest of pauses, “we shall be very happy.”
+
+Shortly thereafter Thorpe took his leave, and went downstairs and out.
+He wandered about till luncheon time, observing the mountains across the
+lake from various standpoints, and, as it were, with new eyes. He was
+interested in them in a curious new fashion; they seemed to say things
+to him. His lip curled once at the conceit that he was one of the Alps
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+IT did not happen until three days later that Thorpe's opportunity to
+speak alone with Lady Cressage came.
+
+In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have become fused in a
+remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young
+people, and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day upon the
+striking prescience he had shown in bringing them.
+
+Both the ladies unaffectedly liked Julia; so much so that they seemed
+unwilling to make any plans which did not include her. Then it was only
+a matter of course that where she went her brother should go--and a
+further logical step quite naturally brought in their willing uncle. If
+he had planned everything, and now was ordering everything, it could not
+have gone more to his liking.
+
+Certain side speculations lent a savour to the satisfaction with which
+he viewed this state of affairs. He found many little signs to confirm
+the suspicion that the two ladies had been the readier to make much of
+Julia because they were not overkeen about each other's society. The
+bright, sweet-natured girl had come as a welcome diversion to a couple
+who in seclusion did battle with tendencies to yawn. He was not quite
+convinced, for that matter, that the American lady always went to that
+trouble. She seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person, who
+would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations from doing the
+things she wanted to do. Her relations with her companion afforded him
+food for much thought. Without any overt demonstrations, she produced
+the effect of ordering Lady Cressage about. This, so far as it went,
+tended to prejudice him against her. On the other hand, however, she was
+so good to Julia, in a peculiarly frank and buoyant way which fascinated
+the girl, that he could not but like her. And she was very good to
+Alfred too.
+
+There was, indeed, he perceived, a great deal of individuality about the
+friendship which had sprung up between Miss Madden and his nephew. She
+was years his senior--he settled it with himself that the American could
+not be less than seven-and-twenty,--yet Alfred stole covert glances of
+admiration at her, and seemed to think of nothing but opportunities for
+being in her company as if--as if--Thorpe hardly liked to complete the
+comparison in his own thoughts. Alfred, of course, said it was all on
+account of her wonderful hair; he rather went out of his way to
+dilate upon the enthusiasm her “colour scheme”--whatever that might
+mean--excited in him as an artist. The uncle had moments of profound
+skepticism about this--moments when he uneasily wondered whether it was
+not going to be his duty to speak to the young man. For the most part,
+however, he extracted reassurance from Miss Madden's demeanour toward
+the lad. She knew, it seemed, a vast deal about pictures; at least she
+was able to talk a vast deal about them, and she did it in such a calmly
+dogmatic fashion, laying down the law always, that she put Alfred in the
+position of listening as a pupil might listen to a master. The humility
+with which his nephew accepted this position annoyed Thorpe upon
+occasion, but he reasoned that it was a fault on the right side. Very
+likely it would help to keep the fact of the lady's seniority more
+clearly before the youngster's mind, and that would be so much gained.
+
+And these apprehensions, after all, were scarcely to be counted in the
+balance against the sense of achieved happiness with which these halcyon
+days kept Thorpe filled. The initiatory dinner had gone off perfectly.
+He could have wished, indeed, that Julia had a smarter frock, and more
+rings, when he saw the imposing costumes and jewelled throats and hands
+of his guests--but she was a young girl, by comparison, he reflected,
+and there could be no doubt that they found her charming. As for Alfred,
+he was notably fine-looking in his evening-clothes--infinitely more like
+the son of a nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying to himself,
+than that big dullard, the Honourable Balder. It filled him with a new
+pleasure to remember that Alfred had visiting cards presenting his name
+as D'Aubigny, which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate
+Dabney really stood for. The lad and his sister had united upon this
+excellent change long ago at Cheltenham, and oddly enough they had
+confessed it to their uncle, at the beginning of the trip, with a show
+of trepidation, as if they feared his anger. With radiant gayety he
+had relieved their minds by showing them his card, with “Mr. Stormont
+Thorpe” alone upon it. At the dinner table, in the proudest moment
+of his life, he had made himself prouder still by thinking how
+distinguished an appearance his and Alfred's cards would make together
+in the apartment below next day.
+
+But next day, the relations between the two parties had already become
+too informal for cards. Julia went down to see them; they came up to see
+Julia. Then they all went for a long walk, with luncheon at Vevey, and
+before evening Alfred was talking confidently of painting Miss Madden.
+Next day they went by train to St. Maurice, and, returning after dark,
+dined without ceremony together. This third day--the weather still
+remaining bright--they had ascended by the funicular road to Glion, and
+walked on among the swarming luegers, up to Caux. Here, after luncheon,
+they had wandered about for a time, regarding the panorama of lake and
+mountains. Now, as the homeward descent began, chance led the two young
+people and Miss Madden on ahead.
+
+Thorpe found himself walking beside Lady Cressage. He had upon his arm
+her outer wrap, which she said she would put on presently. To look at
+the view he must glance past her face: the profile, under the graceful
+fur cap, was so enriched by glowing colour that it was, to his thought,
+as if she were blushing.
+
+“How little I thought, a few months ago,” he said, “that we should be
+mountaineering together!”
+
+“Oh, no one knows a day ahead,” she responded, vaguely. “I had probably
+less notion of coming to Switzerland then than you had.”
+
+“Then you don't come regularly?”
+
+“I have never seen either Germany or Switzerland before. I have scarcely
+been out of England before.”
+
+“Why now”--he paused, to think briefly upon his words--“I took it for
+granted you were showing Miss Madden around.”
+
+“It 's quite the other way about,” she answered, with a cold little
+laugh. “It is she who is showing me around. It is her tour. I am the
+chaperone.” Thorpe dwelt upon the word in his mind. He understood what
+it meant only in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness
+of the tone in which it had been uttered.
+
+“No--it didn't seem as if it were altogether--what I might call--YOUR
+tour,” he ventured. They had seen much of each other these past few
+days, but it was still hard for him to make sure whether their freedom
+of intercourse had been enlarged.
+
+The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence, she commented
+upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a moment he said nothing. He went
+on then with a renewed consciousness of risk.
+
+“You mustn't be annoyed with me,” he urged. “I've been travelling with
+that dear little niece of mine and her brother, so long, that I've
+got into a habit of watching to notice if the faces I see round me are
+happy. And when they're not, then I have a kind of fatherly notion of
+interfering, and seeing what's wrong.”
+
+She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon doubtful
+inspiration--“By the way, speaking of fathers, I didn't know at Hadlow
+that you were the daughter of one of my Directors”--this smile froze
+upon the instant.
+
+“The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel, don't you think?”
+ she remarked, “than it is from here.”
+
+Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. “I have taken a great
+interest in General Kervick,” he said, almost defiantly. “I am seeing to
+it that he has a comfortable income--an income suitable to a gentleman
+of his position--for the rest of his life.”
+
+“He will be very glad of it,” she remarked.
+
+“But I hoped that you would be glad of it too,” he told her, bluntly. A
+curious sense of reliance upon his superiority in years had come to him.
+If he could make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed likely
+that she would defer to it. “I'm talking to you as I would to my niece,
+you know,” he added, plausibly.
+
+She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face, as if the
+point of view took her by surprise. “I don't understand,” she said. “You
+are providing an income for my father, because you wish to speak to me
+like an uncle. Is that it?”
+
+He laughed, somewhat disconsolately. “No--that isn't it,” he said, and
+laughed again. “I couldn't tell, you know, that you wouldn't want to
+talk about your father.” “Why, there's no reason in the world for not
+talking of him,” she made haste to declare. “And if he's got something
+good in the City, I'm sure I'm as glad as anyone. He is the sort that
+ought always to have a good deal of money. I mean, it will bring out his
+more amiable qualities. He does not shine much in adversity--any more
+than I do.”
+
+Thorpe felt keenly that there were fine things to be said here--but he
+had confidence in nothing that came to his tongue. “I've been a poor man
+all my life--till now,” was his eventual remark.
+
+“Please don't tell me that you have been very happy in your poverty,”
+ she adjured him, with the dim flicker of a returning smile. “Very likely
+there are people who are so constituted, but they are not my kind. I
+don't want to hear them tell about it. To me poverty is the horror--the
+unmentionable horror!”
+
+“There never was a day that I didn't feel THAT!” Thorpe put fervour into
+his voice. “I was never reconciled to it for a minute. I never ceased
+swearing to myself that I'd pull myself out of it. And that's what
+makes me sort of soft-hearted now toward those--toward those who haven't
+pulled themselves out of it.”
+
+“Your niece says you are soft-hearted beyond example,” remarked Lady
+Cressage.
+
+“Who could help being, to such a sweet little girl as she is?” demanded
+the uncle, fondly.
+
+“She is very nice,” said the other. “If one may say such a thing, I
+fancy these three months with her have had an appreciable effect upon
+you. I'm sure I note a difference.”
+
+“That's just what I've been saying to myself!” he told her. He was
+visibly delighted with this corroboration. “I've been alone practically
+all my life. I had no friends to speak of--I had no fit company--I
+hadn't anything but the determination to climb out of the hole. Well,
+I've done that--and I've got among the kind of people that I naturally
+like. But then there came the question of whether they would like me. I
+tell you frankly, that was what was worrying the heart out of me when I
+first met you. I like to be confessing it to you now--but you frightened
+me within an inch of my life. Well now, you see, I'm not scared of you
+at all. And of course it's because Julia's been putting me through a
+course of sprouts.”
+
+The figure was lost upon Lady Cressage, but the spirit of the remarks
+seemed not unpleasant to her. “I'm sure you're full of kindness,”
+ she said. “You must forget that I snapped at you--about papa.” “All I
+remember about that is,” he began, his eye lighting up with the thought
+that this time the opportunity should not pass unimproved, “that you
+said he didn't shine much in adversity---any more than you did. Now on
+that last point I disagree with you, straight. There wouldn't be any
+place in which you wouldn't shine.”
+
+“Is that the way one talks to one's niece?” she asked him, almost
+listlessly. “Such flattery must surely be bad for the young.” Her words
+were sprightly enough, but her face had clouded over. She had no heart
+for the banter.
+
+“Ah”--he half-groaned. “I only wish I knew what was the right way to
+talk to you. The real thing is that I see you're unhappy--and that gets
+on my nerve--and I should like to ask you if there wasn't something
+I could do--and ask it in such a way that you'd have to admit there
+was--and I don't know enough to do it.”
+
+He had a wan smile for thanks. “But of course there is nothing,” she
+replied, gently.
+
+“Oh, there must be!” he insisted. He had no longer any clear notions as
+to where his tongue might not lead him. “There must be! You said I might
+talk to you as I would to Julia.”
+
+“Did I?”
+
+“Well, I'm going to, anyway,” he went on stoutly, ignoring the note of
+definite dissent in her interruption. “You ARE unhappy! You spoke about
+being a chaperone. Well now, to speak plainly, if it isn't entirely
+pleasant for you with Miss Madden--why wouldn't you be a chaperone for
+Julia? I must be going to London very soon--but she can stay here, or go
+to Egypt, or wherever she likes--and of course you would do everything,
+and have everything--whatever you liked, too.”
+
+“The conversation is getting upon rather impossible grounds, I'm
+afraid,” she said, and then bit her lips together. Halting, she frowned
+a little in the effort of considering her further words, but there was
+nothing severe in the glance which she lifted to him as she began
+to speak. “Let us walk on. I must tell you that you misconceive the
+situation entirely. Nobody could possibly be kinder or more considerate
+than Miss Madden. Of course she is American--or rather Irish-American,
+and I'm English, and our notions and ways are not always alike. But
+that has nothing to do with it. And it is not so much that she has
+many thousands a year, and I only a few hundreds. That in itself would
+signify nothing--and if I must take help from somebody I would rather
+take it from Celia Madden than anybody else I know--but this is the
+point, Mr. Thorpe. I do not eat the bread of dependence gracefully. I
+pull wry faces over it, and I don't try very much to disguise them. That
+is my fault. Yes--oh yes, I know it is a fault--but I am as I am. And
+if Miss Madden doesn't mind--why”--she concluded with a mirthless,
+uncertain laugh--“why on earth should you?”
+
+“Ah, why should I?” he echoed, reflectively. “I should like desperately
+to tell you why. Sometime I will tell you.”
+
+They walked on in silence for a brief space. Then she put out her hand
+for her wrap, and as she paused, he spread it over her shoulders.
+
+“I am amazed to think what we have been saying to each other,” she said,
+buttoning the fur as they moved on again. “I am vexed with myself.”
+
+“And more still with me,” he suggested.
+
+“No-o--but I ought to be. You've made me talk the most shocking
+rubbish.”
+
+“There we disagree again, you know. Everything you've said's been
+perfect. What you're thinking of now is that I'm not an old enough
+friend to have been allowed to hear it. But if I'm not as old a friend
+as some, I wish I could make you feel that I'm as solid a friend as
+any--as solid and as staunch and as true. I wish I could hear you say
+you believed that.”
+
+“But you talk of 'friends,'” she said, in a tone not at all
+responsive--“what is meant by 'friends'? We've chanced to meet
+twice--and once we barely exchanged civilities, and this time we've been
+hotel acquaintances--hardly more, is it?--and you and your young people
+have been very polite to me--and I in a silly moment have talked to
+you more about my affairs than I should--I suppose it was because you
+mentioned my father. But 'friends' is rather a big word for that, isn't
+it?”
+
+Thorpe pouted for a dubious moment. “I can think of a bigger word
+still,” he said, daringly. “It's been on the tip of my tongue more than
+once.”
+
+She quickened her pace. The air had grown perceptibly colder. The
+distant mountains, visible ever and again through the bare branches,
+were of a dark and cheerless blue, and sharply defined against the sky.
+It was not yet the sunset hour, and there were no mists, but the light
+of day seemed to be going out of the heavens. He hurried on beside her
+in depressed silence.
+
+Their companions were hidden from view in a convolution of the winding
+road, but they were so near that their voices could be heard as they
+talked. Frequently the sound of laughter came backward from them.
+
+“They're jolly enough down there,” he commented at last, moodily.
+
+“That's a good reason for our joining them, isn't it?” Her tone was at
+once casual and pointed.
+
+“But I don't want to join them!” he protested. “Why don't you stay with
+me--and talk?” “But you bully me so,” she offered in explanation.
+
+The phrase caught his attention. Could it be that it expressed her
+real feeling? She had said, he recalled, that he had made her talk. Her
+complaint was like an admission that he could overpower her will. If
+that were true--then he had resources of masterfulness still in reserve
+sufficient to win any victory.
+
+“No--not bully you,” he said slowly, as if objecting to the word rather
+than the idea. “That wouldn't be possible to me. But you don't know me
+well enough to understand me. I am the kind of man who gets the things
+he wants. Let me tell you something: When I was at Hadlow, I had never
+shot a pheasant in my life. I used to do tolerably well with a rifle,
+but I hardly knew anything about a shot-gun, and I don't suppose I'd
+ever killed more than two or three birds on the wing--and that was ages
+ago. But I took the notion that I would shoot better than anybody else
+there. I made up my mind to it--and I simply did it, that's all. I don't
+know if you remember--but I killed a good deal more than both the others
+put together. I give you that as an example. I wanted you to think that
+I was a crack shot--and so I made myself be a crack shot.”
+
+“That is very interesting,” she murmured. They did not seem to be
+walking quite so fast.
+
+“Don't think I want to brag about myself,” he went on. “I don't fancy
+myself--in that way. I'm not specially proud of doing things--it's the
+things themselves that I care for. If some men had made a great fortune,
+they would be conceited about it. Well, I'm not. What I'm keen about is
+the way to use that fortune so that I will get the most out of it--the
+most happiness, I mean. The thing to do is to make up your mind
+carefully what it is that you want, and to put all your power and
+resolution into getting it--and the rest is easy enough. I don't think
+there's anything beyond a strong man's reach, if he only believes enough
+in himself.”
+
+“But aren't you confusing two things?” she queried. The subject
+apparently interested her. “To win one's objects by sheer personal force
+is one thing. To merely secure them because one's purse is longer than
+other people's--that's quite another matter.”
+
+He smiled grimly at her. “Well, I'll combine the two,” he said.
+
+“Then I suppose you will be altogether irresistible,” she said, lightly.
+“There will be no pheasants left for other people at all.”
+
+“I don't mind being chaffed,” he told her, with gravity. “So long as
+you're good-natured, you can make game of me all you like. But I'm in
+earnest, all the same. I'm not going to play the fool with my money and
+my power. I have great projects. Sometime I'll tell you about them. They
+will all be put through--every one of them. And you wouldn't object to
+talking them over with me--would you?”
+
+“My opinion on 'projects' is of no earthly value--to myself or anyone
+else.”
+
+“But still you'd give me your advice if I asked it?” he persisted.
+“Especially if it was a project in which you were concerned?”
+
+After a moment's constrained silence she said to him, “You must have
+no projects, Mr. Thorpe, in which I am concerned. This talk is all very
+wide of the mark. You are not entitled to speak as if I were mixed up
+with your affairs. There is nothing whatever to warrant it.”
+
+“But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there, and keep
+you there?” he asked her, with gleeful boldness. “And just ask yourself
+whether you do really want to help it. Why should you? You've seen
+enough of me to know that I can be a good friend. And I'm the kind of
+friend who amounts to something--who can and will do things for those he
+likes. What obligation are you under to turn away that kind of a friend,
+when he offers himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself.”
+
+“But you are not in a position to nominate the questions that I am to
+put to myself,” she said. The effort to import decision into her tone
+and manner was apparent. “That is what I desire you to understand. We
+must not talk any more about me. I am not the topic of conversation.”
+
+“But first let me finish what I wanted to say,” he insisted. “My talk
+won't break any bones. You'd be wrong not to listen to it--because
+it's meant to help you--to be of use to you. This is the thing, Lady
+Cressage: You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position. Like my
+friend Plowden”--he watched her face narrowly but in vain, in the dull
+light, for any change at mention of the name--“like my friend Plowden
+you have a position and title to keep up, and next to nothing to keep
+it up on. But he can go down into the City and make money--or try to. He
+can accept Directorships and tips about the market and so on, from men
+who are disposed to be good to him, and who see how he can be of use to
+them--and in that way he can do something for himself. But there is the
+difference: you can't do these things, or you think you can't, which
+is the same thing. You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by
+notice-boards, telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that
+way; that you mustn't say this thing or do the other. Now your
+friend down ahead there--Miss Madden--she doesn't take much stock
+in notice-boards. In fact, she feeds the gulls, simply because she's
+forbidden to do it. But you--you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're
+annoyed with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't I
+read you right?”
+
+She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic. There was no
+touch of expostulation in the voice with which she answered him. “I see
+what you think you mean,” she said.
+
+“Think!” he responded, with self-confident emphasis. “I'm not
+'thinking.' I'm reading an open book. As I say, you're not
+contented--you're not happy; you don't try to pretend that you are.
+But all the same, though you hate it, you accept it. You think that you
+really must obey your notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought to do
+is to take a different view. Why should you put up all this barbed
+wire between yourself and your friends? It doesn't do anybody else any
+good--and it does you harm. Why, for example, should Plowden be free to
+take things from me, and you not?”
+
+She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye. “Unfortunately I
+was not asked to join your Board.”
+
+He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her meditatively as
+he turned these words over in his mind. “What I'm doing for Plowden,”
+ he said with slow vagueness meanwhile, “it isn't so much because he's on
+the Board. He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me at
+a time when that meant everything in the world to me--and I don't forget
+things of that sort. Besides, I like him--and it pleases me to let him
+in for a share of my good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying myself.
+Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed to let you in
+also for a share of that good fortune? You think there's a difference,
+but I tell you it's imaginary--pure moonshine. Why, the very people
+whose opinion you're afraid of--what did they do themselves when the
+South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of the earth had
+only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about
+them--and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. I knew
+one or two of the men who were in that deal--I wouldn't have them in my
+house--but it seems there wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in
+London.”
+
+“Oh yes, there were many houses,” she interposed. “It wasn't a nice
+exhibition that society made of itself--one admits that,--but it was
+only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets,
+you know. And--I don't think I see your application, in any event. The
+craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after
+those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled
+in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?”
+
+Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little
+shake of the head. “'On a business basis,'” he repeated, as if talking
+to himself. “They like to have things 'on a business basis.'”
+
+He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well,
+in a reluctant, tentative way. “I don't understand you,” she remarked,
+blankly.
+
+“Let me put it in this way,” he began, knitting his brows, and
+marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy.
+“This is the question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my
+Board. You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden,
+and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke--but it had its
+meaning--at least to me. Now I want to ask you--if I decide to form
+another Company, a very small and particular Company--if I should decide
+to form it, I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
+Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess you know what I
+mean.”
+
+The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle
+for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of
+confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of
+physical ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady
+Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and
+nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain
+beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the
+silence which ensued.
+
+“Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say,” she
+observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her
+feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a
+certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his
+self-command. “Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you,” she went
+on. “We--we have been lagging behind unconscionably. If you wish to
+please me, let us hurry forward now. And please!--no more talk at all!”
+
+“But just a word--you're not angry?”
+
+She shook her head very slightly.
+
+“And you do know that I'm your friend--your solid, twenty-four-carat
+friend?”
+
+After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper--“Yes--be
+my friend--if it amuses you,”--and led the way with precipitate steps
+down the winding road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train
+for Geneva--homeward bound.
+
+It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent
+business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced
+to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes
+the formless impression that there were other things beside business.
+Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably
+venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his
+character that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset
+him. And upset he undeniably was.
+
+They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following
+the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept
+very badly, and that they must “count him out” of their plans for the
+day. He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay
+at Territet. He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and
+preoccupied. He ate little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits
+a good deal, which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce
+him to go out either day.
+
+Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity
+synchronized with an apparent change in the attitude of their new
+friends on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent
+than definable. The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and
+affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship had somehow vanished.
+Insensibly, the two parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in
+common. There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous luncheons
+or formal dinners as a group.
+
+The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this
+morning of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the
+snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They
+made sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite,
+and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no other token
+of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the
+previous evening, of course--it lingered in their minds as a rather
+perfunctory ceremony--but this had not prevented their hoping for
+another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand
+from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously
+at each other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward
+their uncle--and perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and
+was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.
+
+“Fortunately, it is a clear day,” said Julia. “We shall see Mont Blanc.”
+
+Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears.
+Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.
+
+
+At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people
+had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee
+thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.
+
+“It's as they said,” she observed. “You are not allowed to drive in the
+mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint
+for a model Republic--doesn't it?”
+
+“I daresay they're quite right,” Lady Cressage replied, listlessly.
+“It's in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains
+would simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes--and all
+that. I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent.”
+
+“And you're on the side of the Government,” said the other, with a
+twinkle in her brown eyes. “Truly now--you hated the whole idea of
+driving over the Simplon.”
+
+Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.
+
+“But do you like this Russian plan any better?” demanded Celia. “I wish
+for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me--and let me
+know to the uttermost just what you think.” “'For once'?” queried the
+other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of
+the quotation to be marked.
+
+“Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,” Miss Madden declared.
+She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. “It is not
+you alone--Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your
+country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things
+back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe,
+would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom
+I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see
+this case in point,” she pursued, with a little laugh, “I could not drag
+it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was
+a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit
+that you hated it.”
+
+“But you wanted to go,” objected Lady Cressage, quietly. “That was the
+important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with
+the matter.”
+
+Celia's face clouded momentarily. “Those are not the kind of things I
+like to hear you say,” she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. “They put
+everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you
+should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said
+it a thousand times--and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But
+I never can find out what you do want--what really will please you! You
+never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the
+things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye
+that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or
+not.”
+
+The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. “That
+is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago,” said
+Lady Cressage, passively--“that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But
+originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for
+two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak.
+I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of
+view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the
+responsibility of defending it is not mine.”
+
+“Delightful!” cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again.
+“You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with.
+The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford--or
+passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up
+arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing--if
+I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your
+feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in
+silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and
+have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was--and it would all
+be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You
+don't tell me things!”
+
+Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve.
+“It is a constitutional defect--even national, according to you. How
+shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to
+tell you?--I forget.”
+
+“The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and
+then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well
+worth while--and next Moscow--and so on to St. Petersburg, in time
+to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the
+characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the
+sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow--it seems to me it
+must be the best thing in Europe--if you can call Russia Europe.
+That's the way it presents itself to me--but then I was brought up in
+a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing--in its proper
+season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real
+winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would
+like the Russian experiment.”
+
+The other laughed gently. “But if I don't know what a real winter is,
+how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am
+perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes--truly--I should like very
+much to go.”
+
+Miss Madden sighed briefly. “All right,” she said, but with a notable
+absence of conviction in her tone.
+
+A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another
+note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips
+over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of
+surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her
+companion.
+
+“It's from our young friend,” she explained, genially--“the
+painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I
+made--that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't
+think I promised anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail.
+It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time--they
+were to go very early, weren't they?”
+
+Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. “It was 8:40, I think--fully half an
+hour ago,” she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.
+
+“Curious conglomeration”--mused the other. “The boy and girl are so
+civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are
+spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They
+ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather
+effective--but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame
+monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his
+fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it
+more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves
+it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example,
+never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a
+poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what
+he had always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and
+thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out
+of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and
+temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk
+in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever
+putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous.
+I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so;
+he never looked or acted as if he thought so.--But I never stop when I
+begin talking of my father.”
+
+“It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him,” Lady Cressage
+put in. “One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!”
+
+Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that
+had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her
+earlier subject. “Of course there is a certain difference,” she went
+on, carelessly,--“this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase
+goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated.”
+
+“Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me,” said the other,
+with interest. “And his people were booksellers--somewhere in London--so
+that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly
+has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the
+nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very
+well indeed--in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow
+you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that
+they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself--and he's very
+proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a
+nice effect?”
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” Celia replied, idly. “It seemed to me that he was
+the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished
+and taught drawing-room tricks--I feel that merely in the interest
+of the fitness of things. Have you looked into his eyes--I mean when
+they've got that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred thousand
+dead men in them.”
+
+“I know the look you mean,” said Lady Cressage, in a low voice.
+
+“Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody,” pursued Miss Madden,
+with ostensible indifference, but fixing a glance of aroused attention
+upon her companion's face, “or that he has any criminal intentions
+whatever. He behaves very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and
+nephew idolize him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. It may
+be that I'm altogether wrong about him--only I know I had the instinct
+of alarm when I caught that sort of dull glaze in his eye. I met an
+African explorer a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories
+were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. Perhaps it was this
+that put it into my head--but I have a feeling that this Thorpe is an
+exceptional sort of man, who would have the capacity in him for terrible
+things, if the necessity arose for them.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” the other repeated. She toyed with the
+bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively watched their
+manipulation into squares and triangles as she went on. “But may that
+not be merely the visible sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful
+character? And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances whether
+such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred thousand dead men, or
+enriches a hundred thousand lives instead? We agree, let us say, that
+this Mr. Thorpe impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality. The
+question arises, How will he use his power? On that point, we look
+for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his eye, and you draw hostile
+conclusions from it. I reply that it may mean no more than that he is
+sleepy. But, on the other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in
+his favour. He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his
+family that we have seen--persons, moreover, who have been brought up
+in ways different to his own, and who would not start, therefore, with
+prejudices in his favour. Beyond that, I know of two cases in which
+he has behaved, or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish
+generosity--and in neither case was there any claim upon him of a
+substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact, quite too much disposed
+to share his fortune with Tom, Dick, and Harry--anybody who excites
+his sympathy or gets into his affections.” Having said this much, Lady
+Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. “So now,” she added, with
+a flushed smile, “since you love arguments so much, how do you answer
+that?”
+
+Celia smiled back. “Oh, I don't answer it at all,” she said, and her
+voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. “Your proofs overwhelm
+me. I know nothing of him--and you know so much!”
+
+Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel earnestness and
+directness of gaze. “I had a long, long talk with him--the afternoon we
+came down from Glion.”
+
+Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. She
+did not return to the table, but after a brief pause came and took an
+easy-chair beside her friend, who turned to face her. “My dear Edith,”
+ she said, with gravity, “I think you want to tell me about that
+talk--and so I beg you to do so. But if I'm mistaken--why then I beg you
+to do nothing of the kind.”
+
+The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and
+then clasped them upon her knee. “I seem not to know what I want! What
+is the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?”
+
+“Now--now!” Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference,
+apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage
+deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.
+
+“There is really nothing to tell,”--she faltered, hesitatingly--“that
+is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it--the talk left my mind
+in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that was
+said--it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while something
+else was being talked about--but the whole experience made a most
+tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in my own
+mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me, Celia. No
+man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be
+more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people
+of--well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,--but this man, who
+is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled on without
+any special aim that one could see--he reduced my brain to a sort of
+porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him--babbling rubbish
+which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be accounted
+for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?”
+
+“Nerves,” said Miss Madden, judicially.
+
+“Oh, that is meaningless,” the other declared. “Anybody can say
+'nerves.' Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'”
+
+“But yours is a special case of nerves,” Celia pursued, with gentle
+imperturbability. “I think I can make my meaning clear to you--though
+the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred
+dog in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will
+always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity--call
+it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in
+your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say
+it broke your nerve--but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old
+wound aches when there's a storm in the air--so your old hurt distracts
+and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather
+clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain.”
+
+“Perhaps--I don't know,” Edith replied, in a tone of melancholy reverie.
+“It makes a very poor creature out of me, whatever it is.”
+
+“I rather lose patience, Edith,” her companion admonished her, gravely.
+“Nobody has a right to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself
+to be.”
+
+“But I'm not a coward,” the other protested. “I could be as brave as
+anybody--as brave as you are--if a chance were given me. But of what use
+is bravery against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it. I only
+wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down, or break through
+it.--Oh yes, I know what you say! You say there is no wall--that it is
+all an illusion of mine. But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view.
+I've battered myself against it too long--too sorely, Celia!”
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. “Oh, we women all have our
+walls--our limitations--if it comes to that,” she said, with a kind
+of compassionate impatience in her tone. “We are all ridiculous
+together--from the point of view of human liberty. The free woman is a
+fraud--a myth. She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. I used to
+have the most wonderful visions of what independence would mean. I
+thought that when I was absolutely my own master, with my money and my
+courage and my free mind, I would do things to astonish all mankind. But
+really the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a
+German waiter. Even that palls on one after a time. And if you were
+independent, Edith--if you had any amount of money--what difference do
+you think it would make to you? What could you do that you don't do, or
+couldn't do, now?”
+
+“Ah, now”--said the other, looking up with a thin smile--“now is an
+interval--an oasis.”
+
+Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face, habitually serene in its
+expression, lost something in composure as she regarded her companion.
+“I don't know why you should say that,” she observed, gently enough, but
+with an effect of reproof in her tone. “I have never put limits to the
+connection, in my own mind--and it hadn't occurred to me that you were
+doing so in yours.”
+
+“But I'm not,” interposed Lady Cressage.
+
+“Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you talk about an
+'interval'? What was the other word?--'oasis'--as if this were a brief
+halt for refreshments and a breathing-spell, and that presently you must
+wander forth into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine. We
+agreed that we would live together--'pool our issues,' as they say in
+America. I wanted a companion; so did you. I have never for an instant
+regretted the arrangement. Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I
+have regretted. You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen,
+and you were talented, and you seemed to like me--and I promised myself
+that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit to your other gifts--and
+in that I have failed wofully. You're not happy. I see that only too
+clearly.”
+
+“I know--I'm a weariness and a bore to you,” broke in the other,
+despondingly.
+
+“That is precisely what you're not,” Celia went on. “We mustn't use
+words of that sort. They don't describe anything in our life at all. But
+I should be better pleased with myself if I could really put my finger
+on what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided to break up our
+establishment, I have told you that you should not go back to what you
+regard as poverty. Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy.
+As I say, I think you attach more importance to money than those who
+have tested its powers would agree to--but that's neither here nor
+there. You did not get on well on 600 pounds a year--and that is enough.
+You shall never have less than twice that amount, whether we keep
+together or not--and if it ought to be three times the amount, that
+doesn't matter.
+
+“You don't seem to realize, Edith”--she spoke with increased
+animation--“that you are my caprice. You are the possession that I am
+proudest of and fondest of. There is nothing else that appeals to me a
+hundredth part as much as you do. Since I became independent, the one
+real satisfaction I have had is in being able to do things for you--to
+have you with me, and make you share in the best that the world can
+offer. And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see I don't
+know what to do.”
+
+“Oh, I know--I behave very badly!” Lady Cressage had risen, and with
+visible agitation began now to pace the room. “I deserve to be thrown
+into the lake--I know it well enough! But Celia--truly--I'm as incapable
+of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am possessed by
+devils--like the people in the New Testament. Perhaps someone will come
+along who can cast them out. I don't seem able to do it myself. I can't
+rule myself at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!”
+
+“Ah!” said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences which Edith threw
+over her shoulder as she walked appeared, upon examination, to contain a
+suggestion.
+
+“My dear child,” she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence, “do you
+want to marry?”
+
+Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged a long steadfast
+glance with her friend. Then she came slowly forward. “Ah, that is what
+I don't know,” she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.
+
+Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little in thought. Then, at
+some passing reflection, she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she
+also rose, and went to the mantel for another cigarette. “Now I am
+going to talk plainly,” she said, with decision. “Since the subject is
+mentioned, less harm will be done by speaking out than by keeping still.
+There is a debate in your mind on the matter, isn't there?”
+
+The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more, stood at the
+window and with bowed head looked down at the lake. “Yes--I suppose it
+might be called that,” she replied, in a low voice.
+
+“And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would rather not?” Celia,
+after an instant's pause, went on without waiting for an answer. “I beg
+that you won't assume my hostility to the idea, Edith. In fact, I'm not
+sure I don't think it would be the best thing for you to do. Marriage,
+a home, children--these are great things to a woman. We can say that she
+pays the price of bondage for them--but to know what that signifies, we
+must ask what her freedom has been worth to her.”
+
+“Yes,” interposed the other, from the window. “What have I done with my
+freedom that has been worth while?”
+
+“Not much,” murmured Celia, under her breath. She moved forward, and
+stood beside Edith, with an arm round her waist. They looked together at
+the lake.
+
+“It is Lord Plowden, is it not?” asked the American, as the silence grew
+constrained.
+
+Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over her reply.
+“No,” she said at last. Upon reflection, and with a dim smile flickering
+in her side-long glance at Celia, she added, “He wants to marry you, you
+know.”
+
+“Leave that out of consideration,” said Celia, composedly. “He has never
+said so. I think it was more his mother's idea than his, if it existed
+at all. Of course I am not marrying him, or anybody else. But I saw at
+Hadlow that you and he were--what shall I say?--old friends.”
+
+“He must marry money,” the other replied. In an unexpected burst of
+candour she went on: “He would have asked me to marry him if I had
+had money. There is no harm in telling you that. It was quite
+understood--oh, two years ago. And I think I wished I had the
+money--then.”
+
+“And you don't wish it now?”
+
+A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After
+a little, she spoke in a musing tone: “He is going to have money of his
+own, very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him
+personally, of course, but--there is no career, no ambition, no future.”
+
+“A Viscount has future enough behind him,” observed Celia.
+
+“It doesn't attract me,” the other repeated, vaguely. “He is handsome,
+and clever, and kind and all that--but he would never appeal to any of
+the great emotions--nor be capable of them himself He is too smooth, too
+well-balanced, too much the gentleman. That expresses it badly--but do
+you see what I mean?”
+
+Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her, in a steady,
+comprehending look.
+
+“Yes, I think I see what you mean,” she said, with significance in her
+tone.
+
+Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her companion's arm.
+“But I don't know myself what I mean!” she exclaimed, despairingly, as
+she moved away. “I don't know!--I don't know!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not
+exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.
+
+“It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a'
+come out on,” she told them, in salutation--and for comment they all
+glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A
+gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the
+discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but
+could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving
+across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with
+chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy
+stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic
+mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers,
+which nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.
+
+“I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go
+home,” she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. “But
+it isn't three yet--it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd be
+more comfortable upstairs--”
+
+“Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us,” protested Julia.
+She strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was
+unmistakable.
+
+The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her
+daughter. The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long,
+listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.
+
+“But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?” she observed, coldly.
+“You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes
+upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those
+parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?”
+
+Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old
+magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but
+his sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened
+itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.
+
+“There has been so much to do, mamma,” she explained, in a clear, cool
+voice. “We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All
+the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me--and Alfred
+has his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you
+sooner--and much oftener--if we had thought you wanted us. But really,
+when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible
+for us to pretend that you were glad to see us.”
+
+“Oh, I was glad enough,” Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. “Why
+shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you
+expect me to shout and dance?”
+
+“But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square,” Alfred
+reminded her.
+
+“That's different,” she declared. “What would I be doing in Ovington
+Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy
+there. But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there;
+it would be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This
+is my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!”
+
+Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal
+countenance, hardened beyond their wont. “You talk as if there had been
+some class war declared,” she said, with obvious annoyance. “You know
+that Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you
+as he is to us.”
+
+“Uncle Stormont!” Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged
+with hostile sarcasm. “But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel,”
+ broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. “He has a perfect right to use
+the one he likes best.”
+
+“Oh, I don't dispute his right,” she replied, once more in her
+passionless monotone. “Everybody can call themselves whatever they
+please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's
+name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have
+your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me--but
+they're all right for you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is
+that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full
+of money to enable you to make the most of them. If I were religious I
+should call that providential.”
+
+“And that's what we DO call it,” put in Julia, with vivacity. “And why
+should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of
+it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all.
+Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself--at least for
+the present. But when Uncle St--when uncle says there's more than enough
+money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things
+for you--why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow
+Alfred to do things for me.”
+
+“That you never did,” interposed the young man, gayly. “I'll say that
+for you, Jule.”
+
+“And never will,” she assured him, with cheerful decision. “But
+no--mamma--can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us
+to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford,
+from the time we were of no age at all--and when uncle's money came you
+sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we
+behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason
+to suppose that you would be--I won't say proud, but at least well
+satisfied with us--and then it turned out that you didn't like us at
+all.”
+
+“I never said anything of the sort,” the mother declared, with a touch
+of animation.
+
+“Oh no--you never said it,” Julia admitted, “but what else can we think
+you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy
+yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that--and
+I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go----”
+
+“But I did want you to go,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
+
+“Well, then, when I come back--when we come back, and tell you what
+splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken
+a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you
+won't even come and look at the house!”
+
+“But I don't want to see it,” the mother retorted; obstinately.
+
+“Well, then, you needn't!” said Alfred, rising. “Nobody will ask you
+again.” “Oh yes they will,” urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one
+to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to
+mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her
+earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney
+habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then
+politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of
+gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days
+of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed
+distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone
+accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper.
+That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected
+everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own
+will of everybody--and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the
+fact that he was a Thorpe.
+
+After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best of
+Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively peaceful times
+in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a
+recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and
+her father--a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a
+pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as
+an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of
+unsubstantial memories--Julia and this father had stood upon one side
+of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable
+persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
+
+Alfred and his mother were Thorpes--that is to say, people who
+necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none
+of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their
+surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath,
+however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a
+potential existence--and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that
+no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than
+these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was
+concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe
+temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument,
+immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried
+the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her
+soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent
+whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.
+
+“Oh yes they will,” she repeated, and warned her brother into the
+background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. “We are your
+children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure
+that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be
+absurd to let anything come between you and us.”
+
+“How could I help letting it come?” demanded the mother, listlessly
+argumentative. “You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was
+nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and
+live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what
+I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into
+his own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your
+education and your ideas--and what more do you want? Why should you come
+bothering me?”
+
+“How unjust you are, mamma!” cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her
+bright glance.
+
+The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening
+herself, looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually
+grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the
+fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed
+restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse
+in her voice as she spoke:
+
+“If you ever have children of your own,” she said, “and you slave your
+life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your
+betters, and they act accordingly--then you'll understand. But you don't
+understand now--and there's no good our talking any more about it. Come
+in whenever it's convenient--and you feel like it. I must go back to my
+books now.”
+
+She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter.
+Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some
+murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss
+upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
+
+Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward
+beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless,
+ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the
+glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with
+increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner.
+At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet,
+and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.
+
+“Bring everything in!” she called to the boy, and helped out his
+apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.
+
+Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets
+from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from
+without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the
+oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.
+
+“I think you may go home now,” she said to him, with the laconic
+abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. “You have a home, haven't
+you?”
+
+Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made
+about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job,
+he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion
+he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.
+
+“Got a mother?” she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
+
+“And do you think yourself better than she is?”
+
+The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious
+perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he
+grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the
+fell acuteness of the Dials. “I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't,” he answered,
+in swift, rasping accents. “She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a
+fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave--” “Go home!” she bade him,
+peremptorily--and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the
+shop.
+
+Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book--the wretched
+day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history--but loitered
+about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the
+position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others.
+Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked
+street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters
+down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much
+more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters--for what
+reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were
+displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane
+to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal
+breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the
+door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall
+forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent
+to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise,
+she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway,
+preparatory to entering the shop.
+
+It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing
+face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There
+was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm
+round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder,
+she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
+
+Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. “Do
+mind what you're about!” she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
+
+“Shut up the place!” he answered, with lordly geniality. “I've walked
+all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion--I couldn't
+have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a
+talk. God! What things I've got to tell you!”
+
+“There isn't any fire down here,” she said, apologetically, as they
+edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. “The old
+fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I
+have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find
+it too cold--do you?--with your coat on? Or would you rather come
+upstairs?”
+
+“Never mind the cold,” he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before
+the desk. “I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've
+done today?”
+
+Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did
+now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light.
+His strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace.
+It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at
+her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour,
+she discerned a new authority.
+
+The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the
+countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy
+expression which had been their complement. He was all vigour,
+readiness, confidence, now. She deemed him almost handsome, this
+curious, changeable brother of hers, as he beat with his fist in a
+measured way upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened his
+commanding gaze upon her.
+
+“We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day,” he went on. “This
+is the twenty-eighth of February. A fortnight ago today was the first
+settlement. I wasn't here, but Semple was--and the working of it is all
+in his hands. He kept as still as a mouse that first day. They had to
+deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make
+any fuss. The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were
+caught in a trap. We didn't even put the price up to par. They had to
+come to Semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable
+just at the moment, and what would he carry them over at? That means,
+to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. He was as smooth
+as sweet-oil with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without
+any charge at all. But today it was a little different. The price was up
+ten shillings above par. That is to say, Semple arranged with a jobber,
+on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound
+shares. That offer fixed the making-up price. So then, when they were
+still without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had
+to pay ten shillings' difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares,
+plus the difference between par and the prices they'd sold at. That
+makes within a few hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's
+haul. D'ye see?”
+
+She nodded at him, expressively. Through previous talks she had really
+obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than
+she would have cared to confess.
+
+“Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets,” he proceeded
+with a steady glow in his eyes. “A fortnight hence, that is March 14th,
+we ring the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's
+office and settle a second time. Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber
+makes the price for Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have
+to pay us in differences. It is for us to say what that price shall be.
+We'll decide on that when the time comes. We most probably will just put
+it up another ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds.
+It's best in the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small rises like
+that, in order not to frighten anybody. So Semple says, at any rate.”
+
+“But why not frighten them?” Louisa asked. “I thought you wanted to
+frighten them. You were full of that idea a while ago.”
+
+He smiled genially. “I've learned some new wrinkles since then. We'll
+frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. But at the
+start we just go easy. If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there
+would be a dead scare among the jobbers. They'd be afraid to sell or
+name a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares in hand. And
+there are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. Presently, of
+course, we shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some
+actual dealings. Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to
+the general public will come into the market too. But of course you see
+that all such shares will simply go through one operation before they
+come back to us. Some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will
+snap them up and bring them straight to Semple, to get free from the
+fortnightly tax we are levying on them. In that way we shall eventually
+let out say half of these fourteen 'shorts,' or perhaps more than half.”
+
+“What do you want to do that for?” The sister's grey eyes had caught a
+metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. “Why let anybody out?
+Why can't you go on taking their money for ever?”
+
+Thorpe nodded complacently. “Yes--that's what I asked too. It seemed to
+me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them
+there. But when you come to reflect--you can't get more out of a man
+than there is in him. If you press him too hard, he can always go
+bankrupt--and then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose
+everything that you counted on making out of him. So, after a certain
+point, each one of the fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt
+with on a different footing. We shall have to watch them all, and study
+their resources, as tipsters watch horses in the paddock.
+
+“You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds
+better than others could lose ten thousand. All that we have to know. We
+can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose
+his place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. Well,
+our business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start
+with. Then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another,
+till we see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. Then we'll let
+him out. See?”
+
+“It's cruel, isn't it?” she commented, calmly meditative, after a little
+pause.
+
+“Everything in the City is cruel,” he assured her with a light tone.
+“All speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I
+estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over
+to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand
+pounds--maybe eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever
+earned a single sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of
+it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on
+almost indefinitely. There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been
+through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who
+had done some honest work for it parted company with it. Well--money
+like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long
+as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still
+comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain: they don't
+cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept
+it--and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings
+to recoup themselves on. That's the way the City goes.”
+
+Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness.
+As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on
+the desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them
+in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky
+hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
+
+“That's the kind of hand,” he began again, thoughtfully, “that breaks
+the Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used
+to watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining
+them. They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers
+are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's
+feelers. But there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most
+of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move.
+It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull,
+and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes
+them by the throat”--he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the
+thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful
+muscular tension--“when THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel
+that the grip means business--my God! what good are they?”
+
+He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with
+a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled
+something to her mind.
+
+“There was a man in here asking about you today,” she remarked, in a
+casual fashion. “Said he was an old friend of yours.”
+
+“Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,” he observed with beaming
+indifference. “I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and
+dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter
+for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I
+couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will
+write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze
+really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in,
+they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the
+social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something
+tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth,
+d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with
+nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square--that'll
+be good enough for me. By the way--you haven't been out to see us yet.
+We're all settled now. You must come at once--why not with me, now?”
+
+Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among
+some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to
+lift the lid and search about for something inside.
+
+“He left a card for you,” she said, as she groped among the desk's
+contents. “I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it.”
+
+“Oh, damn him, and his card too,” Thorpe protested easily. “I don't want
+to see either of them.”
+
+“He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He
+seemed to act as if you'd want to see him--but I didn't know. I didn't
+tell him your address.”
+
+Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest,
+but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention.
+He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked
+sharply up at his sister.
+
+“What was his name?” he asked with abruptness.
+
+“I don't in the least remember,” she made answer, holding the desk-top
+up, but temporarily suspending her search. “He was a little man,
+five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair--a kind of
+Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he
+remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got
+back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know
+what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether
+you were in England or not!”
+
+Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of
+green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head.
+“You must find that card!” he told her now, with a vague severity in
+his voice. “I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's
+written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was
+Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where
+she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or
+corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've
+got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under
+their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!”
+
+“Oh, I have a good few other things to do,” she reminded him, as she
+fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. “I can put my hand on
+any one of four thousand books in stock,” she mildly boasted over her
+shoulder, “and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell
+if a single book is missing--and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever
+knew to do that.”
+
+“Oh of course, you're an exception,” he admitted, under a sense of
+justice. “But I wish you'd find the card.”
+
+“I know where it is,” she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the
+desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she
+returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. “I'd stuck
+it in the little mirror over the washstand,” she explained.
+
+He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it
+under the gas-light. “Where is Montague Street?” he asked, with rough
+directness.
+
+“In Bloomsbury--alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street--I
+don't know how many others there may be.”
+
+Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat.
+“Yes--Bloomsbury,” he said hurriedly. “That would be his form. And you
+say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts--nothing about the
+Company, eh?” He looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence
+of this stranger had excited him a good deal.
+
+“No,” she assured him, reflectively; “no, I'm sure he didn't. From what
+he said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere
+else, for that matter, I should say.”
+
+Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look.
+“No--he's a shade off in the upper story,” he told her in a confidential
+tone. “Still, it's important that I should see him,”--and with only a
+hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
+
+By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the
+pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella
+for a cab.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+“We've got a spare room here, haven't we?” Thorpe asked his niece, when
+she came out to greet him in the hall of their new home in Ovington
+Square. He spoke with palpable eagerness before even unbuttoning his
+damp great-coat, or putting off his hat. “I mean it's all in working
+order ready for use?”
+
+“Why yes, uncle,” Julia answered, after a moment's thought. “Is someone
+coming?”
+
+“I think so,” he replied, with a grunt of relief. He seemed increasingly
+pleased with the project he had in mind, as she helped him off with his
+things. The smile he gave her, when she playfully took his arm to lead
+him into the adjoining library, was clearly but a part of the satisfied
+grin with which he was considering some development in his own affairs.
+
+He got into his slippers and into the easy-chair before the bright fire
+and lit a cigar with a contented air.
+
+“Well, my little girl?” he said, with genial inconsequence, and smiled
+again at her, where she stood beside the mantel.
+
+“It will be such a lark to play the hostess to a stranger!” she
+exclaimed. “When is he coming?--I suppose it is a 'he,'” she added, less
+buoyantly.
+
+“Oh--that fellow,” Thorpe said, as if he had been thinking of something
+else. “Well--I can't tell just when he will turn up. I only learned he
+was in town--or in England--a couple of hours ago. I haven't seen him
+yet at all. I drove round to his lodgings, near the British Museum,
+but he wasn't there. He only comes there to sleep, but they told me he
+turned in early--by nine o'clock or so. Then I went round to a hotel and
+wrote a note for him, and took it back to his lodgings, and left it for
+him. I told him to pack up his things as soon as he got it, and drive
+here, and make this his home--for the time being at least.”
+
+“Then it's some old friend of yours?” said the girl. “I know I shall
+like him.”
+
+Thorpe laughed somewhat uneasily. “Well--yes--he's a kind of a friend of
+mine,” he said, with a note of hesitation in his voice. “I don't know,
+though, that you'll think much of him. He aint what you'd call a ladies'
+man.”
+
+He laughed again at some thought the words conjured up. “He's a curious,
+simple old party, who'd just like a comfortable corner somewhere by
+himself, and wouldn't expect to be talked to or entertained at all.
+If he does come, he'll keep to himself pretty well. He wouldn't be
+any company for you. I mean,--for you or Alfred either. I think he's
+a Canadian or West Indian,--British subject, at all events,--but he's
+lived all his life in the West, and he wouldn't know what to do in
+a drawing-room, or that sort of thing. You'd better just not pay any
+attention to him. Pass the time of day, of course, but that's all.”
+
+Julia's alert, small-featured face expressed some vague disappointment
+at what she heard, but her words were cheerful enough. “Oh of
+course--whatever he likes best,” she said. “I will tell Potter to make
+everything ready. I suppose there's no chance of his being here in time
+for dinner?”
+
+Thorpe shook his head, and then lifted his brows over some new
+perplexity. “I guess he'd want to eat his meals out, anyway,” he said,
+after some thought. “I don't seem to remember much about him in
+that respect--of course, everything was so different in camp out in
+Mexico--but I daresay he wouldn't be much of an ornament at the table.
+However, that'll be all right. He's as easy to manage as a rabbit. If I
+told him to eat on the roof, he'd do it without a murmur. You see it's
+this way, Julia: he's a scientific man--a kind of geologist, and mining
+expert and rubber expert--and chemical expert and all sort of things. I
+suppose he must have gone through college--very likely he'll turn out to
+have better manners than I was giving him credit for. I've only seen him
+in the rough, so to speak. We weren't at all intimate then,--but we had
+dealings together, and there are certain important reasons why I should
+keep close in touch with him while he's here in London. But I'll try and
+do that without letting you be bothered.” “What an idea!” cried Julia.
+“As if that wasn't what we had the house for--to see the people you want
+to see.”
+
+Her uncle smiled rather ruefully, and looked in a rather dubious way at
+his cigar. “Between you and me and the lamp-post, Jule,” he said, with a
+slow, whimsical drawl, “there isn't a fellow in the world that I wanted
+to see less than I did him. But since he's here--why, we've got to make
+the best of it.”
+
+After dinner, Thorpe suffered the youngsters to go up to the
+drawing-room in the tacit understanding that he should probably not see
+them again that night. He betook himself then once more to the library,
+as it was called--the little, cozy, dark-panelled room off the hall,
+where the owner of the house had left two locked bookcases, and where
+Thorpe himself had installed a writing-desk and a diminutive safe for
+his papers. The chief purpose of the small apartment, however, was
+indicated by the two big, round, low-seated easy-chairs before the
+hearth, and by the cigar boxes and spirit-stand and tumblers visible
+behind the glass of the cabinet against the wall. Thorpe himself
+called the room his “snuggery,” and spent many hours there in slippered
+comfort, smoking and gazing contentedly into the fire. Sometimes Julia
+read to him, as he sat thus at his ease, but then he almost invariably
+went to sleep.
+
+Now, when he had poured out some whiskey and water and lit a cigar, the
+lounging chairs somehow did not attract him. He moved about aimlessly in
+the circumscribed space, his hands in his pockets, his burly shoulders
+rounded, his face dulled and heavy as with a depression of doubt. The
+sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to his ears. Often he
+ascended to the drawing-room to hear Julia play--and more often still,
+with all the doors open, he enjoyed the mellowed murmur of her music
+here at his ease in the big chair. But tonight he had no joy in the
+noise. More than once, as he slouched restlessly round the room, the
+notion of asking her to stop suggested itself, but he forbore to put it
+into action. Once he busied himself for a time in kneeling before his
+safe, and scrutinizing in detail the papers in one of the bundles it
+contained.
+
+At last--it was after ten o'clock, and the music above had ceased--the
+welcome sounds of cab-wheels without, and then of the door-bell, came to
+dispel his fidgeting suspense. On the instant he straightened himself,
+and his face rearranged its expression. He fastened upon the door of the
+room the controlled, calm glance of one who is easily confident about
+what is to happen.
+
+“Quaker-looking” was not an inapt phrase for the person whom the maid
+ushered into the room through this door. He was a small, thin, elderly
+man, bowed of figure and shuffling in gait. His coat and large,
+low-crowned hat, though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an
+indefinable sense of some theological standard, or pretence to such
+a standard. His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet
+meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by
+the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old
+village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid
+books. Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not
+altogether unclerical in their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed,
+as he stood blinking in the electric light of the strange, warm
+apartment--a helpless, worn old creature, inured through long years to
+bleak adverse winds, hoping now for nothing better in this world than
+present shelter.
+
+“How do you do, Mr. Thorpe,” he said, after a moment, with nervous
+formality. “This is unexpectedly kind of you, sir.”
+
+“Why--not at all!” said Thorpe, shaking him cordially by the hand. “What
+have we got houses for, but to put up our old friends? And how are you,
+anyway? You've brought your belongings, have you? That's right!” He
+glanced into the hall, to make sure that they were being taken upstairs,
+and then closed the door. “I suppose you've dined. Take off your hat and
+coat! Make yourself at home. That's it--take the big chair, there--so!
+And now let's have a look at you. Well, Tavender, my man, you haven't
+grown any younger. But I suppose none of us do. And what'll you have to
+drink? I take plain water in mine, but there's soda if you prefer it.
+And which shall it be--Irish or Scotch?”
+
+Mr. Tavender's countenance revealed the extremity of his surprise and
+confusion at the warmth of this welcome. It apparently awed him as well,
+for though he shrank into a corner of the huge chair, he painstakingly
+abstained from resting his head against its back. Uncovered, this head
+gained a certain dignity of effect from the fashion in which the
+thin, iron-grey hair, parted in the middle, fell away from the full,
+intellectual temples, and curled in meek locks upon his collar. A vague
+resemblance to the type of Wesley--or was it Froebel?--might have hinted
+itself to the observer's mind.
+
+Thorpe's thoughts, however, were not upon types. “Well”--he said, from
+the opposite chair, in his roundest, heartiest voice, when the other
+had with diffidence suffered himself to be served, and had deferentially
+lighted on one side the big cigar pressed upon him--“Well--and how's the
+world been using you?”
+
+“Not very handsomely, Mr. Thorpe,” the other responded, in a hushed,
+constrained tone.
+
+“Oh, chuck the Misters!” Thorpe bade him. “Aren't we old pals, man?
+You're plain Tavender, and I'm plain Thorpe.”
+
+“You're very kind,” murmured Tavender, still abashed. For some
+minutes he continued to reply dolefully, and with a kind of shamefaced
+reluctance, to the questions piled upon him. He was in evil luck:
+nothing had gone well with him; it had been with the greatest difficulty
+that he had scraped together enough to get back to London on the chance
+of obtaining some expert commission; practically he possessed nothing
+in the world beyond the clothes on his back, and the contents of two old
+carpet-bags--these admissions, by degrees, were wormed from him.
+
+“But have you parted with the concession, then, that you bought from
+me?” Thorpe suddenly asked him. “Help yourself to some more whiskey!”
+
+Tavender sighed as he tipped the decanter. “It isn't any good,” he
+answered, sadly. “The Government repudiates it--that is, the Central
+Government at Mexico. Of course, I never blamed you. I bought it with my
+eyes open, and you sold it in perfect good faith. I never doubted that
+at all. But it's not worth the paper it's written on--that's certain.
+It's that that busted me--that, and some other things.”
+
+“Well--well!” said Thorpe, blankly. His astonishment was obviously
+genuine, and for a little it kept him silent, while he pondered the
+novel aspects of the situation thus disclosed. Then his eyes brightened,
+as a new path outlined itself.
+
+“I suppose you've got the papers?--the concession and my transfer to you
+and all that?” he asked, casually.
+
+“Oh, yes,” replied Tavender. He added, with a gleam of returning
+self-command--“That's all I have got.”
+
+“Let's see--what was it you paid me?--Three thousand eight hundred
+pounds, wasn't it?”
+
+Tavender made a calculation in mental arithmetic. “Yes, something like
+that. Just under nineteen thousand dollars,” he said.
+
+“Well,” remarked Thorpe, with slow emphasis, “I won't allow you to
+suffer that way by me. I'll buy it back from you at the same price you
+paid for it.”
+
+Tavender, beginning to tremble, jerked himself upright in his chair,
+and stared through his spectacles at his astounding host. “You say”--he
+gasped--“you say you'll buy it back!”
+
+“Certainly,” said Thorpe. “That's what I said.”
+
+“I--I never heard of such a thing!” the other faltered with increasing
+agitation. “No--you can't mean it. It isn't common sense!”
+
+“It's common decency,” replied the big man, in his most commanding
+manner. “It's life and death to you--and it doesn't matter a flea-bite
+to me. So, since you came to grief through me, why shouldn't I do the
+fair thing, and put you back on your legs again?”
+
+Tavender, staring now at those shrunken legs of his, breathed heavily.
+The thing overwhelmed him. Once or twice he lifted his head and essayed
+to speak, but no speech came to his thin lips. He moistened them
+eventually with a long deliberate pull at his glass.
+
+“This much ought to be understood, however,” Thorpe resumed, reflecting
+upon his words as he went along. “If I'm to buy back a dead horse, like
+that, it's only reasonable that there should be conditions. I suppose
+you've seen by this time that even if this concession of ours was
+recognized by the Government there wouldn't be any money in it to speak
+of. I didn't realize that two years ago, any more than you did, but it's
+plain enough now. The trade has proved it. A property of rubber trees
+has no real value--so long as there's a wilderness of rubber trees all
+round that's everybody's property. How can a man pay even the interest
+on his purchase money, supposing he's bought a rubber plantation, when
+he has to compete with people who've paid no purchase money at all, but
+just get out as much as they like from the free forest? You must know
+that that is so.”
+
+Tavender nodded eloquently. “Oh yes, I know that is so. You can prove it
+by me.”
+
+Thorpe grinned a little. “As it happens, that aint what I need to have
+you prove,” he said, dryly. “Now WE know that a rubber property is no
+good--but London doesn't know it. Everybody here thinks that it's a
+great business to own rubber trees. Why, man alive, do you know”--the
+audacity of the example it had occurred to him to cite brought a
+gratified twinkle to his eyes as he went on--“do you know that a man
+here last year actually sold a rubber plantation for four hundred
+thousand pounds--two millions of dollars! Not in cash, of course, but
+in shares that he could do something with--and before he's done with
+it, I'm told, he's going to make twice that amount of money out of it.
+That'll show you what London is like.”
+
+“Yes--I suppose they do those things,” remarked Tavender, vaguely.
+
+“Well--my point is that perhaps I can do something or other with this
+concession of yours here. I may even be able to get my money back on it.
+At any rate I'll take my chances on it--so that at least you shan't lose
+anything by it. Of course, if you'd rather try and put it on the market
+yourself, why go ahead!” There was a wistful pathos in the way Tavender
+shook his head. “Big money doesn't mean anything to me any more,” he
+said, wearily. “I'm too old and I'm too tired. Why--four--five--yes,
+half a dozen times I've had enough money to last me comfortably all my
+life--and every time I've used it as bait to catch bigger money with,
+and lost it all. I don't do that any more! I've got something the matter
+with me internally that takes the nerve all out of me. The doctors don't
+agree about it, but whatever its name is I've got it for keeps. Probably
+I shan't live very long”--Thorpe recalled that the old man had always
+taken a gloomy view of his health after the third glass--“and if you
+want to pay me the nineteen thousand dollars, or whatever it is, why I
+shall say 'God bless you,' and be more than contented.”
+
+“Oh, there's something more to it than that,” observed Thorpe, with an
+added element of business-like briskness in his tone. “If I let you out
+in this way--something, of course, you could never have dreamed would
+happen--you must do some things for me. I should want you, for example,
+to go back to Mexico at once. Of course, I'd pay your expenses out. Or
+say, I'd give you a round four thousand pounds to cover that and some
+other things too. You wouldn't object to that, would you?”
+
+The man who, two hours before, had confronted existence with the change
+of his last five-pound note in his pocket, did not hesitate now. “Oh
+no, that would be all right,” with reviving animation, he declared. He
+helped himself again from the cut-glass decanter. “What would you want
+me to do there?”
+
+“Oh, a report on the concession for a starter,” Thorpe answered,
+with careful indifference. “I suppose they still know your name as an
+authority. I could make that all right anyway. But one thing I ought
+to speak of--it might be rather important--I wouldn't like to have you
+mention to anybody that the concession has at any time been yours. That
+might tend to weaken the value of your report, don't you see? Let it be
+supposed that the concession has been my property from the start. You
+catch my point, don't you? There never was any such thing as a transfer
+of it to you. It's always been mine!”
+
+Tavender gave his benefactor a purblind sort of wink. “Always belonged
+to you? Why of course it did,” he said cheerfully.
+
+The other breathed a cautious prolonged sigh of relief “You'd better
+light a fresh one, hadn't you?” he asked, observing with a kind of
+contemptuous tolerance the old man's efforts to ignite a cigar which had
+more than once unrolled like a carpenter's shaving in his unaccustomed
+fingers, and was now shapelessly defiant of both draught and suction.
+Tavender laughed to himself silently as he took a new cigar, and
+puffed at the match held by his companion. The air of innocence and
+long-suffering meekness was falling rapidly away from him. He put his
+shabby boots out confidently to the fender and made gestures with his
+glass as he talked.
+
+“My mistake,” he declared, in insistent tones, “was in not turning down
+science thirty years ago and going in bodily for business. Then I should
+have made my pile as you seem to have done. But I tried to do something
+of both. Half the year I was assaying crushings, or running a level, or
+analyzing sugars, for a salary, and the other half I was trying to do a
+gamble with that salary on the strength of what I'd learned. You can't
+ring the bell that way. You've got to be either a pig or a pup. You
+can't do both. Now, for instance, if I'd come to London when you did,
+and brought my money with me instead of buying your concession with
+it----”
+
+“Why, what good do you suppose you would have done?” Thorpe interrupted
+him with good-natured brusqueness. “You'd have had it taken from you
+in a fortnight! Why, man, do you know what London is? You'd have had no
+more chance here than a naked nigger in a swamp-full of alligators.”
+
+“You seem to have hit it off,” the other objected. “This is as fine a
+house as I was ever in.”
+
+“With me it's different,” Thorpe replied, carelessly. “I have the talent
+for money-making. I'm a man in armour. The 'gators can't bite me, nor
+yet the rattle-snakes.”
+
+“Yes--men are made up differently,” Tavender assented, with
+philosophical gravity. Then he lurched gently in the over-large chair,
+and fixed an intent gaze upon his host. “What did you make your money
+in?” he demanded, not with entire distinctness of enunciation. “It
+wasn't rubber, was it?”
+
+Thorpe shook his head. “There's no money in rubber. I'm entirely in
+finance--on the Stock Exchange--dealing in differences,” he replied,
+with a serious face.
+
+The explanation seemed wholly acceptable to Tavender. He mused upon it
+placidly for a time, with his reverend head pillowed askew against the
+corner of the chair. Then he let his cigar drop, and closed his eyes.
+
+The master of the house bent forward, and noiselessly helped himself to
+another glass of whiskey and water. Then, sinking back again, he eyed
+his odd guest meditatively as he sipped the drink. He said to himself
+that in all the miraculous run of luck which the year had brought him,
+this was the most extraordinary manifestation of the lot. It had been
+so easy to ignore the existence of this tiresome and fatuous old man, so
+long as he was in remote Mexico, that he had practically forgotten him.
+But he should not soon forget the frightened shock with which he had
+learned of his presence in London, that afternoon. For a minute or two,
+there in his sister's book-shop, it had seemed as if he were falling
+through the air--as if the substantial earth had crumbled away from
+under him. But then his nerve had returned to him, his resourceful brain
+had reasserted itself. With ready shrewdness he had gone out, and met
+the emergency, and made it the servant of his own purposes.
+
+He could be glad now, unreservedly glad, that Tavender had come to
+London, that things had turned out as they had. In truth, he stood now
+for the first time on solid ground. When he thought of it, now, the risk
+he had been running all these months gave him a little sinking of the
+heart. Upon reflection, the performance of having sold the same property
+first to Tavender in Mexico and then to the Rubber Consols Company in
+London might be subject to injurious comment, or worse. The fact that it
+was not a real property to begin with had no place in his thoughts.
+It was a concession--and concessions were immemorially worth what they
+would fetch. But the other thing might have been so awkward--and now it
+was all right!
+
+For an hour and more, till the fire burnt itself out and the guest's
+snoring became too active a nuisance, Thorpe sat lost in this
+congratulatory reverie. Then he rose, and sharply shaking Tavender into
+a semblance of consciousness, led him upstairs and put him to bed.
+
+Three days later he personally saw Tavender off at Waterloo station by
+the steamer-train, en route for Southampton and New York. The old man
+was in childlike good spirits, looking more ecclesiastical than ever
+in the new clothes he had been enabled to buy. He visibly purred with
+content whenever his dim eyes caught sight of the new valise and steamer
+trunk, which belonged to him, on the busy platform.
+
+“You've been very kind to me, Thorpe,” he said more than once, as they
+stood together beside the open door of the compartment. “I was never
+so hospitably treated before in my life. Your attention to me has been
+wonderful. I call you a true friend.”
+
+“Oh, that's all right! Glad to do it,” replied the other, lightly. In
+truth he had not let Tavender stray once out of his sight during those
+three days. He had dragged him tirelessly about London, showing him the
+sights from South Kensington Museum to the Tower, shopping with him,
+resting in old taverns with him, breakfasting, lunching, aud dining
+with him--in the indefatigable resolution that he should strike up
+no dangerous gossiping acquaintance with strangers. The task had been
+tiresome in the extreme--but it had been very well worth while.
+
+“One thing I'm rather sorry about,” Tavender remarked, in apologetic
+parenthesis--“I ought to have gone down and seen that brother-in-law of
+mine in Kent. He's been very good to me, and I'm not treating him very
+well. I wrote to tell him I was coming--but since then I haven't had
+a minute to myself. However, I can write to him and explain how it
+happened. And probably I'll be over again sometime.”
+
+“Why, of course,” said Thorpe, absently. The allusion to the
+brother-in-law in Kent had escaped his notice, so intent was he upon a
+new congeries of projects taking vague shape in his mind.
+
+“Think of yourself as my man out there,” he said now, slowly, following
+the clue of his thoughts. “There may be big things to do. Write to me as
+often as you can. Tell me everything that's going on. Money will be no
+object to me--you can have as much as you like--if things turn up out
+there that are worth taking up. But mind you say nothing about me--or
+any connection you've ever had with me. You'll get a letter from the
+Secretary of a Company and the Chairman asking for a report on a certain
+property, and naming a fee. You simply make a good report--on its
+merits. You say nothing about anything else--about me, or the history of
+the concession, or its validity, or anything. I mustn't be alluded to in
+any way. You quite understand that?”
+
+“Trust me!” said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.
+
+It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched the train draw out
+of the station.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy
+or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it
+serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits
+eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial
+papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the City
+during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the
+moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant
+German pine forests.
+
+To the great mass of City people; this August in question began in a
+normal enough fashion. To one little group of operators, however, and to
+the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose
+interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a
+season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was
+going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a massacre. Even
+to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were principals in this
+fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond
+the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives.
+The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still
+less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The “press”
+ seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's
+mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the
+other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing.
+The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in
+itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had
+been bribed to ignore. It was an assassination.
+
+Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement
+that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this
+stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds
+for one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not
+at all. Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough
+to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the
+figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were
+coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the identity
+of these people. Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal
+columns of the afternoon papers about a “Rubber King” of the name of
+Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so
+many “kings” that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the
+popular eye.
+
+City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this
+“Rubber King.” He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously
+filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did
+this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.
+There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an
+exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom,
+so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters
+and touts. They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits
+of his Rubber corner could fill it. To know such a man, however, could
+not but be useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin
+Friars on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other
+topics.
+
+As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was
+apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the
+possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed
+at by those who did not turn away in cold silence. Of the fourteen men
+who had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and
+Semple, all the conspicuous ones belonged to the class of “wreckers,” a
+class which does not endear itself to Capel Court.
+
+Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men
+of great wealth, but they had systematically amassed these fortunes by
+strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and
+toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they
+had been given a legitimate chance to live. Their system was legal
+enough, in the eyes alike of the law and of the Stock Exchange rules.
+They had an undoubted right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and
+bring it down, and feed to the bone upon it. But the exercise of this
+right did not make them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their
+victims. When word first went round, on the last day of February, that
+a lamb had unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident
+wolves, and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell
+into a “corner,” it was received on all sides with a gratified smile.
+
+Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once more tragic and
+more satisfactory. Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others
+were in the cul de sac guarded by this surprising and bloody-minded
+lamb. Most of the names were well-known as those of “wreckers.” In this
+category belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, Ascher, and
+Mendel, and if Harding, Carpenter, and Vesey could not be so confidently
+classified, at least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy.
+Two other names mentioned, those of Norfell and Pinney, were practically
+unknown.
+
+There was some surprise, however, at the statement that the old and
+respected and extremely conservative firm of Fromentin Bros. was
+entangled in the thing. Egyptian bonds, minor Levantine loans, discounts
+in the Arabian and Persian trades--these had been specialties of the
+Fromentins for many years. Who could have expected to find them caught
+among the “shorts” in Mexican rubber? It was Mexico, wasn't it, that
+these Rubber Consols purported to be connected with?
+
+Thorpe's Company, upon its commercial merits, had not been considered
+at all by the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, at the time of its
+flotation. Men vaguely and with difficulty recalled the fact of its
+prospectus, when the “corner” in its shares was first talked about.
+They looked it up in their lists and files, later on, but its terms said
+nothing to them. Nobody discussed the value of the assets owned by this
+Company, or the probability of its paying a dividend--even when the
+price bid for its shares was making the most sensational upward leaps.
+How Thorpe stood with his shareholders, or whether he had any genuine
+shareholders behind him at all, was seen by the keen eyes of Capel Court
+to be beside the question. Very likely it was a queer affair, if the
+truth were known--but at least it had substance enough in it to be
+giving the “wreckers” a lively time.
+
+By the end of July it was understood that the fight was better worth
+watching than anything that had been seen in a long time. The only
+trouble was that there was so little to see. The papers said nothing.
+The sufferers were the reverse of garrulous. The little red Scotchman,
+Semple, who was the visible avenging sword of the “corner,” was more
+imperturbably silent than anybody else. His fellow-members in the
+“House” watched him now, however, with a new respect. They discovered
+unsuspected elements of power in his thin, tight mouth, in the direct,
+cold glances of his brown-grey eyes, in the very way he carried his head
+and wore his hat. He came to be pointed out, and nodded about behind his
+back, more than anyone else in the “House,” and important men sought his
+acquaintance, with an awkward show of civility, who were notorious for
+their rude exclusiveness.
+
+It might be, of course, that his “corner” would break under him at any
+fortnightly settlement, but already he had carried it much further than
+such things often went, and the planning of the coup had been beyond
+doubt Napoleonic.
+
+Had this small sandy Scot planned it, or was he merely the weapon in
+Thorpe's hand? Both views had their supporters on the Exchange, but
+after the wrench of August 1st, when with an abrupt eighty-shilling
+rise the price of Rubber Consols stood at 15 pounds, and it was to
+be computed that Semple had received on that single day nearly 75,000
+pounds in differences and “backwardation,” a story was set afloat which
+gave Thorpe the undivided credit of the invention. It was related as
+coming from his own lips that he had schemed it all out to be revenged
+upon a group of Jewish operators, against whom he had a grievance. In
+confirmation of this tale, it was pointed out that, of the seven men
+still held pinned in the fatal “corner,” six were Jews--and this did,
+upon first glance, look significant. But then it was objected, upon
+reflection, that Blaustein and Ascher had both been permitted to make
+their escape, and this hardly justified the theory of an implacable
+anti-Semitic vendetta. The objection seemed reasonable, but it was met
+in turn by the point that Blaustein and Ascher had been bled white,
+as Bismarck's phrase went, before they were released, whereas the five
+Christians had been liberated with relatively moderate fines. Upon the
+whole, a certain odour of the Judenhetze clung thereafter about the
+“corner” in Rubber Consols.
+
+On an afternoon of the following week, Mr. Stormont Thorpe was alone in
+the Board Room of the offices in Austin Friars. He had risen from the
+great roller-topped desk over between the windows, and walked now with
+a lethargic, tired step to and fro before the empty fireplace, yawning
+more than once, and stretching out his arms in the supreme gesture of
+fatigue. After a dozen listless rounds, something occurred to him. He
+moved with a certain directness of purpose to the cabinet in the corner,
+unlocked it, and poured out for himself a tumbler of brandy and soda.
+He drank it without a pause, then turned again, and began pacing up and
+down as before, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent in thought.
+
+The intervening six months had effected visible changes in the outer
+man. One noted most readily that the face had grown fuller in its
+lower parts, and was far less browned than formerly. The large, heavy
+countenance, with its square jaws masked now under increased flesh, its
+beginnings of a double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect of pallor,
+was no longer lacking in individual distinction. It was palpably the
+visage of a dictator. The moustache had been cut down to military
+brevity, and the line of mouth below it was eloquent of rough power. The
+steady grey eyes, seemingly smaller yet more conspicuous than before,
+revealed in their glance new elements of secretiveness, of strategy
+supported by abundant and confident personal force.
+
+The man himself seemed scarcely to have grown stouter. He held himself
+more compactly, as it were; seemed more the master of all his physical
+expressions. He was dressed like a magnate who was also a person of
+taste. There was a flower in the lapel of his well-shaped frock-coat,
+and the rustle of his starched and spotless white waistcoat murmured
+pleasantly of refined toilets.
+
+“The Marquis of Chaldon--and a gentleman, with him.”
+
+The announcement, from a clerk who had noiselessly opened the door,
+imposed itself with decorum upon Thorpe's reverie.
+
+“Who is the gentleman with him?” Thorpe began austerely to ask, after
+an instant's hesitation. But this briefest of delays had brought the
+callers into plain view behind the clerk, and with a slight gesture the
+master assented to their entrance.
+
+This large apartment was no longer called the Board Room by anybody. By
+tacit processes, it had become Mr. Thorpe's room. Not even the titular
+Chairman of the Company, the renowned and eminent Lord Chaldon,
+ex-Ambassador and ex-Viceroy, entered this chamber now with any
+assumption of proprietorship in it. No hint of a recollection that there
+were such things as the Company and the Board, or that he was nominally
+the head of both, expressed itself in his Lordship's demeanour as he
+advanced, his hand a little extended.
+
+The noble Chairman was white of beard and hair, and extremely courteous
+of manner--a small, carefully-clad, gracious old gentleman, whose
+mild pink countenance had, with years of anxiety about ways and
+means, disposed itself in lines which produced a chronic expression of
+solicitude. A nervous affection of the eyelids lent to this look, at
+intervals, a beseeching quality which embarrassed the beholder. All
+men had liked him, and spoken well of him throughout his long and
+hard-worked career. Thorpe was very fond of him indeed, and put a
+respectful cordiality into his grasp of the proffered hand. Then he
+looked, with a certain thinly-veiled bluntness of enquiry, past the
+Marquis to his companion.
+
+“You were very kind to give me the appointment,” said Lord Chaldon, with
+a little purring gloss of affability upon the earnestness of his tone.
+“I wish very much to introduce to you my friend, my old friend I may
+say, Monsieur Alexandre Fromentin. We slept together under the same
+tent, in the Persian country beyond Bagdad--oh, it must have been quite
+forty years ago. We were youngsters looking to win our first spurs
+then--I in my line, he in his. And often since we have renewed that old
+friendship--at many different places--India, and Constantinople, and
+Egypt. I wish heartily to commend him to your--your kindness.”
+
+Thorpe had perfunctorily shaken hands with the stranger--a tall,
+slender, sharp-faced, clean-shaven, narrow-shouldered man, who by these
+accounts of his years ought not to have such excessively black hair. He
+bowed in a foreign fashion, and uttered some words which Thorpe, though
+he recognized them as English in intent, failed to follow. The voice
+was that of an elderly man, and at a second glance there were plenty
+of proofs that he might have been older than the Marquis, out there in
+Persia, forty years ago. But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their
+hair, and he offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the table toward
+his desk, with a certain reserve of manner. Seating himself in the
+revolving chair at the desk itself, he put the tips of his fingers
+together, and looked this gentleman with the Continental name and
+experience in the face.
+
+“Is there something you wish me to do?” he asked, passively facilitating
+the opening of conversation.
+
+“Ah, my God! 'Something'!”--repeated the other, with a fluttering
+gesture of his hands over his thin, pointed knees--“everything, Mr.
+Thorpe!”
+
+“That's a tolerably large order, isn't it?” Thorpe asked, calmly, moving
+a slow, inscrutable glance from one to the other of his callers.
+
+“I could ask for nothing that would be a greater personal favour--and
+kindness”--Lord Chaldon interposed. His tone bore the stress of
+sincerity.
+
+“That means a great deal to me, as you know, my Lord,” replied Thorpe,
+“but I don't in the least understand--what is it that your friend
+wants?”
+
+“Only that I shall not be buried in a bankrupt's grave,” the suppliant
+answered, with a kind of embittered eagerness of utterance. “That I
+shall not see disgraced the honoured name that my father and his father
+bequeathed to my care!”
+
+Thorpe's large, composed countenance betrayed a certain perplexity.
+“There must be a mistake,” he observed. “I don't even know this name of
+yours. I never heard it before.”
+
+The other's mobile face twisted itself in a grimace of incredulity. He
+had a conspicuously wide mouth, and its trick of sidelong extension at
+this moment was very unpleasant. “Ah, Herr Je! He never heard it,” he
+ejaculated, turning nervously to the Marquis. “Would to the good God you
+never had!” he told Thorpe, with suppressed excitement.
+
+Lord Chaldon, his own voice shaken a little, interposed with an
+explanation. “My friend is the head--the respected head--of the firm of
+Fromentin Brothers. I think you have--have dealings with them.”
+
+Thorpe, after a furtive instant of bewilderment, opened his mouth.
+“Oh! I see,” he said. “I know what you mean now. With the French
+pronunciation, I didn't recognize the name. I've always heard it called
+'Fromen'-tin' here in London. Oh, yes, of course--Fromen'tin Brothers.”
+
+His lips shut tight again at this. The listeners had caught no helpful
+clue from the tone of his words. They exchanged a glance, and then M.
+Fromentin spoke.
+
+“Mr. Thorpe,” he began, slowly, with an obvious effort at
+self-repression. “It is a very simple story. Our house is an old one.
+My father's grandfather organized the finance of the commissariat of
+General Bonaparte in Egypt. He created the small beginnings of the
+carpet and rug importation from Asia Minor. His son, and in turn his
+son, followed him. They became bankers as well as importers. They
+helped very greatly to develop the trade of the Levant. They were not
+avaricious men, or usurers. It is not in our blood. Your Chairman, Lord
+Chaldon, who honours me so highly by calling me his friend--he will
+assure you that we have a good name in the East. Our banks have
+befriended the people, and never oppressed or injured them. For that
+reason--I will say perhaps for that reason--we have never become a very
+rich house. It is possible to name bankers who have made large fortunes
+out of Egypt. It was different with us. Lord Chaldon will tell you
+that of our own free will--my two brothers and I--of our own choice we
+consented to lose a fifth of all our possessions, rather than coin into
+gold by force the tears and blood of the wretched fellaheen.”
+
+“Yes--I have never known a more honourable or humane action,” put in the
+Marquis, fervently.
+
+“And then my brothers die--Polydor, who lived mostly at Smyrna, and
+whose estate was withdrawn from the business by his widow, and Augustin,
+who lived here in London after 1870, and died--it is now six years ago.
+He left a son, Robert, who is my nephew, and my partner. He is now of
+an age--perhaps thirty years. He was a small child when he came to
+London--he has become more English than the English themselves. His
+activity and industry are very great; he forms plans of such magnitude
+and numbers that they would compel his grandfather to turn in his
+coffin. I am in indifferent health. I live much at Homburg and Marienbad
+and at Cairo. Practically speaking, I have retired from business. There
+remain branches of our house--in several places--but the London house
+has become the centre of all things--and Robert has become the London
+house. This I make plain to your mind, do I, Mr. Thorpe?”
+
+The other, with his chin sunk within the collar of his white waistcoat,
+and scrutinizing the narrator with a steadfast though impassive glance,
+made the faintest possible nod of assent.
+
+“I had great confidence in Robert,” the old man went on. His eyes were
+dimming with tears, and his voice quavered uncertainly. “His plans
+seemed wise, even if they risked more than formerly. The conditions of
+business are wholly altered since my youth--and it was best, I thought,
+to make Robert free to act under these conditions, which he understood
+much better than I could pretend to do. Thus it was that when he said it
+was necessary for Fromentin Brothers to belong to the Stock Exchange,
+I did not object. He was active and bold and clever, and he was in the
+thick of the fight. Therefore he should be the judge in all things. And
+that is our ruin. In the time of the South African excitement, he won a
+great deal of money. Then he lost it all and more. Then gambling began,
+and his fortunes went now up, now down, but always, as his books show to
+me now--sinking a little on the average. He grew more adventurous--more
+careless. He put many small counters upon different numbers on the
+table. You know what I mean? And in an accursed moment, because other
+gamblers were doing the same, he sold two thousand of your shares,
+without having them in his hands. Voila! He wishes now to put a bullet
+through his brain. He proposes that as the fitting end of Fromentin
+Freres.”
+
+Thorpe, his chin on his breast, continued to regard the melancholy
+figure opposite with a moody eye. It seemed a long minute before he
+broke the tense silence by a sigh of discomfort. “I do not discuss these
+things with anybody,” he said then, coldly. “If I had known who you
+were, I don't think you'd have got in.”
+
+The Marquis of Chaldon intuitively straightened himself in his chair,
+and turned toward the speaker a glance of distressed surprise.
+
+“Or no--I beg your pardon,” Thorpe hastened to add, upon the instant
+hint of this look--“that doesn't convey my meaning. Of course, our
+Chairman brings whom he pleases. His friends--as a matter of course--are
+our friends. What I should have said was that if this had been mentioned
+beforehand to me, I should have explained that it wasn't possible to
+discuss that particular business.”
+
+“But--pardon me”--said Lord Chaldon, in a quiet, very gentle, yet
+insistent voice, which seemed now to recall to its listeners the fact
+that sovereigns and chancellors had in their day had attentive ears for
+its tones--“pardon me, but why should it not be possible?”
+
+Thorpe frowned doubtfully, and shifted his position in his chair. “What
+could I say, if it were discussed?” he made vague retort. “I'm merely
+one of the Directors. You are our Chairman, but you see he hasn't found
+it of any use to discuss it with you. There are hard and fast rules
+about these things. They run their natural course. You are not a
+business man, my Lord----”
+
+“Oh, I think I may be called a 'business man,'” interposed the nobleman,
+suavely. “They would tell you so in Calcutta, I think, and in Cairo too.
+When one considers it, I have transacted a great deal of business--on
+the behalf of other people. And if you will permit me--I do not impute
+indirection, of course--but your remark seems to require a footnote. It
+is true that I am Chairman of the Board on which you are a Director--but
+it is not quite the whole truth. I as Chairman know absolutely nothing
+about this matter. As I understand the situation, it is not in your
+capacity as a Director that you know anything about it either. Yet----”
+
+He paused, as if suddenly conscious of some impropriety in this
+domestic frankness before a third party, and Thorpe pounced through his
+well-mannered hesitation with the swiftness of a bird of prey.
+
+“Let me suggest,” he said roundly, lifting his head and poising a
+hand to hold attention, while he thought upon what it was he should
+suggest--“this is what I would say. It seems rather irregular, doesn't
+it? to debate the matter in the presence of an outsider. You see it
+yourself. That is partly what I meant. Now I have met Mr. Fromentin,” he
+gave the name its English vowels with an obstinate emphasis, “and I have
+heard his statement. You have heard it too. If he wishes to lay more
+facts before us, why, well and good. But then I would suggest that
+he leave the matter in our hands, to discuss and look into between
+ourselves. That seems to you the proper course, doesn't it, Lord
+Chaldon?”
+
+The French banker had been studying with strained acuteness the big
+lymphatic mask of the Director, with sundry sharp glances aside at the
+Chairman. The nervous changes on his alert, meagre old face showed
+how intently he followed every phase of their talk. A certain sardonic
+perception of evil in the air curled on his lip when he saw the Marquis
+accede with a bow and wave of the hand to Thorpe's proposition. Then he
+made his bow in turn, and put the best face possible upon the matter.
+
+“Naturally I consult your convenience--and the proprieties,” he said,
+with an effect of proud humility. “There are but a few other facts to
+submit. My nephew has already paid, in differences upon those accursed
+two thousand shares, a sum of nearly 30,000 pounds. I have the figures
+in my pocket--but they are fixed in my head as well. Twenty-eight
+thousand five hundred, those differences already amount to, not to speak
+of interest. At the last settlement, August 1st, the price per share was
+15 pounds. That would make 30,000 pounds more, if we bought now--or a
+total of practically 60,000 pounds. Eh bien! I beg for the privilege of
+being allowed to buy these shares now. It is an unpleasant confession
+to make, but the firm of Fromentin Freres will be made very poor by this
+loss of 60,000 pounds. It was not always so, but it is so now. My nephew
+Robert has brought it into that condition. You see my shame at this
+admission. With all my own means, and with his sister's marriage
+portion, we can make up this sum of 30,000 pounds, and still enable
+the firm to remain in existence. I have gone over the books very
+painstakingly, since I arrived in London. It can be kept afloat, and
+it can be brought back to safe and moderately profitable courses--if
+nothing worse happens. With another six weeks like the last, this
+will not be at all possible. We shall have the cup of dishonour thrust
+between our teeth. That will be the end of everything.”
+
+M. Fromentin finished in tremulous, grave tones. After looking with
+blurred eyes for a moment into Thorpe's face, he bowed his head, and
+softly swayed the knees upon which his thin, dark hands maintained their
+clutch. Not even the revelation of hair quite white at the roots, unduly
+widening the track of parting on the top of his dyed head, could rob
+this movement of its mournful dignity.
+
+Thorpe, after a moment's pause, took a pencil and paper from the desk,
+and made a calculation. He bit his lips and frowned at the sight of
+these figures, and set down some others, which seemed to please him no
+more. Then, with a sudden gesture as of impatience, he rose to his feet.
+
+“How much is that sister's marriage portion you spoke of?” he asked,
+rather brusquely.
+
+The French gentleman had also risen. He looked with an air of
+astonishment at his questioner, and then hardened his face. “I apologize
+for mentioning it,” he said, with brevity. “One does not speak of family
+affairs.”
+
+“I asked you how much it was,” pursued Thorpe, in a masterful tone. “A
+man doesn't want to rob a girl of her marriage portion.”
+
+“I think I must not answer you,” the other replied, hesitatingly. “It
+was the fault of my emotion to introduce the subject. Pray leave the
+young lady out of account.”
+
+“Then I've nothing more to say,” Thorpe declared, and seated himself
+again with superfluous energy. He scowled for a little at the disorder
+of his desk, and then flung forth an angry explanation. “If you evade
+fair questions like that, how can you expect that I will go out of my
+way to help you?”
+
+“Oh, permit me, Mr. Thorpe”--the Marquis intervened soothingly--“I think
+you misapprehend. My friend, I am sure, wished to evade nothing. He
+had the idea that he was at fault in--in alluding to a purely domestic
+matter as--as a--what shall I say?--as a plea for your consideration.”
+ He turned to the old banker. “You will not refuse to mention the sum to
+me, will you, my friend?”
+
+M. Fromentin shrugged his shoulders. “It is ten thousand pounds,” he
+replied, almost curtly.
+
+Thorpe was seemingly mollified. “Very well, then,” he said. “I will sell
+you 2,000 shares at ten pounds.”
+
+The others exchanged a wondering look.
+
+“Monsieur,” the banker stammered--“I see your meaning. You will forgive
+me--it is very well meant indeed by you--but it was not my proposition.
+The market-price is fifteen pounds--and we were prepared to pay it.”
+ Thorpe laughed in a peremptory, gusty way. “But you can't pay more than
+I ask!” he told him, with rough geniality. “Come, if I let you and your
+nephew in out of the cold, what kind of men-folk would you be to insist
+that your niece should be left outside? As I said, I don't want her
+money. I don't want any woman's money. If I'm going to be nice to the
+rest of the family, what's the objection to my being nice to her?”
+
+“Monsieur,” said the Frenchman, after an instant's reflection, “I offer
+none. I did not at the moment perceive the spirit of your words, but
+I recognize now that it was delicacy itself. I tender you the most
+profound thanks--for ALL the family.”
+
+After some further conversation the elder Fromentin took his departure.
+Lord Chaldon apparently proposed to accompany him, but Thorpe begged him
+to remain, and he put aside his hat once more and resumed his seat.
+
+Thorpe walked about a little, with his hands in his pockets, in a
+restless way. “If it isn't unpleasant to you, I think I'll light a
+cigar,” he said suddenly, and moved over to the cabinet. He poured out a
+drink of neat brandy, as well, and furtively swallowed it. Then he came
+back, preceded by a cloud of smoke.
+
+“It went terribly against the grain,” he said, with a rueful laugh. “I'd
+sworn to let no Jew off with an inch of hide left on him--and here three
+of them have been wheedled out of my grip already.”
+
+“Jews?” exclaimed the Marquis, much puzzled. “Did you--did you think
+Fromentin was a Jew? God bless me! he's no more one than I am! Why, not
+even so much, for there IS a Herschell in my pedigree. Why, dear man,
+they were Crusaders!”
+
+Thorpe smiled somewhat sheepishly. “I never noticed much,” he said. “It
+was a foreign-looking name. I took it for granted.”
+
+Lord Chaldon bent his brows a little. “Yes-s”--he murmured,
+meditatively. “I've heard it mentioned that your enterprise was
+suspected of an anti-Semitic twist. Do you mind my talking a little with
+you about that?”
+
+“Oh, not at all,” the other answered with languid acquiescence, as he
+seated himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+“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.'”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+AUGUST wore itself out in parched tedium, and a September began which
+seemed even more unbearable in town,--and still Thorpe did not get away
+from London.
+
+So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance, and the receipt
+of innumerable letters from a restless and fussy steward whom he had
+not yet seen, went as evidence, he knew himself to be the tenant in
+possession of a great shooting in Morayshire. He had several photographs
+of what was called the lodge, but looked like something between a
+mansion and a baronial castle, on the mantel of the Board Room. The
+reflection that this sumptuous residence had been his for a month, and
+that it daily stood waiting for him, furnished and swept and provisioned
+for his coming, did nothing to help the passing of time in the hot,
+fagged City. More than once he had said resolutely that, on the morrow,
+or at the worst the next day, he would go--but in the event he had
+not gone. In the last week of August he had proceeded to the length of
+sending his niece and nephew Northward, and shutting up the house in
+Ovington Square, and betaking himself to the Savoy Hotel. This had
+appeared at the time to be almost equivalent to his getting away
+himself,--to be at least a first stage in the progress of his own
+journey. But at the hotel he had stuck fast,--and now, on the tenth of
+September, was no nearer the moors and the deer-forest than he had been
+a month before.
+
+A novel sense of loneliness,--of the fatuity of present
+existence,--weighed grievously upon him. The ladies of Grafton Street
+had left town upon a comprehensive itinerary of visits which included
+the Malvern country, and a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in
+Westmoreland. There was nothing very definite about the date of their
+coming to him in Scotland. The lady who had consented to marry him had,
+somehow, omitted to promise that she would write to him. An arrangement
+existed, instead, by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond,
+and to fix between themselves the details of the visit to Morayshire.
+
+Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement.
+He was conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and
+there was nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive
+love-letters seem unnatural. The absence of moonshine, at least during
+this preliminary season, had been quite taken for granted between them,
+and he did not complain even to himself. There was even a kind of
+proud satisfaction for him in the thought that, though he had all but
+completed the purchase of the noble Pellesley estate for Edith Cressage,
+he had never yet kissed her. The reserve he imposed upon himself gave
+him a certain aristocratic fineness in his own eyes. It was the means by
+which he could feel himself to be most nearly her equal. But he remained
+very lonely in London, none the less.
+
+It is true that a great deal of society was continually offered to him,
+and even thrust upon him. In the popular phrase, London was empty,
+but there seemed to be more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont
+Thorpe' s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre or
+card or river parties. He clung sullenly to his rule of going
+nowhere, but it was not so simple a matter to evade the civilities and
+importunities of those who were stopping at the hotel, or who came there
+to waylay him at the entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant. He
+could not always refuse to sit down at tables when attractively-dressed
+and vivacious women made room for him, or to linger over cigars and wine
+with their husbands and escorts later on.
+
+An incessant and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups
+of interested people who were rarely at the pains to dissemble their
+aims. He formed a manner for the reception of these advances, compounded
+of joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality, which nobody, to his face
+at least, resented. If women winced under his mocking rudenesses of
+speech and smile, if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of
+his refusal to let them inside his guard, they sedulously kept it from
+him. The consciousness that everybody was afraid of him,--that everybody
+would kneel to him, and meekly take insult and ignominy from him, if
+only hope remained to them of getting something out of him,--hardened
+like a crust upon his mind.
+
+It was impossible to get a sense of companionship from people who
+cringed to him, and swallowed his affronts and cackled at his jokes
+with equal docility. Sometimes he had a passing amusement in the rough
+pleasantries and cruelties which they drew from him. There were two or
+three bright Jewish women, more gayly clever and impudent, perhaps, than
+beautiful, with whom he found it genuine fun to talk, and concerning
+whom he was perpetually conceiving projects which could not have been
+discussed with their husbands, and as perpetually doing nothing to
+test their feasibility. But these diversions were in their essence
+unsubstantial. There was not even the semblance of a real friendship
+among them,--and loneliness became an increasing burden.
+
+His sister at the old book-shop exasperated him nowadays to a degree
+which often provoked within him the resolution to have done with her.
+He had a score of projects for her betterment, each capable of as many
+variations and eager adaptations to suit her fancy, but to them all and
+sundry she opposed a barrier of stupidly passive negation. There was
+nothing she wanted done for her. She would not exchange the work she had
+been brought up in for a life of idleness. She did not want, and would
+not know what to do with, a bigger shop than she had. An augmentation of
+her capital would be of no use, because there was no room in the crowded
+little shop for a larger stock than it contained. She was entirely
+satisfied with the dingy home overhead, and declined to think even of
+moving elsewhere. Over and over again she met his propositions with a
+saying which he could recall having particularly hated on their father's
+lips,--“It's ill teaching an old dog new tricks.”
+
+“You ought to have them taught you with a stick,” he had told her
+roundly, on the last occasion.
+
+She had merely shrugged her gaunt shoulders at him. “You think you can
+bully everybody and make them crawl to you,--but there's no good your
+trying it on with me,” she had told him, and he had pushed his way out
+of the shop almost stamping his feet. It was clear to him at that moment
+that he would never darken her door again.
+
+Yet now, on this afternoon of the tenth, as he lounged with a cigar and
+a City paper in his apartment at the hotel after luncheon, wondering
+whether it were too hot to issue forth for a walk to the Park, the
+irrelevant idea of going round to see his sister kept coming into his
+mind. He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the paper,--but
+off it slipped again to the old book-shop, and to that curious,
+cross-grained figure, its mistress. He abandoned himself to thinking
+about her--and discovered that a certain unique quality in her
+challenged his admiration. She was the only absolutely disinterested
+person he knew--the only creature in the world, apparently, who did not
+desire to make something out of him. She was not at all well-off,--was
+indeed rather poor than otherwise,--and here was her only brother a
+millionaire, and in her dumb way she had a sisterly affection for him,
+and yet she could not be argued or cajoled into touching a penny of his
+money. Surely there could be no other woman like her.
+
+Thorpe realized that it was a distinction to have such a sister,--and
+behind this thought rose obscurely the suggestion that there must be
+wonderful blood in a race which had produced such a daughter. And for
+that matter, such a son too! He lifted his head, and looked abstractedly
+before him, as if he were gazing at some apotheosis of himself in a
+mirror.
+
+He beheld all at once something concrete and personal, obtruded into the
+heart of his reverie, the sight of which dimly astounded him. For the
+moment, with opened lips he stared at it,--then slowly brought himself
+to comprehend what had happened. An old man had by some oversight of
+the hotel servants been allowed to enter the room unannounced. He had
+wandered in noiselessly, and had moved in a purblind fashion to the
+centre of the apartment. The vagueness of the expression on his face and
+of his movements hinted at a vacant mind or too much drink,--but Thorpe
+gave no thought to either hypothesis. The face itself--no--yes--it was
+the face of old Tavender.
+
+“In the name of God! What are you doing here?” Thorpe gasped at this
+extraordinary apparition. Still staring, he began to push back his chair
+and put his weight upon his feet.
+
+“Well--Thorpe”--the other began, thrusting forward his head to look
+through his spectacles--“so it is you, after all. I didn't know whether
+I was going to find you or not. This place has got so many turns and
+twists to it----”
+
+“But good heavens!” interposed the bewildered Thorpe. He had risen to
+his feet. He mechanically took the hand which the other had extended to
+him. “What in hell”--he began, and broke off again. The aroma of alcohol
+on the air caught his sense, and his mind stopped at the perception that
+Tavender was more or less drunk. He strove to spur it forward, to compel
+it to encompass the meanings of this new crisis, but almost in vain.
+
+“Thought I'd look you up,” said the old man, buoyantly. “Nobody in
+London I'd rather see than you. How are you, anyway?”
+
+“What did you come over for? When did you get here?” Thorpe put the
+questions automatically. His self-control was returning to him; his
+capable brain pushed forward now under something like disciplined
+direction.
+
+“Why I guess I owe it all to you,” replied Tavender. Traces of the old
+Quaker effect which had been so characteristic of him still hung about
+his garb and mien, but there shone a new assurance on his benignant,
+rubicund face. Prosperity had visibly liberalized and enheartened him.
+He shook Thorpe's hand again. “Yes, sir--it must have been all through
+you!” he repeated. “I got my cable three weeks ago--'Hasten to
+London, urgent business, expenses and liberal fee guaranteed, Rubber
+Consols'--that's what the cable said, that is, the first one and of
+course you're the man that introduced me to those rubber people. And so
+don't you see I owe it all to you?”
+
+His insistence upon his obligation was suddenly almost tearful. Thorpe
+thought hard as he replied: “Oh--that's all right. I'm very glad indeed
+to have helped you along. And so you came over for the Rubber Consols
+people, eh? Well--that's good. Seen 'em yet? You haven't told me when
+you landed.”
+
+“Came up from Southampton this morning. My brother-in-law was down
+there to meet me. We came up to London together.” “Your brother-in-law,”
+ observed Thorpe, meditatively. Some shadowy, remote impression of
+having forgotten something troubled his mind for an instant. “Is your
+brother-in-law in the rubber business?”
+
+“Extraor'nary thing,” explained Tavender, beamingly, “he don't know
+no more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon. I asked him
+today--but he couldn't tell me anything about the business--what it was
+I'd been sent for, or anything.”
+
+“But he--he knew you'd been sent for,” Thorpe commented upon brief
+reflection.
+
+“Why, he sent the second cable himself----”
+
+“What second cable?”
+
+“Why it was the next day,--or maybe it was sent that same night, and
+not delivered till morning,--I got another cable, this time from my
+brother-in-law, telling me to cable him what ship I sailed on and when.
+So of course he knew all about it--but now he says he don't. He's a
+curious sort of fellow, anyway.”
+
+“But how is he mixed up in it?” demanded Thorpe, impatiently.
+
+“Well, as nearly as I can figure it out, he works for one of the men
+that's at the head of this rubber company. It appears that he happened
+to show this man--he's a man of title, by the way--a letter I wrote to
+him last spring, when I got back to Mexico--and so in that way this man,
+when he wanted me to come over, just told Gafferson to cable to me.”
+
+“Gafferson,” Thorpe repeated, very slowly, and with almost an effect
+of listlessness. He was conscious of no surprise; it was as if he
+had divined all along the sinister shadows of Lord Plowden and Lord
+Plowden's gardener, lurking in the obscurity behind this egregious old
+ass of a Tavender.
+
+“He's a tremendous horticultural sharp,” said the other. “Probably
+you've heard tell of him. He's taken medals for new flowers and things
+till you can't rest. He's over at--what do you call it?--the Royal
+Aquarium, now, to see the Dahlia Show. I went over there with him, but
+it didn't seem to be my kind of a show, and so I left him there, and
+I'm to look in again for him at 5:30. I'm going down to his place in the
+country with him tonight, to meet his boss--the nobleman I spoke of.”
+
+“That's nice,” Thorpe commented, slowly. “I envy anybody who can get
+into the country these days. But how did you know I was here?” “The
+woman in the book-store told me--I went there the first thing. You might
+be sure I'd look you up. Nobody was ever a better friend than you've
+been to me, Thorpe. And do you know what I want you to do? I want you to
+come right bang out, now, and have a drink with me.”
+
+“I was thinking of something of the sort myself,” the big man replied.
+“I'll get my hat, and be with you in a minute.”
+
+In the next room he relinquished his countenance to a frown of fierce
+perplexity. More than a minute passed in this scowling preoccupation.
+Then his face lightened with the relief of an idea, and he stepped
+confidently back into the parlour.
+
+“Come along,” he said, jovially. “We'll have a drink downstairs, and
+then we'll drive up to Hanover Square and see if we can't find a friend
+of mine at his club.”
+
+In the office below he stopped long enough to secure a considerable
+roll of bank-notes in exchange for a cheque. A little later, a hansom
+deposited the couple at the door of the Asian Club, and Thorpe, in the
+outer hallway of this institution, clicked his teeth in satisfaction at
+the news that General Kervick was on the premises.
+
+The General, having been found by a boy and brought down, extended
+to his guests a hospitality which was none the less urbane for the
+evidences of surprise with which it was seasoned. He concealed so
+indifferently his inability to account for Tavender, that the anxious
+Thorpe grew annoyed with him, but happily Tavender's perceptions were
+less subtle. He gazed about him in his dim-eyed way with childlike
+interest, and babbled cheerfully over his liquor. He had not been
+inside a London club before, and his glimpse of the reading-room, where,
+isolated, purple-faced, retired old Empire-makers sat snorting in the
+silence, their gouty feet propped up on foot-rests, their white brows
+scowling over the pages of French novels, particularly impressed him. It
+was a new and halcyon vision of the way to spend one's declining years.
+And the big smoking-room--where the leather cushions were so low and
+so soft, and the connection between the bells and the waiters was so
+efficient--that was even better.
+
+Thorpe presently made an excuse for taking Kervick apart. “I brought
+this old jackass here for a purpose,” he said in low, gravely mandatory
+tones. “He thinks he's got an appointment at 5:30 this afternoon--but
+he's wrong. He hasn't. He's not going to have any appointment at
+all--for a long time yet. I want you to get him drunk, there where he
+sits, and then take him away with you, and get him drunker still, and
+then take a train with him somewhere--any station but Charing Cross or
+that line--and I don't care where you land with him--Scotland or Ireland
+or France--whatever you like. Here's some money for you--and you can
+write to me for more. I don't care what you say to him--make up any yarn
+you like--only keep him pacified, and keep him away from London, and
+don't let a living soul talk to him--till I give you the word. You'll
+let me know where you are. I'll get away now--and mind, General, a good
+deal depends on the way you please me in this thing.”
+
+The soldier's richly-florid face and intent, bulging blue eyes expressed
+vivid comprehension. He nodded with eloquence as he slipped the notes
+into his trousers pocket. “Absolutely,” he murmured with martial
+brevity, from under his white, tight moustache.
+
+With only a vague word or two of meaningless explanation to Tavender,
+Thorpe took his departure, and walked back to the hotel. From what he
+had learned and surmised, it was not difficult to put the pieces of
+the puzzle together. This ridiculous old fool, he remembered now, had
+reproached himself, when he was in England before, for his uncivil
+neglect of his brother-in-law. By some absurd chance, this damned
+brother-in-law happened to be Gafferson. It was clear enough that, when
+he returned to Mexico, Tavender had written to Gafferson, explaining
+the unexpected pressure of business which had taken up all his time in
+England. Probably he had been idiot enough to relate what he of course
+regarded as the most wonderful piece of good news--how the worthless
+concession he had been deluded into buying had been bought back from
+him. As likely as not he had even identified the concession, and given
+Thorpe's name as that of the man who had first impoverished and then
+mysteriously enriched him. At all events, he had clearly mentioned that
+he had a commission to report upon the Rubber Consols property, and
+had said enough else to create the impression that there were criminal
+secrets connected with its sale to the London Company. The rest was
+easy. Gafferson, knowing Lord Plowden's relation to the Company, had
+shown him Tavender's letter. Lord Plowden, meditating upon it, had seen
+a way to be nasty--and had vindictively plunged into it. He had brought
+Tavender from Mexico to London, to use him as a weapon. All this was as
+obvious as the nose on one's face.
+
+But a weapon for what? Thorpe, as this question put itself in his mind,
+halted before a shop-window full of soft-hued silk fabrics, to muse upon
+an answer. The delicate tints and surfaces of what was before his eyes
+seemed somehow to connect themselves with the subject. Plowden himself
+was delicately-tinted and refined of texture. Vindictiveness was too
+plain and coarse an emotion to sway such a complicated and polished
+organism. He reasoned it out, as he stood with lack-lustre gaze before
+the plate-glass front, aloof among a throng of eager and talkative women
+who pressed around him--that Plowden would not have spent his money on
+a mere impulse of mischief-making. He would be counting upon something
+more tangible than revenge--something that could be counted and weighed
+and converted into a bank-balance. He smiled when he reached this
+conclusion--greatly surprising and confusing a matronly lady into
+whose correct face he chanced to be looking at the instant--and turning
+slowly, continued his walk.
+
+At the office of the hotel, he much regretted not having driven instead,
+for he learned that Semple had twice telephoned from the City for him.
+It was late in the afternoon--he noted with satisfaction that the
+clock showed it to be already past the hour of the Tavender-Gafferson
+appointment,--but he had Semple's office called up, upon the chance that
+someone might be there. The clerk had not consumed more than ten minutes
+in the preliminaries of finding out that no one was there--Thorpe
+meanwhile passing savage comments to the other clerks about the British
+official conception of the telephone as an instrument of discipline and
+humiliation--when Semple himself appeared in the doorway.
+
+The Broker gave an exclamation of relief at seeing Thorpe, and then,
+apparently indifferent to the display of excitement he was exhibiting,
+drew him aside.
+
+“Come somewhere where we can talk,” he whispered nervously.
+
+Thorpe had never seen the little Scotchman in such a flurry. “We'll go
+up to my rooms,” he said, and led the way to the lift.
+
+Upstairs, Semple bolted the door of the sitting-room behind them, and
+satisfied himself that there was no one in the adjoining bedroom. Then,
+unburdening himself with another sigh, he tossed aside his hat, and
+looked keenly up at the big man. “There's the devil to pay,” he said
+briefly.
+
+Thorpe had a fleeting pride in the lethargic, composed front he was able
+to present. “All right,” he said with forced placidity. “If he's got to
+be paid, we'll pay him.” He continued to smile a little.
+
+“It's nah joke,” the other hastened to warn him. “I have it from two
+different quarters. An application has been made to the Stock Exchange
+Committee, this afternoon, to intervene and stop our business, on the
+ground of fraud. It comes verra straight to me.”
+
+Thorpe regarded his Broker contemplatively. The news fitted with
+precision into what he had previously known; it was rendered altogether
+harmless by the precautions he had already taken. “Well, keep your hair
+on,” he said, quietly. “If there were fifty applications, they wouldn't
+matter the worth of that soda-water cork. Won't you have a drink?”
+
+Semple, upon reflection, said he would. The unmoved equipoise of the big
+man visibly reassured him. He sipped at his bubbling tumbler and smacked
+his thin lips. “Man, I've had an awful fright,” he said at last, in the
+tone of one whose ease of mind is returning.
+
+“I gave you credit for more nerve,” observed the other, eyeing him in
+not unkindly fashion over his glass. “You've been so plumb full of sand
+all the while--I didn't think you'd weaken now. Why, we're within two
+days of home, now--and for you to get rattled at this late hour--you
+ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
+
+The Scotchman looked into the bottom of his glass, as he turned it
+thoughtfully round. “I'm relieved to see the way you take it,” he said,
+after a pause. With increased hesitation he went dryly on: “I've never
+enquired minutely into the circumstances of the flotation. It has not
+seemed to be my business to do so, and upon advice I may say that the
+Committee would not hold that such was my business. My position is quite
+clear, upon that point.”
+
+“Oh, perfectly,” Thorpe assented. “It couldn't possibly be any of your
+business--either then, or now.” He gave a significant touch of emphasis
+to these last two words.
+
+“Precisely,” said Semple, with a glance of swift comprehension. “You
+must not think I am asking any intrusive questions. If you tell me
+that--that there is no ground for uneasiness--I am verra pleased indeed
+to accept the assurance. That is ample information for my purposes.”
+
+“You can take it from me,” Thorpe told him. He picked up a red book from
+a side table, and turned over its pages with his thick thumb. “This
+is what Rule 59 says,” he went on: “'NO APPLICATION WHICH HAS FOR ITS
+OBJECT TO ANNUL ANY BARGAIN IN THE STOCK EXCHANGE SHALL BE ENTERTAINED
+BY THE COMMITTEE, UNLESS UPON A SPECIFIC ALLEGATION OF FRAUD OR WILFUL
+MISREPRESENTATION.' Shall be entertained, d'ye see? They can't even
+consider anything of the sort, because it says 'specific,' and I tell
+you plainly that anything 'specific' is entirely out of the question.”
+
+The Broker lifted his sandy brows in momentary apprehension. “If it
+turns upon the precise definition of a word,” he remarked, doubtingly.
+
+“Ah, yes,--but it doesn't,” Thorpe reassured him. “See here--I'll tell
+you something. You're not asking any questions. That's as it should be.
+And I'm not forcing information upon you which you don't need in your
+business. That's as it should be, too. But in between these two, there's
+a certain margin of facts that there's no harm in your knowing. A scheme
+to blackmail me is on foot. It's rather a fool-scheme, if you ask me,
+but it might have been a nuisance if it had been sprung on us unawares.
+It happened, however, that I twigged this scheme about two hours ago. It
+was the damnedest bit of luck you ever heard of----”
+
+“You don't have luck,” put in Semple, appreciatively. “Other men have
+luck. You have something else--I don't give it a name.”
+
+Thorpe smiled upon him, and went on. “I twigged it, anyway. I went out,
+and I drove the biggest kind of spike through that fool-scheme--plumb
+through its heart. Tomorrow a certain man will come to me--oh, I could
+almost tell you the kind of neck-tie he'll wear--and he'll put up his
+bluff to me, and I'll hear him out--and then--then I'll let the floor
+drop out from under him.”
+
+“Aye!” said Semple, with relish.
+
+“Stay and dine with me tonight,” Thorpe impulsively suggested, “and
+we'll go to some Music Hall afterward. There's a knock-about pantomime
+outfit at the Canterbury--Martinetti I think the name is--that's damned
+good. You get plenty of laugh, and no tiresome blab to listen to. The
+older I get, the more I think of people that keep their mouths shut.”
+
+“Aye,” observed Semple again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+IN the Board Room, next day, Thorpe awaited the coming of Lord Plowden
+with the serene confidence of a prophet who not only knows that he
+is inspired, but has had an illicit glimpse into the workings of the
+machinery of events.
+
+He sat motionless at his desk, like a big spider for who time has
+no meaning. Before him lay two newspapers, folded so as to expose
+paragraphs heavily indicated by blue pencil-marks. They were not
+financial journals, and for that reason it was improbable that he would
+have seen these paragraphs, if the Secretary of the Company had not
+marked them, and brought them to him. That official had been vastly more
+fluttered by them than he found it possible to be. In slightly-varying
+language, these two items embedded in so-called money articles reported
+the rumour that a charge of fraud had arisen in connection with the
+Rubber Consols corner, and that sensational disclosures were believed to
+be impending.
+
+Thorpe looked with a dulled, abstracted eye at these papers, lying
+on the desk, and especially at the blue pencil-lines upon them, as he
+pondered many things. Their statement, thus scattered broadcast to the
+public, seemed at once to introduce a new element into the situation,
+and to leave it unchanged. That influence of some sort had been exerted
+to get this story into these papers, it did not occur to him for an
+instant to doubt. To his view, all things that were put into papers
+were put there for a purpose--it would express his notion more clearly,
+perhaps, to say for a price. Of the methods of Fleet Street, he was
+profoundly ignorant, but his impressions of them were all cynical. Upon
+reflection, however, it seemed unlikely to him that Lord Plowden had
+secured the insertion of these rumours. So far as Thorpe could fathom
+that nobleman's game, its aims would not be served by premature
+publicity of this kind.
+
+Gradually, the outlines of a more probable combination took shape in
+his thoughts. There were left in the grip of the “corner” now only
+two victims,--Rostocker and Aronson. They owed this invidious
+differentiation to a number of causes: they had been the chief sellers
+of stock, being between them responsible for the delivery of 8,500
+Rubber Consols shares, which they could not get; they were men of larger
+fortune than the other “shorts,” and therefore could with safety be
+squeezed longest; what was fortunate for him under the circumstances,
+they were the two men against whom Thorpe's personal grudge seemed able
+to maintain itself most easily.
+
+For these reasons, they had already been mulcted in differences to the
+extent of, in round numbers, 165,000 pounds. On the morrow, the twelfth
+of September, it was Thorpe's plan to allow them to buy in the shares
+they needed, at 22 or 23 pounds per share--which would take from them
+nearly 200,000 pounds more. He had satisfied himself that they could,
+and would if necessary, pay this enormous ransom for their final escape
+from the “corner.” Partly because it was not so certain that they could
+pay more, partly because he was satiated with spoils and tired of the
+strain of the business, he had decided to permit this escape.
+
+He realized now, however, that they on their side had planned to escape
+without paying any final ransom at all.
+
+That was clearly the meaning of these paragraphs, and of the
+representations which had yesterday been made to the Stock Exchange
+Committee. He had additional knowledge today of the character of these
+representations. Nothing definite had been alleged, but some of the
+members of the Committee had been informally notified, so Semple had
+this morning learned, that a specific charge of fraud, supported
+by unanswerable proof, was to be brought against the Rubber Consols
+management on the morrow. Thorpe reasoned out now, step by step, what
+that meant. Lord Plowden had sought out Rostocker and Aronson, and
+had told them that he had it in his power ignominiously to break the
+“corner.” He could hardly have told them the exact nature of his power,
+because until he should have seen Tavender he did not himself know what
+it was. But he had given them to understand that he could prove fraud,
+and they, scenting in this the chance of saving 200,000 pounds, and
+seeing that time was so terribly short, had hastened to the Committeemen
+with this vague declaration that, on the morrow, they could prove--they
+did not precisely know what. Yes--plainly enough--that was what had
+happened. And it would be these two Jew “wreckers,” eager to invest
+their speculative notification to the Committee with as much of an
+air of formality as possible, who had caused the allusions to it to be
+published in these papers.
+
+Thorpe's lustreless eye suddenly twinkled with mirth as he reached this
+conclusion; his heavy face brightened into a grin of delight. A vision
+of Lord Plowden's absurd predicament rose vividly before him, and he
+chuckled aloud at it.
+
+It seemed only the most natural thing in the world that, at this
+instant, a clerk should open the door and nod with meaning to the
+master. The visitor whom he had warned the people in the outer office
+he expected, had arrived. Thorpe was still laughing to himself when Lord
+Plowden entered.
+
+“Hallo! How d'ye do!” he called out to him from where he sat at his
+desk.
+
+The hilarity of the manner into which he had been betrayed, upon the
+instant surprised and rather confused him. He had not been altogether
+clear as to how he should receive Plowden, but certainly a warm
+joviality had not occurred to him as appropriate.
+
+The nobleman was even more taken aback. He stared momentarily at the
+big man's beaming mask, and then, with nervous awkwardness, executed a
+series of changes in his own facial expression and demeanour. He flushed
+red, opened his lips to say “Ah!” and then twisted them into a doubting
+and seemingly painful smile. He looked with very bright-eyed intentness
+at Thorpe, as he advanced, and somewhat spasmodically put out his hand.
+
+It occurred to Thorpe not to see this hand. “How are you!” he repeated
+in a more mechanical voice, and withdrew his smile. Lord Plowden
+fidgeted on his feet for a brief, embarrassed interval before the desk,
+and then dropped into a chair at its side. With a deliberate effort at
+nonchalance, he crossed his legs, and caressed the ankle on his knee
+with a careless hand. “Anything new?” he asked.
+
+Thorpe lolled back in his arm-chair. “I'm going to be able to get away
+in a few days' time,” he said, indifferently. “I expect to finally wind
+up the business on the Stock Exchange tomorrow.”
+
+“Ah--yes,” commented Plowden, vacantly. He seemed to be searching after
+thoughts which had wandered astray. “Yes--of course.”
+
+“Yes--of course,” Thorpe said after him, with a latent touch of
+significance.
+
+The other looked up quickly, then glanced away again. “It's all going as
+you expected, is it?” he asked.
+
+“Better than I expected,” Thorpe told him, energetically. “Much better
+than anybody expected.”
+
+“Hah!” said Plowden. After a moment's reflection he went on
+hesitatingly: “I didn't know. I saw something in one of the papers this
+morning,--one of the money articles,--which spoke as if there were some
+doubt about the result. That's why I called.”
+
+“Well--it's damned good of you to come round, and show such a friendly
+interest.” Thorpe's voice seemed candid enough, but there was an
+enigmatic something in his glance which aroused the other's distrust.
+
+“I'm afraid you don't take very much stock in the 'friendly interest,'”
+ he said, with a constrained little laugh.
+
+“I'm not taking stock in anything new just now,” replied Thorpe, lending
+himself lazily to the other's metaphor. “I'm loaded up to the gunnels
+already.”
+
+A minute of rather oppressive silence ensued. Then Plowden ventured upon
+an opening. “All the same, it WAS with an idea of,--perhaps being of use
+to you,--that I came here,” he affirmed. “In what way?” Thorpe put the
+query almost listlessly.
+
+Lord Plowden turned his hands and let his dark eyes sparkle in a gesture
+of amiable uncertainty. “That depended upon what was needed. I got the
+impression that you were in trouble--the paper spoke as if there were
+no doubt of it--and I imagined that quite probably you would be glad to
+talk with me about it.”
+
+“Quite right,” said Thorpe. “So I should.”
+
+This comprehensive assurance seemed not, however, to facilitate
+conversation. The nobleman looked at the pattern of the sock on the
+ankle he was nursing, and knitted his brows in perplexity. “What if the
+Committee of the Stock Exchange decide to interfere?” he asked at last.
+
+“Oh, that would knock me sky-high,” Thorpe admitted.
+
+“Approximately, how much may one take 'sky-high' to mean?”
+
+Thorpe appeared to calculate. “Almost anything up to a quarter of a
+million,” he answered.
+
+“Hah!” said Lord Plowden again. “Well--I understand--I'm given to
+understand--that very likely that is what the Committee will decide.”
+
+“Does it say that in the papers?” asked Thorpe. He essayed an effect of
+concern. “Where did you see that?”
+
+“I didn't see it,” the other explained. “It--it came to me.”
+
+“God!” said Thorpe. “That'll be awful! But are you really in earnest? Is
+that what you hear? And does it come at all straight?”
+
+Lord Plowden nodded portentously. “Absolutely straight,” he said, with
+gravity.
+
+Thorpe, after a momentary stare of what looked like bewilderment,
+was seen to clutch at a straw. “But what was it you were saying?” he
+demanded, with eagerness. “You talked about help--a minute ago. Did you
+mean it? Have you got a plan? Is there something that you can do?”
+
+Plowden weighed his words. “It would be necessary to have a very
+complete understanding,” he remarked.
+
+“Whatever you like,” exclaimed the other.
+
+“Pardon me--it would have to be a good deal more definite than that,”
+ Plowden declared. “A 'burnt child'--you know.”
+
+The big man tapped musingly with his finger-nails on the desk. “We won't
+quarrel about that,” he said. “But what I'd like to know first,--you
+needn't give anything away that you don't want to,--but what's your
+plan? You say that they've got me in a hole, and that you can get me
+out.” “In effect--yes.”
+
+“But how do you know that I can't get myself out? What do you know about
+the whole thing anyway? Supposing I tell you that I laugh at it--that
+there's no more ground for raising the suspicion of fraud than there is
+for--for suspecting that you've got wings and can fly.”
+
+“I--I don't think you'll tell me that,” said Plowden, placidly.
+
+“Well then, supposing I don't tell you that,” the other resumed,
+argumentatively. “Supposing I say instead that it can't be proved. If
+the Committee doesn't have proof NOW,--within twenty-one or twenty-two
+hours,--they can't do anything at all. Tomorrow is settling day. All
+along, I've said I would wind up the thing tomorrow. The market-price
+has been made for me by the jobbers yesterday and today. I'm all ready
+to end the whole business tomorrow--close it all out. And after that's
+done, what do I care about the Stock Exchange Committee? They can
+investigate and be damned! What could they do to me?”
+
+“I think a man can always be arrested and indicted, and sent to penal
+servitude,” said Lord Plowden, with a certain solemnity of tone. “There
+are even well-known instances of extradition.”
+
+Thorpe buried his chin deep in his collar, and regarded his companion
+with a fixed gaze, in which the latter detected signs of trepidation.
+“But about the Committee--and tomorrow,” he said slowly. “What do you
+say about that? How can they act in that lightning fashion? And even if
+proofs could be got, how do you suppose they are to be got on the drop
+of the hat, at a minute's notice?”
+
+“The case is of sufficient importance to warrant a special meeting
+tomorrow morning,” the other rejoined. “One hour's notice, posted in the
+House, is sufficient, I believe. Any three members of the Committee can
+call such a meeting, and I understand that seven make a quorum. You will
+see that a meeting could be held at noon tomorrow, and within half an
+hour could make you a ruined man.”
+
+“I don't know--would you call it quite ruined?” commented Thorpe. “I
+should still have a few sovereigns to go on with.”
+
+“A criminal prosecution would be practically inevitable--after such a
+disclosure,” Plowden reminded him, with augmented severity of tone.
+
+“Don't mix the two things up,” the other urged. There seemed to the
+listener to be supplication in the voice. “It's the action of the
+Committee that you said you could influence. That's what we were talking
+about. You say there will be a special meeting at noon tomorrow----
+
+“I said there could be one,” Plowden corrected him.
+
+“All right. There CAN be one. And do you say that there can be
+proof,--proof against me of fraud,--produced at that meeting?”
+
+“Yes--I say that,” the nobleman affirmed, quietly.
+
+“And further still--do you say that it rests with you whether that proof
+shall be produced or not?”
+
+Lord Plowden looked into the impassive, deep-eyed gaze which covered
+him, and looked away from it again. “I haven't put it in just that
+form,” he said, hesitatingly. “But in essentials--yes, that may be taken
+as true.”
+
+“And what is your figure? How much do you want for holding this proof
+of yours back, and letting me finish scooping the money of your Hebrew
+friends Aronson and Rostocker?”
+
+The peer raised his head, and shot a keenly enquiring glance at the
+other. “Are they my friends?” he asked, with challenging insolence.
+
+“I'm bound to assume that you have been dealing with them, just as you
+are dealing with me.” Thorpe explained his meaning dispassionately, as
+if the transaction were entirely commonplace. “You tell them that you're
+in a position to produce proof against me, and ask them what they'll
+give for it. Then naturally enough you come to me, and ask what I'll be
+willing to pay to have the proof suppressed. I quite understand that I
+must bid against these men--and of course I take it for granted that,
+since you know their figure, you've arranged in your mind what mine is
+to be. I quite understand, too, that I am to pay more than they have
+offered. That is on account of 'friendly interest.'”
+
+“Since you allude to it,” Lord Plowden observed, with a certain calm
+loftiness of tone, “there is no harm in saying that you WILL pay
+something on that old score. Once you thrust the promise of something
+like a hundred thousand pounds positively upon me. You insisted on my
+believing it, and I did so, like a fool. I came to you to redeem the
+promise, and you laughed in my face. Very well. It is my turn now. I
+hold the whip-hand, and I should be an ass not to remember things. I
+shall want that entire one hundred thousand pounds from you, and fifty
+thousand added to it 'on account of the 'friendly interest,' as you so
+intelligently expressed it.”
+
+Thorpe's chin burrowed still deeper upon his breast. “It's an outrage,”
+ he said with feeling. Then he added, in tones of dejected resignation:
+“When will you want it?”
+
+“At the moment when the payments of Rostocker and Aronson are made to
+you, or to your bankers or agents,” Lord Plowden replied, with prepared
+facility. He had evidently given much thought to this part of the
+proceedings. “And of course I shall expect you to draw up now an
+agreement to that effect. I happen to have a stamped paper with me this
+time. And if you don't mind, we will have it properly witnessed--this
+time.”
+
+Thorpe looked at him with a disconcertingly leaden stare, the while he
+thought over what had been proposed. “That's right enough,” he announced
+at last, “but I shall expect you to do some writing too. Since we're
+dealing on this basis, there must be no doubt about the guarantee that
+you will perform your part of the contract.”
+
+“The performance itself, since payment is conditional upon it--” began
+Plowden, but the other interrupted him.
+
+“No, I want something better than that. Here--give me your stamped
+paper.” He took the bluish sheet, and, without hesitation, wrote several
+lines rapidly. “Here--this is my promise,” he said, “to pay you 150,000
+pounds, upon your satisfactory performance of a certain undertaking to
+be separately nominated in a document called 'A,' which we will jointly
+draw up and agree to and sign, and deposit wherever you like--for
+safe keeping. Now, if you'll sit here, and write out for me a similar
+thing--that in consideration of my promise of 150,000 pounds, you
+covenant to perform the undertaking to be nominated in the document
+'A'--and so on.”
+
+Lord Plowden treated as a matter of course the ready and business-like
+suggestion of the other. Taking his place at the desk in turn, he wrote
+out what had been suggested. Thorpe touched a bell, and the clerk who
+came in perfunctorily attested the signatures upon both papers. Each
+principal folded and pocketed the pledge of the other.
+
+“Now,” said Thorpe, when he had seated himself again at the desk, “we
+are all right so far as protection against each other goes. If you don't
+mind, I will draw up a suggestion of what the separate document 'A'
+should set forth. If you don't like it, you can write one.”
+
+He took more time to this task, frowning laboriously over the fresh
+sheet of foolscap, and screening from observation with his hand what he
+was writing. Finally, the task seemed finished to his mind. He took up
+the paper, glanced through it once more, and handed it in silence to the
+other.
+
+In silence also, and with an expression of arrested attention, Lord
+Plowden read these lines:
+
+“The undertaking referred to in the two documents of even date, signed
+respectively by Lord Plowden and Stormont Thorpe, is to the effect
+that at some hour between eleven A.M. and three P.M. of September 12th,
+instant, Lord Plowden shall produce before a special meeting of the
+Committee of the Stock Exchange, the person of one Jerome P. Tavender,
+to explain to said Committee his share in the blackmailing scheme of
+which Lord Plowden, over his own signature, has furnished documentary
+evidence.”
+
+The nobleman continued to look down at the paper, after the power to
+hold it without shaking had left his hand. There came into his face,
+mingling with and vitiating its rich natural hues of health, a kind of
+grey shadow. It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint.
+He did not lift his eyes.
+
+Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation of his trick with
+boisterous and scornful mirth. Even while the victim was deciphering the
+fatal paper, he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst
+out into bitter laughter. But now there was something in the aspect of
+Plowden's collapse which seemed to forbid triumphant derision. He was
+taking his blow so like a gentleman,--ashen-pale and quivering, but
+clinging to a high-bred dignity of silence,--that the impulse to exhibit
+equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant.
+
+“Well--you see how little business you've got, setting yourself to buck
+against a grown-up man.”
+
+He offered the observation in the tone of the school-teacher, affectedly
+philosophical but secretly jubilant, who harangues a defeated and
+humiliated urchin upon his folly.
+
+“Oh, chuck it!” growled Lord Plowden, staring still at the calamitous
+paper.
+
+Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence was after all
+most decorous. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and tipping
+back his chair, surveyed the discomfited Viscount impassively. He
+forbore even to smile.
+
+“So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!” Lord Plowden had
+found words at last. As he spoke, he lifted his face, and made a show of
+looking the other in the eye.
+
+“Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even, that you haven't
+an inkling of,” Thorpe told him, lightly. “I've been watching every move
+you've made, seeing further ahead in your own game than you did. Why, it
+was too easy! It was like playing draughts with a girl. I knew you would
+come today, for example. I told the people out there that I expected
+you.”
+
+“Yes-s,” said the other, with rueful bewilderment. “You seem to have
+been rather on the spot--I confess.”
+
+“On the spot? All over the place!” Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his
+chair, and put more animation into his voice.
+
+“It's the mistake you people make!” he declared oracularly. “You think
+that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great
+combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the
+smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em,
+and make for himself a big fortune--and still be a fool! You imagine
+that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked by amateurs like
+yourself. It's too ridiculous!”
+
+The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun
+to spread through Plowden's consciousness. It was almost more surprising
+to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed
+himself to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept
+back into his glance. He breathed more easily.
+
+“You are right!” he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of
+fervid conviction to the tone of his words. The big brute's pride in his
+own brains and power was still his weakest point. “You are right! I did
+play the fool. And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first
+man in London to recognize the immense forces in you. I said to you at
+the very outset, 'You are going to go far. You are going to be a great
+man.' You remember that, don't you?”
+
+Thorpe nodded. “Yes--I remember it.”
+
+The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket,
+and extracted a match. “Do you mind?” he asked, and scarcely waiting for
+a token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied
+it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. The two men
+watched it curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate,
+without a word.
+
+This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of
+the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it
+became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and
+put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.
+
+“It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me,” he said, in
+an altered, harsh tone, “but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old bum
+of a Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and
+he's a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what
+one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and
+spend your money,--money I gave you, by the way,--in bringing Tavender
+over here. You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using him
+against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for
+a still bigger profit. You see it's all at my fingers' ends.”
+
+Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent.
+
+“Well then--Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to
+meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've set out to fight one of the
+smartest and strongest men in England, and I've got to keep every atom
+of wits about me, and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every
+point of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it! You
+snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson--Gafferson!--the mud-head of the
+earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and
+bring him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My God!
+You've only got two clear days left to do the whole thing in--and
+you don't even come up to town to get ready for them! You send
+Gafferson--and he goes off to see a flower-show--Mother of Moses! think
+of it! a FLOWER-show!--and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll
+together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so
+on, to our hearts' content. Really, it's too easy! You make me tired!”
+
+The nobleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile. “I confess to a
+certain degree of weariness myself,” he said, humbly.
+
+Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion for a little.
+“I may tell you that if you HAD got hold of Tavender,” he decided to
+tell him, “he shouldn't have been of the faintest use to you. I know
+what it was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn't understand it when
+he first told me, but afterwards I saw through it,--and it was merely a
+maudlin misapprehension of his. He'd got three or four things all mixed
+up together. You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd
+enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred yards off. What
+little brain he's got left is soaked in it. The first time I was ever
+camping with him, I had to lick him for drinking the methylated spirits
+we were using with our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!”
+
+“Evidently,” said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, “it was all a most
+unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake.” With inspiration, he made
+bold to add: “The most amazing thing, though--to my mind--is that you
+don't seem--what shall I say?--particularly enraged with me about it.”
+
+“Yes--that surprises me, too,” Thorpe meditatively admitted. “I was
+entitled to kill you--crush you to jelly. Any other man I would. But
+you,--I don't know,--I do funny things with you.”
+
+“I wish you would give me a drink, now--as one of them,” Plowden
+ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry.
+
+Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved across the room.
+He set out upon the big official table in the middle, that mockingly
+pretentious reminder of a Board which never met, a decanter and two
+glasses and some recumbent, round-bottomed bottles. He handed one of
+these last to Plowden, as the latter strolled toward the table.
+
+“You know how to open these, don't you?” he said, languidly. “Somehow I
+never could manage it.”
+
+The nobleman submissively took the bottle, and picked with awkwardness
+at its wire and cork, and all at once achieved a premature and not
+over-successful explosion. He wiped his dripping cuff in silence, when
+the tumblers were supplied.
+
+“Well--here's better luck to you next time,” Thorpe said, lifting his
+glass. The audacious irony of his words filled Plowden with an instant
+purpose.
+
+“What on earth did you round on me in that way for, Thorpe--when I was
+here last?” He put the question with bravery enough, but at sight of the
+other's unresponsive face grew suddenly timorous aud explanatory. “No
+man was ever more astounded in the world than I was. To this day I'm as
+unable to account for it as a babe unborn. What conceivable thing had I
+done to you?”
+
+Thorpe slowly thought of something that had not occurred to him before,
+and seized upon it with a certain satisfaction.
+
+“That day that you took me shooting,” he said, with the tone of one
+finally exposing a long-nursed grievance, “you stayed in bed for hours
+after you knew I was up and waiting for you--and when we went out, you
+had a servant to carry a chair for you, but I--by God!--I had to stand
+up.”
+
+“Heavens above!” ejaculated Plowden, in unfeigned amazement.
+
+“These are little things--mere trifles,” continued Thorpe, dogmatically,
+“but with men of my temper and make-up those are just the things that
+aggravate and rankle and hurt. Maybe it's foolish, but that's the kind
+of man I am. You ought to have had the intelligence to see that--and not
+let these stupid little things happen to annoy me. Why just think what
+you did. I was going to do God knows what for you--make your fortune and
+everything else,--and you didn't show consideration enough for me to get
+out of bed at a decent hour--much less see to it that I had a chair if
+you were going to have one.”
+
+“Upon my word, I can't tell how ashamed and sorry I am,” Lord Plowden
+assured him, with fervent contrition in his voice.
+
+“Well, those are the things to guard against,” said Thorpe, approaching
+a dismissal of the subject. “People who show consideration for me;
+people who take pains to do the little pleasant things for me, and see
+that I'm not annoyed and worried by trifles--they're the people that
+I, on my side, do the big things for. I can be the best friend in the
+world, but only to those who show that they care for me, and do what
+they know I'll like. I don't want toadies about me, but I do want people
+who feel bound to me, and are as keen about me and my feelings and
+interests as they are about their own.”
+
+“It is delightfully feudal--all this,” commented the nobleman, smilingly
+addressing the remark to nobody in particular. Then he looked at Thorpe.
+“Let me be one of them--one of the people you speak of,” he said, with
+directness.
+
+Thorpe returned his look with the good-natured beginnings of a grin.
+“But what would you be good for?” he queried, in a bantering tone.
+“People I have about me have to be of some use. They require to have
+heads on their shoulders. Why--just think what you've done. I don't mean
+so much about your letting Tavender slip through your fingers--although
+that was about the worst I ever heard of. But here in this room, at
+that desk there, you allowed me to bounce you into writing and signing
+a paper which you ought to have had your hand cut off rather than write,
+much less sign. You come here trying to work the most difficult and
+dangerous kind of a bluff,--knowing all the while that the witness you
+depended entirely upon had disappeared, you hadn't the remotest idea
+where,--and you actually let me lead you into giving me your signature
+to your own declaration that you are blackmailing me! Thinking it all
+over--you know--I can't see that you would be of much help to me in the
+City.”
+
+Lord Plowden joined perforce in the laughter with which the big man
+enjoyed his own pleasantry. His mirth had some superficial signs of
+shamefacedness, but it was hopeful underneath. “The City!” he echoed,
+with meaning. “That's the curse of it. What do I know about the City?
+What business have I in the City? As you said, I'm the amateur. A strong
+man like you can make me seem any kind of a ridiculous fool he likes,
+with the turn of his hand. I see that right enough. But what am I to do?
+I have to make a shot at something. I'm so rotten poor!”
+
+Thorpe had retired again behind the barrier of dull-eyed abstraction. He
+seemed not to have heard this appealing explanation.
+
+The other preserved silence in turn, and even made a pretence of looking
+at some pamphlets on the table, as a token of his boundless deference to
+the master's mood.
+
+“I don't know. I'll see,” the big man muttered at last, doubtfully.
+
+Lord Plowden felt warranted in taking an optimistic view of these vague
+words. “It's awfully good of you”--he began, lamely, and then paused.
+“I wonder,”--he took up a new thought with a more solicitous tone,--“I
+wonder if you would mind returning to me that idiotic paper I signed.”
+
+Thorpe shook his head. “Not just now, at any rate,” he said, still
+musingly. With his head bowed, he took a few restless steps.
+
+“But you are going to--to help me!” the other remarked, with an air of
+confidence. He had taken up his hat, in response to the tacit warning of
+his companion's manner.
+
+Thorpe looked at him curiously, and hesitated over his answer. It was a
+surprising and almost unaccountable conclusion for the interview to
+have reached. He was in some vague way ashamed of himself, but he was
+explicitly and contemptuously ashamed for Plowden, and the impulse to
+say so was strong within him. This handsome young gentleman of title
+ought not to be escaping with this restored buoyancy of mien, and this
+complacency of spirit. He had deserved to be punished with a heavy hand,
+and here he was blithely making certain of new benefits instead.
+
+“I don't know--I'll see,” Thorpe moodily repeated--and there was no more
+to be said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people had made
+themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up.
+
+It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so
+little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but
+he had slept very badly in it, none the less. The room was luxuriously
+furnished, as was the entire suite, but it was all strange and
+uncomfortable to his senses. The operation of shaving and dressing in
+solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. He regretted not having
+brought his man with him for this reason, and then, upon meditation, for
+other reasons. A person of his position ought always to have a servant
+with him. The hotel people must have been surprised at his travelling
+unattended--and the people at High Thorpe must also have thought it
+strange. It flashed across his mind that no doubt his wife had most of
+all thought it strange. How would she explain to herself his sudden,
+precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite naturally
+put an unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to
+remember that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much
+worse to be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over
+his mysterious absence in her mind.
+
+He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt
+signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and
+made his way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his
+in the old days--but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It
+seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with
+his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a
+hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost
+the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and
+from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the
+discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his
+unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east,
+and ever and again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway,
+and flung it in his face.
+
+He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose, and with
+no very definite reflections. It occurred to him that if his wife did
+impute to him some unworthy motive in stealing off to London, and
+made herself unhappy in doing so--that would at least provide the
+compensation of showing that she cared. The thought, however, upon
+examination, contained very meagre elements of solace. He could not in
+the least be sure about any of the workings of her mind. There might be
+more or less annoyance mixed up this morning with the secret thoughts
+she had concerning him--or she might not be bothering her head about him
+at all. This latter contingency had never presented itself so frankly to
+him before. He looked hard at it, and saw more semblances of probability
+about it than he liked. It might very well be that she was not thinking
+about him one way or the other.
+
+A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need think about him
+pervaded his soul. Who cared what he said or did or felt? The City had
+forgotten his very existence. In the West End, only here and there some
+person might chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder
+who had married Lady Cressage. Nowhere else in England, save one dull
+strip of agricultural blankness in a backward home county, was there
+a human being who knew anything whatever about him. And this was his
+career! It was for this that he had planned that memorable campaign, and
+waged that amazing series of fortnightly battles, never missing victory,
+never failing at any point of the complicated strategy, and crowning it
+all with a culminating triumph which had been the wonder and admiration
+of the whole financial world! A few score of menials or interested
+inferiors bowed to him; he drove some good horses, and was attentively
+waited upon, and had a never-failing abundance of good things to eat and
+drink aud smoke. Hardly anything more than that, when you came to think
+of it--and the passing usufruct of all these things could be enjoyed by
+any fool who had a ten-pound note in his pocket!
+
+What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had achieved power--and
+where was that power? What had he done with it? What COULD he do with
+it? He had an excess of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it
+command an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox, as he
+dimly perceived. There existed only a narrow margin of advantage in
+favour of the rich man. He could eat and drink a little more and a
+little better than the poor man; he could have better clothes, and lie
+abed later in the morning, and take life easier all round--but only
+within hard and fast bounds. There was an ascertained limit beyond which
+the millionaire could no more stuff himself with food and wine than
+could the beggar. It might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in
+bed in the morning, but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So
+it ran indefinitely--this thin selvedge of advantage which money
+could buy--with deprivation on the one side, and surfeit on the other.
+Candidly, was it not true that more happiness lay in winning the way out
+of deprivation, than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The
+poor man succeeding in making himself rich--at numerous stages of the
+operation there might be made a moral snap-shot of the truly happy man.
+But not after he had reached the top. Then disintegration began at once.
+The contrast between what he supposed he could do, and what he finds it
+possible to do, is too vast to be accepted with equanimity.
+
+It must be said that after breakfast--a meal which he found in an
+Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension,
+and ate with an almost novel relish--Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy
+views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into
+warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite
+unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his
+meditations. He established in his mind the proposition that since an
+excess of enjoyment was impossible--since one could not derive a great
+block of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, but
+at the most could only gather a little from each--the desirable thing
+was to multiply as much as might be those tastes and whims and fancies
+which passed for appetites, and thus expand the area of possible
+gratification.
+
+This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply itself to his
+individual needs with much facility. What did he want to do that he had
+not done? It was difficult for him to say. Perhaps it was chandlers'
+signs and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring preoccupation
+suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets, which raised the question
+of a yacht in his mind. Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once
+dwelt with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it would still
+be full of attractions for him. He liked the water, and the water
+liked him--and he was better able now than formerly to understand how
+luxurious existence can be made in modern private ships. He decided that
+he would have a yacht--and then perceived that the decision brought no
+exhilaration. He was no happier than before. He could decide that he
+would have anything he chose to name--and it would in no whit lighten
+his mood. The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively as
+spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired of the one as
+he had of the other?
+
+He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something he had never
+admitted to himself. Was he indeed tired of High Thorpe? He had assured
+his wife to the contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his
+own mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself. He carried
+a weariness about with him, which looked at everything with apathetic
+eyes, and cared for nothing. Some nameless paralysis had settled upon
+his capacity for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it. He had
+had the power to expand his life to the farthest boundaries of rich
+experience and sensation, and he had deliberately shrunk into a sort of
+herbaceous nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had
+London at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might
+mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than
+that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with
+dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.
+
+Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently
+came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him.
+He walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign
+fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting
+recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped,
+to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the
+left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian
+buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of
+the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and
+the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the
+picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied
+smugness--of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could
+be more commonplace to the eye.
+
+Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels
+of power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within
+those doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct
+the movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and
+their cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between
+them wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth.
+They could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole
+people, or decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of
+their little family council. He remembered now how he had stood on this
+same spot, and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull
+houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild--and
+that was only a little over a year ago!
+
+There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found
+himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the
+little knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the
+doorway. It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding
+within. One of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for
+aught he knew; at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were
+on the premises. He had heard it said that the very head of the house
+listened to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon, and
+interrupted his conversations with the most important of non-commercial
+callers, to make or refuse bargains in shares offered by brokers who
+came in. What impulse lay behind this extraordinary devotion to labour?
+Toward what conceivable goal could it be striving?
+
+To work hard and risk great things for the possession of a fortune, in
+order to enjoy it afterward--he could understand how that attracted
+men. But to possess already the biggest of human fortunes, and still
+work--that baffled him. He wished he knew some of those men in there,
+especially if they belonged to the place. It would be wonderfully
+interesting to get at the inner point of view of New Court.
+
+A little later, in Colin Semple's office, he sat down to await the
+coming of that gentleman. “Then he doesn't get here so early nowadays?”
+ he suggested to the head-clerk who, with instant recognition and
+exaggerated deference, had ushered him into this furthermost private
+room. It pleased him to assume that prosperity had relaxed the
+Scotchman's vigilance.
+
+“Oh yes, sir,” the clerk replied. “A bit earlier if anything, as a rule.
+But I think he is stopping at his solicitors on his way to the City. I
+hope you are very well, sir.”
+
+“Yes--I'm very fit--thanks,” Thorpe said, listlessly, and the other left
+him.
+
+Mr. Semple, when at last he arrived, bustled into the room with
+unaffected gratification at the news he had heard without. “Well, well,
+Thorpe man!” he cried, and shook hands cordially. “This is fine! If
+I'd only known you were in town! Why wouldn't you have told me you were
+coming? I'd never have kept you waiting.”
+
+Thorpe laughed wearily. “I hardly knew I was in town myself. I only ran
+up last night. I thought it would amuse me to have a look round--but
+things seem as dull as ditchwater.”
+
+“Oh no,” said Semple, “the autumn is opening verra well indeed. There
+are more new companies, and a better public subscription all round, than
+for any first week of October I remember. Westralians appear bad on
+the face of things, it's true--but don't believe all you hear of them.
+There's more than the suspicion of a 'rig' there. Besides, you haven't a
+penny in them.”
+
+“I wasn't thinking of that,” Thorpe told him, with comprehensive
+vagueness. “Well, I suppose you're still coining money,” he observed,
+after a pause.
+
+“Keeping along--keeping along,” the broker replied, cheerfully. “I canna
+complain.” Thorpe looked at him with a meditative frown. “Well, what are
+you going to do with it, after you've got it?” he demanded, almost with
+sharpness.
+
+The Scotchman, after a surprised instant, smiled. “Oh, I'll just keep my
+hands on it,” he assured him, lightly.
+
+“That isn't what I mean,” Thorpe said, groping after what he did
+mean, with sullen tenacity, among his thoughts. His large, heavy face
+exhibited a depressed gravity which attracted the other's attention.
+
+“What's the matter?” Semple asked quickly. “Has anything gone wrong with
+you?”
+
+Thorpe slowly shook his head. “What better off do you think you'll be
+with six figures than you are with five?” he pursued, with dogmatic
+insistence.
+
+Semple shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have grown much brighter
+and gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. Apparently he was somewhat
+stouter, and certainly there was a mellowed softening of his sharp
+glance and shrewd smile. It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat
+nonplussed him, but his good-humour was unflagging.
+
+“It's the way we're taught at school,” he hazarded, genially. “In all
+the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six.”
+
+“They're wrong,” Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a
+grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement.
+“What I mean is--what's the good of piling up money, while you can't
+pile up the enjoyments it will buy? What will a million give you, that
+the fifth of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?”
+
+“Aye,” said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. “So
+you've come to that frame of mind, have you? Why does a man go on and
+shoot five hundred pheasants, when he can eat only one?”
+
+“Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing more to say,”
+ Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. “I've always thought of
+you as a man like myself, who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy
+himself.”
+
+The Scotchman laughed joyously. “Enjoy myself! Like you!” he cried.
+“Man, you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's funeral! What's come over
+you? I know what it is. You go and take a course of German waters----”
+
+“Oh, that be damned!” Thorpe objected, gloomily. “I tell you I'm all
+right. Only--only--God! I've a great notion to go and get drunk.”
+
+Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic expression.
+“I'm sorry you're so hipped,” he said, in gentle tones. “It can't be
+more than some passing whimsy. You're in no real trouble, are you?--no
+family trouble?”
+
+Thorpe shook his head. “The whole thing is rot!” he affirmed,
+enigmatically.
+
+“What whole thing?” The broker perched on the edge of his desk, and with
+patient philosophy took him up. “Do you mean eighty thousand a year is
+rot? That depends upon the man who has it.”
+
+“I know that well enough,” broke in the other, heavily. “That's what I'm
+kicking about. I'm no good!”
+
+Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips in
+reflection. “That's not the case,” he observed with argumentative
+calmness. “You're a great deal of good. I'm not so sure that what you've
+been trying to do is any good, though. Come!--I read you like large
+print. You've set out to live the life of a rich country squire--and it
+hasn't come off. It couldn't come off! I never believed it would. You
+haven't the taste for it inbred in your bones. You haven't the thousand
+little habits and interests that they take in with their mother's milk,
+and that make such a life possible. When you look at a hedge, you don't
+think of it as something to worry live animals out of. When you see one
+of your labourers, you don't care who his father was, or which dairymaid
+his uncle ought to have married, if he had wanted to get a certain
+cottage. You don't want to know the name of everybody whose roof you can
+see; much less could you remember them, and talk about them, and listen
+to gossip about them, year after year. It isn't a passion in your blood
+to ride to hounds, and to shoot, and all that. It doesn't come to you
+by tradition--and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might be a
+substitute for tradition. What are you doing in the country, then? Just
+eating too much, and sitting about, and getting fat and stupid. If you
+want the truth, there it is for you.”
+
+Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon reflection to the
+view that this was the truth. “That's all right, as far as it goes,” he
+assented, with hesitation. “But what the hell else is there?”
+
+The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis to drop
+it in an incomplete state. “A year ago,” he went on, “you had won your
+victories like a veritable Napoleon. You had everything in your own
+hands; Napoleon himself was not more the master of what he saw about
+him than you were. And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired
+yourself to your Elba. It wasn't that you were beaten and driven there
+by others; you went of your own accord. Have you ever thought, Thorpe,
+of this? Napoleon was the greatest man of his age--one of the greatest
+men of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred other ways. He spent
+the last six years of his life at St. Helena--in excellent health and
+with companions that he talked freely to--and in all the extraordinarily
+copious reports of his conversations there, we don't get a single
+sentence worth repeating. If you read it, you'll see he talked like a
+dull, ordinary body. The greatness had entirely evaporated from him, the
+moment he was put on an island where he had nothing to do.”
+
+“Yes-s,” said Thorpe, thoughtfully. He accepted the application without
+any qualms about the splendour of the comparison it rested upon. He had
+done the great things, just as Semple said, and there was no room for
+false modesty about them in his mind. “The trouble is,” he began, “that
+I did what I had always thought I wanted to do most. I was quite certain
+in my mind that that was what I wanted. And if we say now that I was
+wrong--if we admit that that wasn't what I really wanted--why then, God
+knows what it is I DO want. I'll be hanged if I do!”
+
+“Come back to the City,” Semple told him. “That's where you belong.”
+
+“No--no!” Thorpe spoke with emphasis. “That's where you're all off. I
+don't belong in the City at all. I hate the whole outfit. What the devil
+amusement would it be to me to take other men's money away from them?
+I'd be wanting all the while to give it back to them. And certainly I
+wouldn't get any fun out of their taking my money away from me. Besides,
+it doesn't entertain me. I've no taste at all for it. I never look at a
+financial paper now. I could no more interest myself in all that stuff
+again than I could fly. That's the hell of it--to be interested in
+anything.”
+
+“Go in for politics,” the other suggested, with less warmth.
+
+“Yes, I know,” Thorpe commented, with a lingering tone. “Perhaps I ought
+to think more about that. By the way, what's Plowden doing? I've lost
+all track of him.”
+
+“Abroad somewhere, I fancy,” Semple replied. His manner exhibited a
+profound indifference. “When his mother died he came into something--I
+don't know how much. I don't think I've seen him since--and that must
+have been six months and more ago.”
+
+“Yes. I heard about it at the time,” the other said. “It must be about
+that. His sister and brother--the young Plowdens--they're coming to us
+at the end of the week, I believe. You didn't hit it off particularly
+with Plowden, eh?”
+
+Semple emitted a contemptuous little laugh. “I did not quarrel with
+him--if you mean that,” he said, “but even to please you, Thorpe, I
+couldn't bring myself to put my back into the job of making money for
+him. He was treated fairly--even generously, d'ye mind. I should think,
+all told, he had some thirty thousand pounds for his shares, and that's
+a hundred times as much as I had a pleasure in seeing him get. Each man
+can wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand another
+man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the chance came.”
+
+“THAT'S all right,” Thorpe assured him, easily. “I never told you that
+he was any good. I merely felt like giving him a leg up--because really
+at the start he was of use to me. I did owe him something....It was at
+his house that I met my wife.”
+
+“Aye,” said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who
+had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could
+think of no one else in the City whom he desired to see. A call upon
+his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant
+courtesy by those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely
+worth the trouble.
+
+He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch
+of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when
+the whim seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were
+like. After luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from
+St. Giles, through avenues which had not existed in the London of his
+boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials. Here also the landmarks
+seemed all changed, but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and
+disorder to identify the district. He observed it and its inhabitants
+with a certain new curiosity. A notable alteration for the better had
+come over his spirits. It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it
+might be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple, that had
+dissipated his gloom. At all events it was gone--and he strolled along
+in quite placid contentment, taking in the panorama of London's more
+intimate life with the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh
+country eye.
+
+He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the
+spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had
+not supposed it possible to do. He surrendered himself to the experience
+with a novel sense of having found something worth while--and found it,
+moreover, under his very nose. In some dull, meaningless fashion he had
+always known this part of London, and been familiar with its external
+aspects. Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of
+seeing it all in a different way. The objects he beheld, inanimate
+and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. His mind was stirred
+pleasurably by the things they said to him.
+
+He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the
+barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at
+the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their
+shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or
+about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy,
+shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background
+of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown
+theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts,
+sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some
+survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly,
+their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where
+through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse;
+at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to
+him--faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding,
+faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by
+resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it
+were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed
+alive to him before.
+
+Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's
+book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and
+stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident
+that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship.
+It pleased Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and
+pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. He had
+almost the temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and
+see what the lad would do. It was remarkable, he reflected with
+satisfaction--this new capacity within him to find drama in trifles.
+
+There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he
+had had with his sister about the sign overhead. He stepped back a
+few paces and looked up at it. There were the old words--“Thorpe,
+Bookseller”--right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a
+novel prominence. Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been
+repainted. At this he laughed aloud. The details of the episode came
+back to him now. For some reason, or no reason at all--he could not now
+imagine what on earth could have prompted him--he had last spring caused
+his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney, should
+be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. It was to Julia that he
+had confided this mission, and it was Julia who, in a round-about
+way, had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do
+nothing of the sort. He laughed again at the added defiance that this
+refurbishing of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly
+as he entered the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.
+
+She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he
+could remember her--tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling
+as it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. Her long,
+mannish countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence,
+when she recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was
+pleased or otherwise. In their infrequent latter-day encounters he had
+dropped the habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in
+her manner of expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now--but upon
+a sudden impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt
+waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.
+
+Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his
+embrace, was plain enough. “Well!” she exclaimed vaguely, and then
+looked at him. “You're getting fatter.”
+
+“No I'm not,” he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an
+important topic. “People think I am--but it's merely the looseness of
+these clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last.”
+
+The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this
+last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. “Let's
+see--that was just before Christmas, wasn't it?” he said.
+
+“Something like that,” she responded. “You were going to get married
+in a week or two, I remember, and THAT was in January, wasn't it? I was
+taking stock, I know.”
+
+He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his
+marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday,
+and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic
+life, annoyed him afresh. “You're an awful goat, not to come near us,”
+ he felt impelled, in brotherly frankness, to tell her.
+
+She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which
+it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. “I
+thought that was all settled and done with long ago,” she said, moodily.
+
+“Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou,” he observed, with reassuring
+kindness of tone. “I never felt so much like being nice to you in my
+life.”
+
+She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new
+fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
+
+“Julia and Alfred all right?” he queried, cheerfully.
+
+“I daresay,” she made brief answer.
+
+“But they write to you, don't they?”
+
+“SHE does--sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well, from
+what she says.”
+
+“She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,” he told her, in
+tones of confidential reproach.
+
+“Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say,” she
+answered, as if the explanation were ample.
+
+The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf,
+where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental
+student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable
+pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and
+occupation of a home of her own. They had taken a house for the summer
+and autumn, and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for
+the winter.
+
+“What I would really have liked,” Thorpe confided to his sister now,
+“was to have had them both live with me. They would have been as welcome
+as the day is long. I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if
+he's set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad. Even the best
+English artists, he says, do that at the beginning. So it was all right
+for him to go. But Julia--it was different with her--I was rather keen
+about her staying. My wife was just as keen as I was. She took the
+greatest fancy to Julia from the very start--and so far as I could
+see, Julia liked her all right. In fact, I thought Julia would want to
+stay--but somehow she didn't.”
+
+“She always spoke very highly of your wife,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed with
+judicial fairness. “I think she does like her very much.”
+
+“Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those Dutchmen
+for, when one of the best houses in England was open to her?” Thorpe
+demanded.
+
+“You mustn't ask me,” her mother responded. Her tone seemed to carry
+the suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's
+interests.
+
+“I don't believe you know any more about it than I do,” was his
+impulsive comment.
+
+“I daresay not,” she replied, with indifference. “Probably she didn't
+fancy living in so big a house--although heaven knows her ideas are big
+enough about most things.”
+
+“Did she say so?” Thorpe asked abruptly.
+
+The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. “She didn't
+say anything to me about it, one way or the other. I formed my own
+impressions--that's all. It's a free country. Everybody can form their
+impressions.”
+
+“I wish you'd tell me what you really think,” Thorpe urged her, mildly
+persuasive. “You know how fond I am of Julia, and how little I want to
+do her an injustice.”
+
+“Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way,” Louisa observed, vaguely. “If you ask
+me plain, I think it was dull for her.”
+
+“Well,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “I shouldn't be surprised if it
+was. I hadn't thought of that. But still--why she and my wife could be
+company for each other.”
+
+“You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,” she told him,
+in an unexpected flight of metaphor. “Two women cooped up in a lonesome
+country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself
+would be--but not much. It's none of my business--but how your wife must
+hate it!”
+
+He laughed easily. “Ah, that's where you're wrong,” he said. “She
+doesn't care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy
+about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting
+the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating
+apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do
+you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the
+amaryllises--and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you
+like. Well, that's her passion. That's what she really loves.”
+
+“That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,”
+ Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother
+she went on. “Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four
+customers--ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title,
+too--and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when
+they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to
+me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart
+doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all
+day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own
+way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to
+occupy themselves with--and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd even
+do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank God I don't!”
+
+“That's because you don't know anything about the country,” he told her,
+but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in
+his own ears. “All you know outside of London is Margate.”
+
+“I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer,” she informed him,
+crushingly.
+
+Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. “I know what you mean, Lou,” he
+said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. “I suppose there's a
+good deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you
+have too much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never
+occurred to me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is
+there to do? We tried a house in London, during the Season----”
+
+“Yes, I saw in the papers you were here,” she said impassively, in
+comment upon his embarrassed pause.
+
+“I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see
+me”--he explained with a certain awkwardness--“but bye-gones are all
+bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one
+endless procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties;
+we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well
+there you are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfordshire, and it's
+stupid here. Of course one can travel abroad, but that's no good
+for more than a few months. Of course it would be different if I had
+something to do. I tell you God's truth, Lou--sometimes I feel as if I
+was really happier when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot--I really
+wasn't--but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was.”
+
+She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. “Didn't it ever occur
+to you to do some good with your money?” she said, with slow bluntness.
+Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: “I
+don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes;
+we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while
+we were doing it--but I mean outside, in the world at large.”
+
+“What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't make it; I'm
+not responsible for it.” He muttered the phrases lightly enough, but a
+certain fatuity in them seemed to attract his attention when he heard
+their sound. “I've given between five and six thousand pounds to London
+hospitals within the present year,” he added, straightening himself. “I
+wonder you didn't see it. It was in all the papers.”
+
+“Hospitals!”
+
+It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her voice imported into
+the word. He looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and then took in the
+impression that she was upon a subject which exceptionally interested
+her. Certainly the display of something approaching animation in her
+glance and manner was abnormal.
+
+“I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'” she reminded him, still with a
+vibration of feeling in her tone. “You must live in the country, if
+you think London hospitals are deserving objects. They couldn't fool
+Londoners on that point, not if they had got the Prince to go on his
+hands and knees. And you give a few big cheques to them,” she went on,
+meditatively, “and you never ask how they're managed, or what rings are
+running them for their own benefit, or how your money is spent--and you
+think you've done a noble, philanthropic thing! Oh no--I wasn't talking
+about humbug charity. I was talking about doing some genuine good in the
+world.”
+
+He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat back with a
+smile. “All right,” he said, genially. “What do you propose?”
+
+“I don't propose anything,” she told him, after a moment's hesitation.
+“You must work that out for yourself. What might seem important to
+me might not interest you at all--and if you weren't interested you
+wouldn't do anything. But this I do say to you, Joel--and I've said it
+to myself every day for this last year or more, and had you in mind all
+the time, too--if I had made a great fortune, and I sat about in
+purple and fine linen doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and
+selfishness, letting my riches accumulate and multiply themselves
+without being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look my
+fellow-creatures in the face! You were born here. You know what London
+slums are like. You know what Clare Market was like--it's bad enough
+still--and what the Seven Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places
+round here are like to this day. That's only within a stone's throw.
+Have you seen Charles Booth's figures about the London poor? Of course
+you haven't--and it doesn't matter. You KNOW what they are like. But you
+don't care. The misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two
+or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your
+money-bags and smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for
+a brother!”
+
+“Well, I'm damned!” was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this
+outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. “Since
+when have you been taken this way?” he asked at last, mechanically
+jocular.
+
+“That's all right,” she declared with defensive inconsequence. “It's the
+way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning.”
+
+He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for
+demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked
+about in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was
+to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he
+had been conscious.
+
+“How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too--from the
+beginning?” he demanded of her, almost with truculence. “You say I sit
+on my money-bags and smile--you abuse me with doing no good with my
+money--how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this
+while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did
+believe in me!”
+
+She sniffed at him. “I don't believe in you now, at all events,” she
+said, bluntly.
+
+He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. “Why, this very
+day”--he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming
+up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his
+brain--“this whole day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground
+you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and
+alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the
+things they buy and the way they live--and thinking out my plans for
+doing something. I don't claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more
+than what a man in my position ought to do. But I own that to come in,
+actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's
+own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the
+rest of it--I must say, that's a bit rum.”
+
+Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected
+to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown
+with which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after
+some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to
+avoid offense. “It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if
+you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. You're too
+used to it for that.”
+
+He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his assurances than
+this--but after all, one did not look to Louisa for enthusiasms. The
+depth of feeling she had disclosed on this subject of London's poor
+still astonished him, but principally now because of its unlikely
+source. If she had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed
+disposition, he could have understood it. But she had been always the
+hard, dry, unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself
+to be a volatile and even sentimental person. If she had such views
+as these, it became clear to him that his own views were even much
+advanced.
+
+“It's a tremendous subject,” he said, with loose largeness of manner.
+“Only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. The
+only way is to start with the understanding that something is going
+to be done. No matter how many difficulties there are in the way,
+SOMETHING'S GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out with that, why
+then he can fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or
+bend them to suit his purpose, and accomplish something.”
+
+Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with--yet
+somehow remained, if not skeptical, then passively unconvinced. “What
+are your plans?” she asked him.
+
+“Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything,” he told her, with prepared
+readiness. “It isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked
+theories and limited information. Great results, permanent results, are
+never obtained that way.”
+
+“I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing.”
+
+“Oh, nothing like it in the least,” he assured her, and made a mental
+note to find out what it was she had referred to.
+
+“The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say,” she went on, “but it
+seems to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this
+immense number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their
+pocket. That's where the real mischief lies.”
+
+He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then
+something occurred to him. “Look here!” he said. “If you're as keen
+about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and
+devote your time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into
+shape?”
+
+She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to
+her. “It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?”
+ she observed.
+
+“No--you've got to promise me now,” he told her.
+
+“Well that I won't!” she answered, roundly.
+
+“You'd see the whole--the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?”--he
+scolded at her--“rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness.”
+
+“Aha!” she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining
+through the stolidity of her mien. “I knew you were humbugging! If
+you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing
+because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm
+always a goose when I believe what you tell me.”
+
+A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. “No you're
+not, Lou,” he replied, coaxingly. “I really mean it all--every word of
+it--and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you
+helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?”
+
+She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of
+sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. “I
+don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it,” she declared,
+when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it
+had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied
+in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of
+their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their
+perusal--and almost to their endorsement. He had thought during the day
+of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the
+morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time
+he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his
+mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+“I DIDN'T ask your father, after all,” was one of the things that
+Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing
+a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark
+with a scant, silent nod.
+
+Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the
+terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day,
+with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had
+glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at
+random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight
+before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and
+yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of
+the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits
+of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to
+induce.
+
+“About your father,” he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak
+with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: “I'm afraid
+I annoyed you the other day by what I said.”
+
+“I have no recollection of it,” she told him, with tranquil politeness,
+over her shoulder.
+
+He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this
+topic. “But I want you to recollect,” he said, as he rose to his
+feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her
+attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched
+herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant
+against the parapet.
+
+“I've thought of it a good deal,” he went on, in halting explanation.
+His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which
+to define it. “I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't
+want me to do--something that was a good deal more your affair than
+mine--and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to
+do.”
+
+Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for
+an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly
+embarrassed as well. “I'm sure you always wish to be nice,” she said at
+last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them
+somewhere a perfunctory note.
+
+“Oh--nice!” he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word.
+“Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten
+thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'”
+
+“I withdraw the word immediately--unreservedly,” she put in, with a
+smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.
+
+“You laugh at me--whenever I try to talk seriously,” he objected.
+
+“I laugh?” she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated
+amazement. “Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how.”
+
+“Ah, now we get to it!” he broke out, with energy. “You're really
+feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're
+doing--with the life we're leading--any more than I am. I see that,
+plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea
+that you were enjoying it immensely--the greenhouses and gardens and all
+that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right--that
+told me you hated it?”
+
+“Oh, don't let us talk of him!” Edith exclaimed, swiftly.
+
+Thorpe laughed. “You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him.
+No--it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew
+enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were
+happy here.”
+
+“How clever of her!” A certain bantering smile accompanied the words,
+but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity.
+“I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real
+sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live
+with--I daresay all genuine characters are--but she's very real.
+Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy
+talking with her.”
+
+“How do you mean?” Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.
+
+“Oh, I often go to her shop--or did when I was in town. I went almost
+immediately after our--our return to England. I was half afraid
+she would recognize me--the portraits in the papers, you know--but
+apparently she didn't. And it's splendid--the way she says absolutely
+nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks
+books are bad she says so. Fancy that!”
+
+He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. “You never mentioned
+to me that you had gone there,” he told her, as if in reproach.
+
+“Ah, it was complicated,” Edith explained. “She objects to knowing me--I
+think secretly I respect her a great deal for that--and therefore there
+is something clandestine about my getting to know her--and I could not
+be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to
+mention it.”
+
+“It isn't that alone,” he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer
+voice. “Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the
+difference in the world to me, if--if you were really--actually my other
+half!”
+
+The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to
+impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked
+dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.
+
+“I mean”--all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as
+he progressed--“I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm
+not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the
+start--you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than
+that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy.”
+
+“Oh no,” she interposed, gently. “It is not the fact that it has made me
+unhappy.”
+
+“Well--discontented, then,” he resumed, without pause. “Here we are. We
+do the thing we want to do--we make the kind of home for ourselves
+that we've agreed we would like--and then it turns out that somehow it
+doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the
+truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look
+at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of
+us. It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and
+examine frankly in all its bearings--in order to see if we can't better
+it--but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between
+us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy----”
+
+“You use the word again,” she reminded him, a wan smile softening her
+protest.
+
+Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her
+glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding
+her.
+
+“Do you tell me that you are happy?” he asked, with sober directness.
+
+She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. “You
+consider only the extremes,” she told him. “Between black and white
+there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum,
+in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the
+true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications.
+People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that
+can be said of me is that I may be in the blues--in the light-blues--but
+it is fair to remember that they photograph white.”
+
+Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling,
+he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. “That is to
+say”--he began hesitatingly.
+
+“To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy.”
+
+“Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?”
+
+The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The
+intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.
+
+“If I could tell myself,” she answered him, after an instant's thought,
+“pray believe that I would tell you.”
+
+The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily.
+“I want to get nearer to you,” he said, with gloom, “and I don't!”
+
+It occurred to her to remark: “You take exception to my phraseology when
+I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean.”
+ She offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he
+gazed moodily.
+
+“You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me,” he was
+suddenly inspired to say. “I can't imagine your applying that word to me
+then in your mind. God knows what it was you did say to yourself about
+me, but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would
+have fitted me then--and now it's the only one you can think of.”
+ The hint that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries
+enveloping him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke. The year had
+wrought a baffling difference in him. He lacked something now that then
+he had possessed, but he was powerless to define it.
+
+He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm
+to keep her where she lightly rested beside him. “Will you tell me,” he
+said, with a kind of sombre gentleness, “what the word is that you would
+have used then? I know you wouldn't--couldn't--have called me 'nice.'
+What would you have called me?”
+
+She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and
+stood erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his
+fingers. “I suppose,” she said, musingly--“I suppose I should have said
+'powerful' or 'strong.'” Then she released her arm, and in turn moved to
+the parapet.
+
+“And I am weak now--I am 'nice,'” he reflected, mechanically.
+
+In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon,
+there was something pensive, even sad. She did not speak at once, and as
+he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering.
+A new sense of her great beauty came to him--and with it a hint that
+for the instant at least her guard was down. He sprang to his feet, and
+stood beside her.
+
+“You ARE going to be open with me--Edith!” he pleaded, softly.
+
+She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation.
+“Oh, what is there to say?” she demanded, in a tone which was almost a
+wail. “It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you.”
+
+“WHAT is not my fault?” he persisted with patient gentleness.
+
+Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon
+her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. “It is a mistake--a
+blunder,” she began, hurriedly. “I take it all upon my own shoulders.
+I was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment--more good
+sense!”
+
+“You are not telling me, are you,” he asked with gravity, “that you are
+sorry you married me?”
+
+“Is either of us glad?” she retorted, breathlessly. “What is there to be
+glad about? You are bored to death--you confess it. And I--well, it is
+not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach
+you.”
+
+“No, you keep saying that,” he observed, with gloomy slowness of
+utterance. “But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as
+well have it out.”
+
+“Yes,” she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his
+with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. “I married one
+man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another
+because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am.
+There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am
+his daughter; that explains everything.”
+
+The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect
+upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new
+personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced
+cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a
+woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all--a woman to whom he could
+talk on terms of intimacy.
+
+“Rubbish!” he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal
+smile. “You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply
+came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would
+have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence.”
+
+To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of
+answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action
+too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.
+
+“The trouble has been,” he declared, “that I've been too much afraid of
+you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am,
+that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right
+enough now. You ARE finer than I am--God knows there's no dispute about
+that--but that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands
+off!' all around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the
+cheek to capture you and carry you off--and I ought to have had the
+pluck to make you love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm
+going to do!”
+
+To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to
+gaze with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread
+below them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and
+then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say
+that there was any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm
+to himself with new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small
+head at his shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn softly
+over the temples, and its glimpse of the matchless profile inclined
+beneath--that it was all right.
+
+He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience, for her to speak. The
+mere fact that she stood beneath his engirdling arm, and gave no thought
+to the potential servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present
+happiness. He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his
+terrace with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest view in
+England--and something much more than that beside.
+
+At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud--a silvery, amused little laugh
+under her breath. “How comedy and tragedy tread forever on each other's
+heels!” she remarked. Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon
+reflection he did not wholly like her words.
+
+“There wasn't any tragedy,” he said, “and there isn't any comedy.”
+
+She laughed again. “Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal to your sense
+of humour!” she urged, with mock fervour.
+
+Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this, that she seemed
+touched by his mood. Without stirring from his hold, she lifted her
+face. “Don't think I'm hateful,” she bade him, and her eyes were very
+kind. “There's more truth in what you've been saying than even you
+imagine. It really wasn't the money--or I mean it might easily have been
+the same if there had been no money. But how shall I explain it? I am
+attracted by a big, bold, strong pirate, let us say, but as soon as
+he has carried me off--that is the phrase for it--then he straightway
+renounces crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. My
+buccaneer transforms himself, under my very eyes, into an alderman! Do
+you say there is no comedy in that--and tragedy too?”
+
+“Oh, put it that way and it's all right,” he declared, after a moment's
+consideration. “I've got as much fun in me as anybody else,” he went
+on, “only your jokes have a way of raising blisters on me, somehow.
+But that's all done with now. That's because I didn't know you--was
+frightened of you. But I aint scared any more. Everything is different!”
+
+With a certain graciousness of lingering movement, she withdrew herself
+from his clasp, and faced him with a doubtful smile. “Ah, don't be too
+sure,” she murmured.
+
+“Everything is different!” he repeated, with confident emphasis. “Don't
+you see yourself it is?”
+
+“You say it is,” she replied, hesitatingly, “but that alone doesn't make
+it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it.”
+
+“Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that,” he broke in
+triumphantly. “We've been standing off with one another. We've been
+of no help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over
+everything together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do,
+and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it.”
+
+She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. “Don't
+count on me for too much wisdom or invention,” she warned him. “If
+things are to be done, you are still the one who will have to do them.
+But undoubtedly you are at your best when you are doing things. This
+really has been no sort of life for you, here.”
+
+He gathered her arm into his. “Come and show me your greenhouses,” he
+said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. “It'll turn
+out to have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here,” he
+continued, as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness
+of new intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his
+tone with buoyancy. “I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and
+getting myself into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In
+every way I'm a better man than I was.”
+
+They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached
+now a long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft
+colour--whites, yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds--were
+dimly perceptible.
+
+“The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year,” Edith observed,
+as they drew near to the door of this house. “Collins did them very
+badly--as he did most other things. But next year it will be very
+different. Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is
+he in there now, I think.”
+
+Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions
+stirred by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.
+
+“Gafferson?” he asked her, with a blank countenance.
+
+“My new head-gardener,” she explained. “He was at Hadlow, and after poor
+old Lady Plowden died--why, surely you remember him there. You spoke
+about him--you'd known him somewhere--in the West Indies, wasn't it?”
+
+He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied. “Did I?” he
+mumbled automatically.
+
+Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. “I've got a
+kind of headache coming on,” he said. “If you don't mind, we won't go
+inside among the flowers.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts of the great
+gardens, as the first shadows of evening began to dull the daylight.
+For a long time he moved aimlessly about, sick at heart and benumbed of
+mind, in the stupid oppression of a bad dream.
+
+There ran through all his confused thoughts the exasperating
+consciousness that it was nonsense to be frightened, or even disturbed;
+that, in truth, nothing whatever had happened. But he could not lay hold
+of it to any comforting purpose. Some perverse force within him insisted
+on raising new phantoms in his path, and directing his reluctant gaze
+to their unpleasant shapes. Forgotten terrors pushed themselves upon his
+recollection. It was as if he stood again in the Board Room, with the
+telegram telling of old Tavender's death in his hands, waiting to hear
+the knock of Scotland Yard upon the door.
+
+The coming of Gafferson took on a kind of supernatural aspect, when
+Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which
+had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the
+very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed
+a vivid picture of that approach--of the old ramshackle village trap,
+and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent,
+red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively
+suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now
+that he had at the time discerned a certain fateful quality in the
+apparition. And he and his wife had actually been talking of old Kervick
+at the moment! It was their disagreement over him which had prevented
+her explaining about the new head-gardener. There was an effect of the
+uncanny in all this.
+
+And what did Gafferson want? How much did he know? The idea that perhaps
+old Kervick had found him out, and patched up with him a scheme of
+blackmail, occurred to him, and in the unreal atmosphere of his mood,
+became a thing of substance. With blackmail, however, one could always
+deal; it was almost a relief to see the complication assume that guise.
+But if Gafferson was intent upon revenge and exposure instead? With such
+a slug-like, patient, tenacious fool, was that not more likely?
+
+Reasonable arguments presented themselves to his mind ever and again:
+his wife had known of Gafferson's work, and thought highly of it, and
+had been in a position to learn of his leaving Hadlow. What more natural
+than that she should hasten to employ him? And what was it, after all,
+that Gafferson could possibly know or prove? His brother-in-law had gone
+off, and got too drunk to live, and had died. What in the name of all
+that was sensible had this to do with Thorpe? Why should it even
+be supposed that Gafferson associated Thorpe with any phase of the
+business? And if he had any notion of a hostile movement, why should he
+have delayed action so long? Why indeed!
+
+Reassurance did not come to him, but at last an impulse to definite
+action turned his footsteps toward the cluster of greenhouses in the
+deepening shadow of the mansion. He would find Gafferson, and probe this
+business to the uttermost. If there was discoverable in the man's manner
+or glance the least evidence of a malevolent intention--he would know
+what to do. Ah, what was it that he would do? He could not say, beyond
+that it would be bad for Gafferson. He instinctively clenched the
+fists in the pockets of his jacket as he quickened his pace. Inside the
+congeries of glazed houses he was somewhat at sea. It was still light
+enough to make one's way about in the passages between the stagings, but
+he had no idea of the general plan of the buildings, and it seemed to
+him that he frequently got back to places he had traversed before. There
+were two or three subordinate gardeners in or about the houses, but
+upon reflection he forbore to question them. He tried to assume an
+idly indifferent air as he sauntered past, nodding almost imperceptible
+acknowledgment of the forefingers they jerked upward in salutation.
+
+He came at last upon a locked door, the key of which had been removed.
+The fact vaguely surprised him, and he looked with awakened interest
+through the panes of this door. The air inside seemed slightly
+thickened--and then his eye caught the flicker of a flame, straight
+ahead. It was nothing but the fumigation of a house; the burning spirits
+in the lamp underneath the brazier were filling the structure with
+vapours fatal to all insect life. In two or three hours the men would
+come and open the doors and windows and ventilate the place. The
+operation was quite familiar to him; it had indeed interested him more
+when he first saw it done than had anything else connected with the
+greenhouses.
+
+His abstracted gaze happened to take note of the fact that the door-key
+was hanging on a nail overhead, and then suddenly this seemed to be
+related to something else in his thoughts--some obscure impression
+or memory which evaded him. Continuing to look at the key, a certain
+recollection all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it came
+to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they were using warned
+people against exposing themselves to its fumes more than was absolutely
+necessary. That meant, of course, that their full force would kill a
+human being. It was very interesting. He looked through the glass again,
+but could not see that the air was any thicker. The lamp still burned
+brightly.
+
+He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron, at the
+further end of the palm-house he was in, doing something to a plant.
+Thorpe noted the fact that he felt no surprise in seeing that it was
+Gafferson. Somehow the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading
+flame inside the locked door, seemed to have prepared him for the
+spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. He moved forward slowly toward the
+head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at
+each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into
+non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house,
+and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. The men
+when they came back would find him there. But ah! they would know that
+they had not left him there; they would have seen him outside, no doubt,
+after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key could be left in the
+unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had rashly entered, and
+been overcome by the vapours. He approached the man silently, his brain
+arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.
+
+Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost
+exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was
+to be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his
+wife talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have
+a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of
+conversation. Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole
+household into confusion. And its effect upon his wife!--the progress
+of his thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the
+shock such a catastrophe might involve to her--or at the best, of the
+gross unpleasantness she would find in it--flashed over his mind, and
+then yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this
+meant to him. It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. A
+profoundly tender desire for her happiness was in complete possession.
+Already the notion of doing anything to wound or grieve her appeared
+incredible to him.
+
+“Well, Gafferson,” he heard himself saying, in one of the more reserved
+tones of his patriarchal manner. He had halted close to the inattentive
+man, and stood looking down upon him. His glance was at once tolerant
+and watchful.
+
+Gafferson slowly rose from his slouching posture, surveyed the other
+while his faculties in leisurely fashion worked out the problem of
+recognition, aud then raised his finger to his cap-brim. “Good-evening,
+sir,” he said.
+
+This gesture of deference was eloquently convincing. Thorpe, after an
+instant's alert scrutiny, smiled upon him. “I was glad to hear that you
+had come to us,” he said with benevolent affability. “We shall expect
+great things of a man of your reputation.”
+
+“It'll be a fair comfort, sir,” the other replied, “to be in a place
+where what one does is appreciated. What use is it to succeed in
+hybridizing a Hippeastrum procera with a Pancratium Amancaes, after
+over six hundred attempts in ten years, and then spend three years
+a-hand-nursing the seedlings, and then your master won't take enough
+interest in the thing to pay your fare up to London to the exhibition
+with 'em? That's what 'ud break any man's heart.”
+
+“Quite true,” Thorpe assented, with patrician kindliness. “You need fear
+nothing of that sort here, Gafferson. We give you a free hand. Whatever
+you want, you have only to let us know. And you can't do things too well
+to please us.” “Thank you, sir,” said Gafferson, and really, as Thorpe
+thought about it, the interview seemed at an end.
+
+The master turned upon his heel, with a brief, oblique nod over his
+shoulder, and made his way out into the open air. Here, as he walked,
+he drew a succession of long consolatory breaths. It was almost as if
+he had emerged from the lethal presence of the fumigator itself. He took
+the largest cigar from his case, lighted it, and sighed smoke-laden new
+relief as he strolled back toward the terrace.
+
+But a few minutes before he had been struggling helplessly in the coils
+of an evil nightmare. These terrors seemed infinitely far behind him
+now. He gave an indifferent parting glance backward at them, as one
+might over his after-breakfast cigar at the confused alarms of an early
+awakening hours before. There was nothing worth remembering--only the
+shapeless and foolish burden of a bad dream.
+
+The assurance rose within him that he was not to have any more such
+trouble. With a singular clearness of mental vision he perceived that
+the part of him which brought bad dreams had been sloughed off, like a
+serpent's skin. There had been two Thorpes, and one of them--the Thorpe
+who had always been willing to profit by knavery, and at last in a
+splendid coup as a master thief had stolen nearly a million, and would
+have shrunk not at all from adding murder to the rest, to protect that
+plunder--this vicious Thorpe had gone away altogether. There was no
+longer a place for him in life; he would never be seen again by
+mortal eye....There remained only the good Thorpe, the pleasant,
+well-intentioned opulent gentleman; the excellent citizen; the
+beneficent master, to whom, even Gafferson like the others, touched a
+respectful forelock.
+
+It passed in the procession of his reverie as a kind of triumph of
+virtue that the good Thorpe retained the fortune which the bad Thorpe
+had stolen. It was in all senses a fortunate fact, because now it would
+be put to worthy uses. Considering that he had but dimly drifted
+about heretofore on the outskirts of the altruistic impulse, it was
+surprisingly plain to him now that he intended to be a philanthropist.
+Even as he mentioned the word to himself, the possibilities suggested
+by it expanded in his thoughts. His old dormant, formless lust for power
+stirred again in his pulses. What other phase of power carried with it
+such rewards, such gratitudes, such humble subservience on all sides
+as far as the eye could reach--as that exercised by the intelligently
+munificent philanthropist?
+
+Intelligence! that was the note of it all. Many rich people dabbled at
+the giving of money, but they did it so stupidly, in such a slip-shod
+fashion, that they got no credit for it. Even millionaires more or less
+in public life, great newspaper-owners, great brewer-peers, and the
+like, men who should know how to do things well, gave huge sums in bulk
+for public charities, such as the housing of the poor, and yet contrived
+somehow to let the kudos that should have been theirs evaporate. He
+would make no such mistake as that.
+
+It was easy enough to see wherein they erred. They gave superciliously,
+handing down their alms from a top lofty altitude of Tory superiority,
+and the Radicals down below sniffed or growled even while they
+grudgingly took these gifts--that was all nonsense. These aristocratic
+or tuft-hunting philanthropists were the veriest duffers. They laid out
+millions of pounds in the vain attempt to secure what might easily
+be had for mere thousands, if they went sensibly to work. Their vast
+benefactions yielded them at the most bare thanks, or more often no
+thanks at all, because they lacked the wit to lay aside certain little
+trivial but annoying pretensions, and waive a few empty prejudices.
+They went on, year after year, tossing their fortunes into a sink of
+contemptuous ingratitude, wondering feebly why they were not beloved in
+return. It was because they were fools. They could not, or they would
+not, understand the people they sought to manipulate.
+
+What could not a man of real brain, of real breadth and energy and force
+of character, do in London with two hundred thousand pounds? Why, he
+could make himself master of the town! He could break into fragments the
+political ascendency of the snob, “semi-detached” villa classes, in half
+the Parliamentary divisions they now controlled. He could reverse
+the partisan complexion of the Metropolitan delegation, and lead to
+Westminster a party of his own, a solid phalanx of disciplined men,
+standing for the implacable Democracy of reawakened London. With such a
+backing, he could coerce ministries at will, and remake the politics of
+England. The role of Great Oliver himself was not too hopelessly beyond
+the scope of such a vision.
+
+Thorpe threw his cigar-end aside, and then noted that it was almost
+dark. He strode up to the terrace two steps at a time, and swung along
+its length with a vigour and exhilaration of movement he had not known,
+it seemed to him, for years. He felt the excitement of a new incentive
+bubbling in his veins.
+
+“Her Ladyship is in her sitting-room, sir,” a domestic replied to his
+enquiry in the hall. The title arrested his attention from some
+fresh point of view, and he pondered it, as he made his way along the
+corridor, and knocked at a door. At the sound of a voice he pushed open
+the door, and went in.
+
+Lady Cressage, looking up, noted, with aroused interest, a marked change
+in his carriage. He stood aggressively erect, his big shoulders squared,
+and his head held high. On his massive face there was the smile, at once
+buoyant and contained, of a strong man satisfied with himself.
+
+Something impelled her to rise, and to put a certain wistfulness of
+enquiry into her answering smile.
+
+“Your headache is better then?” she asked him.
+
+He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. “Oh--yes,” he
+answered. Advancing, he caught her suddenly, almost vehemently, in his
+arms, aud covered the face that was perforce upturned with kisses. When
+she was released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting
+and flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes, in which
+mystification was mellowed by the gleam of not-displeased curiosity, he
+preferred a request which completed her bewilderment.
+
+“Mrs. Thorpe,” he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with
+his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words--“would you mind if
+we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little
+breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead of the big place?”
+
+“Why, not at all, if you wish it,” she answered readily enough, but
+viewing him still with a puzzled glance.
+
+“I'm full of new ideas,” he explained, impulsively impatient of the
+necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. “I see great things
+ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if
+I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time
+and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. You don't
+know what it means to me to have something to do. It makes another man
+of me, just to think about it. Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a
+thing that can be done, and by God! I'm going to do it!”
+
+She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the
+man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through
+the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large
+features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance
+as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a
+conqueror--of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his
+fellows, the appetites, energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast
+of prey. Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the
+frank barbarism of power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to
+her that something more was to be read in this look; there was in it a
+reservation of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for
+her special self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces
+and devour others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love
+with all his strength. An involuntary trembling thrill ran through
+her--and then she smiled up at him.
+
+“What is it you're going to do?” she asked him, mechanically. Her mind
+roved far afield.
+
+“Rule England!” he told her with gravity.
+
+For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in
+the statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his
+refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what
+would be impossible to him.
+
+She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of
+good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before.
+“Delightful,” she said gayly. “But I'm not sure that I quite understand
+the--the precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room
+with the project.” He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in
+which she took him. “Just a whim,” he explained. “The things I've got
+in mind don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and
+men standing about. What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug
+little evening with you alone, where I can talk to you and--and we can
+be together by ourselves. You'd like it, wouldn't you?”
+
+She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarrassment in her
+mantling colour and down-spread lashes. It had always to his eyes been,
+from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the
+world--exquisitely matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene
+yet sensitive grace. But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that
+there could come to it, this crowning added loveliness of feminine
+confusion.
+
+“You would like it, wouldn't you?” he repeated in a lower, more
+strenuous tone.
+
+She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his
+shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming.
+She swayed rather than stepped toward him.
+
+“I think,” she answered, in a musing murmur,--“I think I shall
+like--everything.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+THORPE found the Duke of Glastonbury a much more interesting person
+to watch and to talk with, both during the dinner Saturday evening and
+later, than he had anticipated.
+
+He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature,
+but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had
+a distinction of its own. His face, with its little black moustache
+and large dark eyes, was fine upon examination, but in some elusively
+foreign way. There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked.
+His speech was English enough to the ear, it was true, but it was the
+considered English of a book, and its phrases had a deftness which was
+hardly native. He looked, if not a sad young man, then one conscious
+always of sufficient reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time, to
+see that the mood beneath was not melancholy. It had even its sprightly
+side, which shone out irregularly in his glance and talk, from a sober
+mean of amiable weariness.
+
+Thorpe knew his extraordinary story--that of a poor tutor, earning his
+living in ignorance of the fact that he had a birthright of any sort,
+who had been miraculously translated into the heir, not only to an
+ancient title but to vast collateral wealth. He had been born and reared
+in France, and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change
+in his affairs had found him out. There was a good deal more to the
+story, including numerous unsavoury legends about people now many years
+dead, and it was impossible to observe the young Duke and not seem to
+perceive signs that he was still nervously conscious of these legends.
+The story of his wife--a serene, grey-eyed, rather silent young person,
+with a pale face of some beauty, and with much purity and intellect--was
+strange enough to match. She also had earned her own living, as a
+private secretary or type-writing girl, or something of the sort, and
+her husband had deliberately chosen her after he had come into his
+title. One might study her very closely, however, and catch no hint that
+these facts in any degree disconcerted her.
+
+Thorpe studied her a good deal, in a furtive way, with a curiosity born
+of his knowledge that the Duke had preferred her, when he might have
+married his widowed cousin, who was now Thorpe's own wife. How he had
+come to know this, he could never have told. He had breathed it in,
+somehow, with the gossip-laden atmosphere of that one London season of
+his. It was patent enough, too, that his wife--his Edith--had not only
+liked this ducal youngster very much, but still entertained toward him
+a considerable affection. She had never dissembled this feeling, and it
+visibly informed her glance and manner now, at her own table, when she
+turned to speak with him, where he sat at her right hand. Thorpe had
+never dreamed of thinking ill of his wife's friendship, even when her
+indifference to what he thought had been most taken for granted. Now
+that this was all changed, and the amazing new glory of a lover had
+enveloped him, he had a distinct delight in watching the myriad charming
+phases of her kind manner, half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the
+grave-faced young man. It was all a part of the delicious change which
+these past few days had wrought in her, this warm and supple softness of
+mien, of eye and smile and voice.
+
+But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could
+have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave
+more attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the
+conversation of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the
+young Duchess beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which
+left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while
+she turned to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the
+Hon. Winifred Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies
+interested him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested
+that it was amusing. He looked from his wife to the Duchess and back
+again, in ever-recurring surprise that the coronet had been carried
+past Edith. And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke, and
+formulated the theory that she must have refused him. No doubt that was
+why she had been sympathetically fond of him ever since, and was being
+so nice to him now. Yes--clearly that was it. He felt upon this that he
+also liked the Duke very much.
+
+It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. Both he and his
+Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even deferentially polite, but
+there was a painstaking effect about it, which, seemingly, they lacked
+the art altogether to conceal. It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests
+unconsciously took their cue from this august couple, and all exposed
+somewhat the effort their civility to him involved. At another time the
+suspicion of this would have stung him. He had only to glance across the
+table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. What other
+people thought of him--how other people liked or disliked him--was of no
+earthly importance. Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel
+from them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull inability
+to read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich
+outsider who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable
+tolerance this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to
+do so, he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and
+the burst of thunder.
+
+The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination, to
+contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. The young man
+seemed both clever and sensible, and in a way impressionable as well.
+Thorpe thought that he would probably have some interesting things to
+say, but still more he thought of him as a likely listener. It would be
+the easier to detach him from the company, since the occasion was one
+of studied informality. The Duke did not go about in society, in the
+ordinary sense of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe to
+meet a large party. He was here as a kinsman and friend of his hostess
+for a quiet week; and the few other guests fitted readily enough into
+the picture of a family gathering. The spirit of domesticity had indeed
+so obviously descended upon the little group in the drawing-room, an
+hour or so after dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural thing to
+put his arm through that of the Duke and lead him off to his personal
+smoking-room. He even published his intention by audibly bidding the
+Hon. Balder Plowden to remain with the ladies.
+
+When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the
+host had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in
+the matter of large rich cigars, a brief silence ensued.
+
+“I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject,” Thorpe was
+inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries aside. “If a man of
+fortune wishes to do genuine good with his money, here in England, how
+should he best go about it?”
+
+The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash of surprise on
+his dark, mobile face. He hesitated a moment, and smiled a little. “You
+ask of me the sum of human wisdom,” he said. “It is the hardest of all
+problems; no one solves it.”
+
+Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly. “That's all the more reason
+why it ought to be solved,” he declared, with slow emphasis.
+
+The other expressed by look and tone an augmented consciousness of the
+unexpected. “I did not know,” he remarked cautiously, “that this was a
+matter in which you were specially concerned. It pleases me very much to
+hear it. Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have as many
+as possible turning the problem over in their minds.”
+
+“Oh, but I'm going to solve it!” Thorpe told him, with round confidence.
+
+The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. “Do not think
+me a cynic,” he began at last. “You are a man of affairs; you have made
+your own way; you should be even more free from illusions than I am.
+If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one
+to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional
+importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me.
+I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs
+as we think it has--for that matter, if it has any power at all.
+The shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the
+moment--change it about and alter it in many ways--but its effect is
+only temporary. As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms
+rearrange themselves as they were before, and the old conditions return.
+I think the only force which really makes any permanent difference is
+character--and yet about even that I am not sure. The best man I have
+ever known--and in many respects the ablest--devoted untold energy and
+labour, and much money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in
+Somerset, on land of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and
+worked out. Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his
+System?”
+
+Thorpe shook his head.
+
+“He had worked tremendously for years at it. He fell ill and went
+away--and in a day all the results of his labours and outlay were flat
+on the ground. The property is mine now, and it is farmed and managed
+again in the ordinary way, and really the people there seem already
+to have forgotten that they had a prophet among them. The marvelous
+character of the man--you look in vain for any sign of an impress that
+it left upon them. I never go there. I cannot bear those people. I have
+sometimes the feeling that if it were feasible I should like to oppress
+them in some way--to hurt them.”
+
+“Oh! 'the people' are hogs, right enough,” Thorpe commented genially,
+“but they ARE 'the people,' and they're the only tools we've got to work
+with to make the world go round.”
+
+“But if you leave the world alone,” objected the Duke, “it goes round
+of itself. And if you don't leave it alone, it goes round just the
+same, without any reference whatever to your exertions. Some few men are
+always cleverer or noisier or more restless than the others, and
+their activity produces certain deviations and peculiarities in their
+generation. The record of these--generally a very faulty and foolish
+record--we call history. We say of these movements in the past that some
+of them were good and some were bad. Our sons very likely will differ
+totally from us about which were good and which were bad; quite
+possibly, in turn, their sons may agree with us. I do not see that it
+matters. We cannot treat anything as final--except that the world goes
+round. We appear out of the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried
+across and pitched off into the darkness at the other edge of it. We are
+certain about nothing else.”
+
+“Except that some of us have to pay for our ride, and others don't,” put
+in Thorpe. The tone in which he spoke made his meaning so clear that his
+Grace sat up.
+
+“Ah, you think we do not pay?” he queried, his countenance brightening
+with the animation of debate. “My dear sir, we pay more than anyone
+else. Our fares are graduated, just as our death-duties are. No doubt
+there are some idle and stupid, thick-skinned rich fellows, who escape
+the ticket-collector. But for each of them there are a thousand idle
+poor fellows who do the same. You, for example, are a man of large
+wealth. I, for my sins, carry upon my back the burden of a prodigious
+fortune. Could we not go out now, and walk down the road to your nearest
+village, and find in the pub, there a dozen day-labourers happier than
+we are? Why--it is Saturday night. Then I will not say a dozen, but
+as many as the tap will hold. It is not the beer alone that makes them
+happy. Do not think that. It is the ability to rest untroubled,
+the sense that till Monday they have no more responsibility than a
+tree-toad. Does the coming of Sunday make that difference to you or to
+me? When night comes, does it mean to us that we are to sleep off into
+oblivion all we have done that day, and begin life afresh next morning?
+No-o! We are the tired people; the load is never lifted from our backs.
+Ah, do we not pay indeed!”
+
+“Oh-ho!” ejaculated Thorpe. He had been listening with growing
+astonishment to the other's confession. He was still surprised as he
+spoke, but a note of satisfaction mounted into his voice as he went on.
+“You are unhappy, too! You are a young man, in excellent health; you
+have the wife you want; you understand good tobacco; you have a son.
+That is a great deal--but my God! think what else you've got. You're the
+Duke of Glastonbury--one of the oldest titles in England. You're one of
+the richest men in the country--the richest in the old peerage, at any
+rate, I'm told. And YOU'RE not happy!”
+
+The other smiled. “Ah, the terms and forms survive,” he said, with a
+kind of pedagogic affability, “after the substance has disappeared.
+The nobleman, the prince, was a great person in the times when he
+monopolized wealth. It enabled him to monopolize almost everything
+else that was pleasant or superb. He had the arts and the books and the
+musicians and the silks and velvets, and the bath-tubs--everything that
+made existence gorgeous--all to himself. He had war to amuse himself
+with, and the seven deadly sins. The barriers are down now. Everything
+which used to be exclusively the nobleman's is now within everybody's
+reach, including the sins. And it is not only that others have levelled
+up to him; they have levelled him down. He cannot dress now more
+expensively than other people. Gambling used to be recognized as one of
+his normal relaxations, but now, the higher his rank, the more sharply
+he is scolded for it. Naturally he does not know what to do with
+himself. As an institution, he descends from a period when the only
+imaginable use for wealth was to be magnificent with it. But now in this
+business age, where the recognized use of wealth is to make more
+wealth, he is so much out of place that he has even forgotten how to
+be magnificent. There are some illustrated articles in one of the
+magazines, giving photographs of the great historic country-houses of
+England. You should see the pictures of the interiors. The furniture and
+decorations are precisely what a Brixton dressmaker would buy, if she
+suddenly came into some money.”
+
+“All the same,” Thorpe stuck to his point, “you are not happy.”
+
+The Duke frowned faintly, as if at the other's persistency. Then he
+shrugged his shoulders and answered in a lighter tone. “It hardly
+amounts to that, I think. I confess that there are alleviations to
+my lot. In the opinion of the world I am one of its most fortunate
+citizens--and it is not for me to say that the world is altogether
+wrong. The chief point is--I don't know if you will quite follow
+me--there are limits to what position and fortune can give a man. And so
+easily they may deprive him of pleasures which poorer men enjoy! I may
+be wrong, but it seems impossible to me that any rich man who has acres
+of gardens and vineries and glass can get up the same affection for
+it all that the cottager will have for his little flower-plot, that he
+tends with his own hands. One seems outside the realities of life--a
+mere spectator at the show.”
+
+“Ah, but why not DO things?” Thorpe demanded of him. “Why merely stand,
+as you say, and look on?”
+
+The other leant his head back again. “Pray what do you recommend?” he
+asked almost listlessly.
+
+“Why--politics, for example.”
+
+The Duke nodded, with an air of according to the suggestion a certain
+respect. “Unhappily I am too much of a foreigner,” he commented. “I know
+Englishmen and their affairs too imperfectly. Sometime--perhaps.”
+
+“And philanthropic work--you don't care about that,” pursued the other.
+
+“Oh--we go not so far as that,” said his Grace, with a deprecatory wave
+of the hands. “My wife finds many interests in it, only she would not
+like to have you call it philanthropical. She is London-born, and it
+is a great pleasure to her to be of assistance to poorer young women in
+London, who have so little done for them by the community, and can do
+so little for themselves. I am much less skeptical about that particular
+work, I may tell you, than about philanthropy in general. In fact, I am
+quite clear that it is doing good. At least it is doing a kindness, and
+that is a pleasant occupation. We are really not so idle as one might
+think. We work at it a good deal, my wife and I.”
+
+“So am I London-born,” Thorpe remarked, with a certain irrelevancy.
+After a moment's pause he turned a sharply enquiring glance upon his
+guest. “This thing that you're doing in London--does it give you any
+'pull' there?” “Pull?” repeated the other helplessly.
+
+“If there was something you wanted the people of London to do, would
+they do it for you because of what you've been doing for them--or for
+their girls?”
+
+The Duke looked puzzled for a moment. “But it isn't conceivable that I
+should want London to do anything--unless it might be to consume its own
+smoke,” he observed.
+
+“Quite so!” said Thorpe, rising bulkily to his feet, but signifying by a
+gesture that his companion was to remain seated. He puffed at his cigar
+till its tip gleamed angrily through the smoke about him, and moved a
+few steps with his hands in his pockets. “That is what I wanted to get
+at. Now I'm London-born, I've got the town in my blood. The Thorpes have
+been booksellers there for generations. The old name is over the old
+shop still. I think I know what Londoners are like; I ought to. It's my
+belief that they don't want gifts. They'll take 'em, but it isn't what
+they want. They're a trading people--one of the oldest in the world.
+Commercial traditions, the merchant's pride--these are bred in their
+bones. They don't want something for nothing. They like an honest
+bargain--fair on both sides. 'You help me and I'll help you.' And it's
+the only way you can do anything worth doing.”
+
+“Well,” said the Duke, passively.
+
+Thorpe halted, and still with the cigar between his teeth, looked down
+at him.
+
+“I can go into London, and study out the things that are to be
+done--that need to be done--and divide these into two parts, those that
+belong to private enterprise and those that ought to be done publicly.
+And I can say to Londoners--not in so many words, mind you, but in a way
+the sharper ones will understand: 'Here, you fellows. I'll begin doing
+out of my own pocket one set of these things, and you in turn must put
+yourselves at my back, and stand by me, and put me in a position where
+I can make the Government do this other set of things.' That will appeal
+to them. A poor man couldn't lead them any distance, because he could
+always be killed by the cry that he was filling his pockets. They will
+believe in a man whose ambition is to win an earldom and five thousand
+a year out of politics, but they will stone to death the man who merely
+tries to get a few hundreds a year out of it for his wife and children.
+And a man like you can't do anything in London, because they can't see
+that there's anything you want in return--and besides, in their hearts,
+they don't like your class. Don't forget it! This is the city that
+chopped off the king's head!”
+
+“Ah, but this is also the city,” retorted the other, with placid
+pleasure in his argument, “which decked itself in banners and ribbons to
+welcome back the son of that same king. And if you think of it, he was
+rather a quaint thing in sons, too.”
+
+“It was the women did that,” Thorpe affirmed with readiness. “They get
+their own way once in a while, when the men are tired out, and they have
+their little spell of nonsense and monkey-shines, but it never lasts
+long. Charles II. doesn't matter at all--but take my word for it, his
+father matters a great deal. There was a Thorpe among the judges who
+voted to behead him. I am descended in a straight line from him.”
+
+His Grace shrugged his slight shoulders again. “It happens that my
+ancestors had extremely large facilities for doing unpleasant things,
+and, God knows, they did them--but I don't quite see what that goes to
+prove, now.”
+
+“No, you don't grasp the idea,” said Thorpe, resignedly. After a
+moment's pause he took the cigar from his lips, and straightened himself
+“All the same,” he declared roundly, “I am going to do the trick. London
+has been waiting for an organizer--a leader--for a hundred years. The
+right kind of a man, going the right way to work, can stand London on
+its head, as surely as I can burn this cigar. And I'm going to have a
+try at it.”
+
+“It is very interesting,” remarked the Duke, with vagueness. “But--are
+the ladies waiting for us? And if so, aren't we keeping them up
+unconscionably?”
+
+As if in comment upon his words, there was the sound of a faint rap at
+the door. Then it opened, and through the dense blue haze of the room
+they saw some shadowed forms softly indistinct save where the light from
+the ceiling outside shone down upon a group of coiffured heads. A
+noise of mingled coughing and laughter specifically completed the
+introduction.
+
+“Oh, I'm--it's unendurable in there,” spoke the voice of the hostess.
+“We WERE coming in to smoke with you,” she called out through the cloud,
+“since you wouldn't stop with us.”
+
+“Come along!” answered Thorpe, cheerily. He strode to the end of the
+room and raised a window. From the same corner he turned on some added
+lights.
+
+Under this more effective illumination, the lady of the house advanced,
+with Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred close behind her. “Frank has gone
+to bed,” she explained to the Duke, who had risen. Then she turned to
+her husband a bright-eyed glance: “You don't mind--our coming?” she
+asked.
+
+“Mind!” he called out, with robust impressiveness. “Mind!” As if to
+complete the expression of his meaning, he threw his arm loosely
+about her, where she stood, and brought her to his side. They remained
+standing thus, before the fireplace, after the others were all seated.
+
+“Mr. Thorpe has been outlining to me the most wonderful plans,” said the
+Duke, looking from one face to another, with a reserved smile. “It
+seems that philanthropy fails unless it is combined with very advanced
+politics. It is a new idea to me--but he certainly states it with
+vigour. Do you understand it, Edith?”
+
+“Oh, perfectly,” replied the wife, smilingly. “I am his first convert.
+Behold in me the original disciple.”
+
+“The worst of that is,” commented Thorpe, with radiant joviality, “she
+would subscribe to any other new doctrine of mine just as readily.” He
+tightened the arm encircling her by a perceptible trifle. “Wouldn't you,
+sweetheart?” he demanded.
+
+She seemed in nowise embarrassed by these overt endearments.
+There was indeed the dimmest suggestion in her face and voice of a
+responsive mood. “Really,” she began, with a soft glance,
+half-deprecation, half-pride, bent upon the others, and with thoughtful
+deliberation,--“really the important thing is that he should pursue some
+object--have in view something that he is determined to master. Without
+that, he is not contented--not at his best. He should have been a
+soldier. He has a passion for battle in his blood. And now that he sees
+something he is eager to do--I am very glad. It makes it none the less
+acceptable that good is to come from it.”
+
+“I still maintain,” said Miss Madden, interpolating her words through
+the task of lighting a cigarette, and contriving for them an effect of
+drollery which appealed to Thorpe most of all--“I shall always insist,
+just the same, that crime was his true vocation.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARKET-PLACE ***
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Market-Place
+
+Author: Harold Frederic
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2008 [EBook #298]
+Last Updated: March 14, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARKET-PLACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Hamm, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MARKET-PLACE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      by Harold Frederic
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the field&mdash;sitting
+      alone with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat shapeless
+      to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried to define to
+      himself what its limits would probably be. Vistas of unchecked, expanding
+      conquest stretched away in every direction. He held at his mercy
+      everything within sight. Indeed, it rested entirely with him to say
+      whether there should be any such thing as mercy at all&mdash;and until he
+      chose to utter the restraining word the rout of the vanquished would go on
+      with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush and torture and despoil
+      his enemies until he was tired. The responsibility of having to decide
+      when he would stop grinding their faces might come to weigh upon him later
+      on, but he would not give it room in his mind to-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames in
+      the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom visages:
+      they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright. They
+      implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself above rage and
+      cunning. Only here and there did he recall a name with which to label one
+      of these countenances; very few of them raised a memory of individual
+      rancour. The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt, but their
+      persecution of him had been impersonal; his great revenge was equally so.
+      As he looked, in truth, there was only one face&mdash;a composite mask of
+      what he had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample implacably
+      under foot. He stared with a conqueror's cold frown at it, and gave an
+      abrupt laugh which started harsh echoes in the stillness of the Board
+      Room. Then he shook off the reverie, and got to his feet. He shivered a
+      little at the sudden touch of a chill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the table where the
+      two least-considered of his lieutenants, the dummy Directors, had left it.
+      He poured a small quantity and sipped it. During the whole eventful day it
+      had not occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat liquor
+      seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain. With more
+      deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad, floridly-decorated open box
+      beside the bottle, lit it, and blew a long draught of smoke thoughtfully
+      through his nostrils. Then he put his hands in his pockets, looked again
+      into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile. God in heaven! it was
+      actually true!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel exhilaration,
+      which yet was not novel. Upon reflection, he perceived that he felt as if
+      he were a boy again&mdash;a boy excited by pleasure. It surprised as much
+      as it delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy of a child. He
+      caught the inkling of an idea that perhaps his years were an illusion. He
+      had latterly been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the grey hairs
+      thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him. Now all at once he
+      saw that he was not old at all. The buoyancy of veritable youth bubbled in
+      his veins. He began walking up and down the room, regarding new halcyon
+      visions with a sparkling eye. He was no longer conscious of the hated foe
+      beneath his feet; they trod instead elastic upon the clouds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside, and of trying a
+      door near by, suddenly caught his attention. He stood still and listened
+      with alertness for a surprised instant, then shrugged his shoulders and
+      began moving again. It must be nearly seven o'clock; although the
+      allotment work had kept the clerks later than usual that day, everybody
+      connected with the offices had certainly gone home. He realized that his
+      nerves had played him a trick in giving that alarmed momentary start&mdash;and
+      smiled almost tenderly as he remembered how notable and even glorious a
+      warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state. They would be all
+      right after a night's real rest. He would know how to sleep NOW, thank
+      God!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But yes&mdash;there was somebody outside&mdash;and this time knocking with
+      assurance at the right door, the entrance to the outer office. After a
+      second's consideration, he went into this unlighted outer office, and
+      called out through the opaque glass an enquiry. The sound of his voice, as
+      it analyzed itself in his own ears, seemed unduly peremptory. The answer
+      which came back brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes. He hurriedly
+      unlocked and opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room,&rdquo; said the
+      newcomer, as he entered. &ldquo;I assumed it must be you. Hope I don't interrupt
+      anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden,&rdquo; replied the
+      other, leading the way back to the inner apartment. &ldquo;In fact, I couldn't
+      have asked anything better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it not quite in
+      harmony with this declaration. He turned, under the drop-light overhanging
+      the Board-table, and shook hands with his guest, as if to atone for this
+      doubtful accent. &ldquo;I shake hands with you again,&rdquo; he said, speaking
+      rapidly, &ldquo;because this afternoon it was what you may call formal; it
+      didn't count. And&mdash;my God!&mdash;you're the man I owe it all to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you mustn't go as far as that&mdash;even in the absence of
+      witnesses,&rdquo; replied Lord Plowden, lightly. &ldquo;I'll take off my coat for a
+      few minutes,&rdquo; he went on, very much at his ease. &ldquo;It's hot in here. It's
+      by the merest chance I happened to be detained in the City&mdash;and I saw
+      your lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity whatever for a quiet
+      talk. No&mdash;I won't drink anything before dinner, but I'll light a
+      cigar. I want to say to you, Thorpe,&rdquo; he concluded, as he seated himself
+      &ldquo;that I think what you've done is very wonderful. The Marquis thinks so
+      too&mdash;but I shouldn't like to swear that he understands much about
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The implication that the speaker did understand remained in the air like a
+      tangible object. Thorpe took a chair, and the two men exchanged a silent,
+      intent look. Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from the fire,
+      pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them from above, had
+      for a moment a mysterious something in common. Then the tension of the
+      glance was relaxed&mdash;and on the instant no two men in London looked
+      less alike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man. Thorpe had even
+      heard him called the handsomest man in England&mdash;though this seemed in
+      all likelihood an exaggeration. But handsome he undoubtedly was&mdash;tall
+      without suggesting the thought of height to the observer, erect yet
+      graceful, powerfully built, while preserving the effect of slenderness.
+      His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful guardsman-type&mdash;regular,
+      finely-cut, impassive to hardness. When he talked, or followed with
+      interest the talk of others, it revealed almost an excess of animation.
+      Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his glance, the swift facility of
+      his smile and comprehending brows, and saw that it was not the guardsman
+      face at all. His skin was fresh-hued, and there was a shade of warm brown
+      in his small, well-ordered moustasche, but his hair, wavy and worn longer
+      than the fashion, seemed black. There were perceptible veins of grey in
+      it, though he had only entered his thirty-fifth year. He was dressed
+      habitually with the utmost possible care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contrast between this personage and the older man confronting him was
+      abrupt. Thorpe was also tall, but of a burly and slouching figure. His
+      face, shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard, invited no
+      attention. One seemed always to have known this face&mdash;thick-featured,
+      immobile, undistinguished. Its accessories for the time being were even
+      more than ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were ragged with
+      neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes looked as if he had slept in them.
+      The hands resting on his big knees were coarse in shape, and roughened,
+      and ill-kept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in,&rdquo; he repeated
+      now, speaking with a drag, as of caution, on his words. &ldquo;Witnesses or no
+      witnesses, I'm anxious to have you understand that I realize what I owe to
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only wish it were a great deal more than it is,&rdquo; replied the other,
+      with a frank smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands,&rdquo; said Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could hear that there was a kind of reservation in his voice; the
+      suspicion that his companion detected it embarrassed him. He found himself
+      in the position of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings impelled
+      him to be perfectly open. He paused, and was awkwardly conscious of
+      constraint in the silence which ensued. &ldquo;You are very kind to put it in
+      that way,&rdquo; said Lord Plowden, at last. He seemed also to be finding words
+      for his thoughts with a certain difficulty. He turned his cigar round in
+      his white fingers meditatively. &ldquo;I gather that your success has been
+      complete&mdash;as complete as you yourself could have desired. I
+      congratulate you with all my heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;don't say my success&mdash;say our success,&rdquo; put in Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear man,&rdquo; the other corrected him, &ldquo;my interest, compared with
+      yours, is hardly more than nominal. I'm a Director, of course, and I'm not
+      displeased that my few shares should be worth something instead of
+      nothing, but&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands. &ldquo;That isn't my view of the thing at
+      all. To be frank, I was turning over in my mind, just awhile ago, before
+      you came in, some way of arranging all that on a different footing. If
+      you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore to Lord Plowden his
+      accustomed fluency of speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came here to say precisely that thing,&rdquo; he began&mdash;&ldquo;that I do trust
+      it to you. We have never had any very definite talk on the subject&mdash;and
+      pray don't think that I want to go into details now. I'd much rather not,
+      in fact. But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe in you. I
+      feel sure that you are going to go far, as the saying is. Well, I want to
+      tie myself to your star. Do you see what I mean? You are going to be a
+      power in finance. You are going to be able to make and unmake men as you
+      choose. I should be very much obliged indeed if you would make me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion with what seemed to
+      the other a lethargic gaze. In truth, his mind was toiling with strenuous
+      activity to master, in all its bearings, the significance of what had been
+      said. This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye, the while he was
+      hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous asset which he had never up to
+      that time learned that he possessed. Unconsciously, he dampened the
+      spirits of his companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you,&rdquo; Lord Plowden said,
+      growing cool in the face of this slow stare. &ldquo;I'm asking nothing at all. I
+      had the impulse to come and say to you that you are a great man, and that
+      you've done a great thing&mdash;and done it, moreover, in a very great
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know how it was done!&rdquo; The wondering exclamation forced itself from
+      Thorpe's unready lips. He bent forward a little, and took a new visual
+      hold, as it were, of his companion's countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden smiled. &ldquo;Did you think I was such a hopeless duffer, then?&rdquo;
+       he rejoined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs, and patted
+      his knee contentedly. All at once his face had lightened; a genial
+      speculation returned to his grey eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see,&rdquo; he began to
+      explain. The relief with which he spoke was palpable. &ldquo;I could not for the
+      life of me make up my mind whether to tell you about it or not. Let's see&mdash;this
+      is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the scheme didn't dawn on
+      me myself until toward evening Tuesday. But yesterday, of course, I could
+      have told you&mdash;and again this afternoon&mdash;but, as I say, I
+      couldn't make up my mind. Once I had it on the tip of my tongue&mdash;but
+      somehow I didn't. And you&mdash;you never gave me a hint that you saw what
+      was going on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Lord Plowden smiled. &ldquo;I voted with you,&rdquo; he put in softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar. &ldquo;Well, I couldn't have asked anything
+      better than this,&rdquo; he declared once again. &ldquo;It beats all the rest put
+      together, to my mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning,&rdquo; commented the other
+      tentatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why man,&rdquo; Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his choice of words,
+      but speaking with evident fervour; &ldquo;I was more anxious about you&mdash;and
+      the way you'd take it&mdash;than about anything else. I give you my word I
+      was. I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing. You might
+      think that it was all right, and then again you might round on me&mdash;or
+      no, I don't mean quite that&mdash;but you might say it wasn't good enough
+      for you, and wash your hands of the whole affair. And I can't tell you
+      what a relief it is to find that you&mdash;that you're satisfied. Now I
+      can go ahead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes&mdash;ahead,&rdquo; said the younger man, thoughtfully. &ldquo;Do you mind
+      telling me&mdash;you see I'm quite in the dark as to details&mdash;how
+      much further ahead we are likely to go? I comprehend the general nature of
+      our advance&mdash;but how far off is the goal you have in sight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows!&rdquo; answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of excitement in his
+      voice. &ldquo;I don't give it any limit. I don't see why we should stop at all.
+      We've got them in such a position that&mdash;why, good heavens! we can
+      squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz.&rdquo; He chuckled grimly at the
+      suggestion of his simile. &ldquo;We'll get more ounces to the ton out of our
+      crushings than they ever heard of on the Rand, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Might I ask,&rdquo; interposed the other, &ldquo;who may 'they' be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort to remember names.
+      &ldquo;Oh, there are a lot of them,&rdquo; he said, vaguely. &ldquo;I think I told you of
+      the way that Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let me
+      believe they were going to take me up, and then, because I wouldn't give
+      them everything&mdash;the very shirt off my back&mdash;turned and put
+      their knife into me. I don't know them apart, hardly&mdash;they've all got
+      names like Rhine wines&mdash;but I know the gang as a whole, and if I
+      don't lift the roof clean off their particular synagogue, then my name is
+      mud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden smiled. &ldquo;I've always the greatest difficulty to remember that
+      you are an Englishman&mdash;a Londoner born,&rdquo; he declared pleasantly. &ldquo;You
+      don't talk in the least like one. On shipboard I made sure you were an
+      American&mdash;a very characteristic one, I thought&mdash;of some curious
+      Western variety, you know. I never was more surprised in my life than when
+      you told me, the other day, that you only left England a few years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen,&rdquo; Thorpe corrected him. He
+      studied his companion's face with slow deliberation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss,&rdquo; he remarked,
+      after a little pause. &ldquo;If you'd known that I was an Englishman, when we
+      first met, there on the steamer, I kind o' suspect that you and I'd never
+      have got much beyond a nodding acquaintance&mdash;and even that mostly on
+      my side. I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything&mdash;that is,
+      not specially&mdash;but I've often thought since that it was a mighty good
+      thing I did. Now isn't that true&mdash;that if you had taken me for one of
+      your own countrymen you'd have given me the cold shoulder?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say there's a good deal in what you say,&rdquo; the other admitted,
+      gently enough, but without contrition. &ldquo;Things naturally shape themselves
+      that way, rather, you know. If they didn't, why then the whole position
+      would become difficult. But you are an American, to all intents and
+      purposes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no&mdash;I never took any step towards getting naturalized,&rdquo; Thorpe
+      protested. &ldquo;I always intended to come back here. Or no, I won't say that&mdash;because
+      most of the time I was dog-poor&mdash;and this isn't the place for a poor
+      man. But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it off&mdash;if I
+      ever found my self a rich man&mdash;THEN I'd come piking across the
+      Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would carry me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam in his eye. &ldquo;And you
+      ARE a rich man, now,&rdquo; he observed, after a momentary pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are both rich men,&rdquo; replied Thorpe, gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken. &ldquo;This is how
+      it seems to me the thing figures itself out: It can't be said that your
+      name on the Board, or the Marquis's either, was of much use so far as the
+      public were concerned. To tell the truth, I saw some time ago that they
+      wouldn't be. Titles on prospectuses are played out in London. I've rather
+      a notion, indeed, that they're apt to do more harm than good&mdash;just at
+      present, at least. But all that aside&mdash;you are the man who was civil
+      to me at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about my scheme, and
+      you are the man who was good to me later on, when I didn't know where to
+      turn for a friendly word. Very well; here I am! I've made my coup! And I'd
+      be a sweep, wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so glad to remember a
+      week ago. But you see, I don't forget! The capital of the Company is
+      500,000 pounds, all in pound shares. We offered the public only a fifth of
+      them. The other four hundred thousand shares are mine as vendor&mdash;and
+      I have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of them to be yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words. &ldquo;It is too
+      much&mdash;you don't reflect what it is you are saying,&rdquo; he murmured
+      confusedly. &ldquo;Not a bit of it,&rdquo; the other reassured him. &ldquo;Everything that
+      I've said goes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet. &ldquo;It is a preposterously
+      big reward for the merest act of courtesy,&rdquo; he insisted. &ldquo;Of course it
+      takes my breath away for joy&mdash;and yet I feel I oughtn't to be
+      consenting to it at all. And it has its unpleasant side&mdash;it buries me
+      under a mountain of obligation. I don't know what to do or what to say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then,&rdquo; replied Thorpe, with a
+      gesture before which the other resumed his seat. &ldquo;Just a word more&mdash;and
+      then I suppose we'd better be going. Look at it in this way. Your
+      grandfather was Lord Chancellor of England, and your father was a General
+      in the Crimea. My grandfather kept a small second-hand book-shop, and my
+      father followed him in the business. In one sense, that puts us ten
+      thousand miles apart. But in another sense, we'll say that we like each
+      other, and that there are ways in which we can be of immense use to each
+      other, and that brings us close together. You need money&mdash;and here it
+      is for you. I need&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;a kind of friendly lead
+      in the matter of establishing myself on the right footing, among the right
+      people&mdash;and that's what you can do for me. Mind&mdash;I'd prefer to
+      put it all in quite another way; I'd like to say it was all niceness on
+      your part, all gratitude on mine. But if you want to consider it on a
+      business basis&mdash;why there you have it also&mdash;perfectly plain and
+      clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well. The two men shook
+      hands in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the latter spoke, it was to say: &ldquo;Do you know how to open one of
+      those soda-water bottles? I've tried, but I can never get the trick. I
+      think I should like to have a drink&mdash;after this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man was getting into
+      his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy and cigars within a cabinet at
+      the corner of the room, and carefully turned a key upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you're going West, let me give you a lift,&rdquo; said Lord Plowden, hat in
+      hand. &ldquo;I can set you down wherever you like. Unfortunately I've to go out
+      to dinner, and I must race, as it is, to get dressed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head. &ldquo;No, go along,&rdquo; he bade him. &ldquo;I've some odds and
+      ends of things to do on the way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then when shall I see you?&rdquo;&mdash;began the other, and halted suddenly
+      with a new thought in his glance. &ldquo;But what are you doing Saturday?&rdquo; he
+      asked, in a brisker tone. &ldquo;It's a dies non here. Come down with me
+      to-morrow evening, to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday, and
+      drive about on Sunday, if you like&mdash;and there we can talk at our
+      leisure. Yes, that is what you must do. I have a gun for you. Shall we
+      say, then&mdash;Charing Cross at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we
+      will dine at home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The elder man pondered his answer&mdash;frowning at the problem before him
+      with visible anxiety. &ldquo;I'm afraid I'd better not come&mdash;it's very good
+      of you all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; retorted the other. &ldquo;My mother will be very glad indeed to see
+      you. There is no one else there&mdash;unless, perhaps, my sister has some
+      friend down. We shall make a purely family party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. &ldquo;All right. Charing Cross,
+      5:15,&rdquo; he said then, with the grave brevity of one who announces a
+      momentous decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments after his
+      companion had gone. Then, going to a closet at the end of the room, he
+      brought forth his coat and hat; something prompted him to hold them up,
+      and scrutinize them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put
+      them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused, playing in his
+      beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. He made
+      his way out, and downstairs to the street. It was a rainy, windy October
+      night, sloppy underfoot, dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a
+      cabman, motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening rubber
+      cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed him,
+      with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, &ldquo;Strand!&rdquo; as he
+      clambered into the hansom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;LOUISA, the long and short of it is this,&rdquo; said Thorpe, half an hour
+      later: &ldquo;you never did believe in me, as a sister should do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
+      dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering gasjets.
+      They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only the laid
+      materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate. Above the
+      mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man. Thorpe's gaze
+      recurred automatically at brief intervals to this portrait&mdash;which
+      somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility for the
+      cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the walls of which
+      he was dimly conscious&mdash;small, faded, old prints about Dido and
+      AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out of the
+      mists of his childhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with quaint
+      inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The peculiar odour
+      of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like snuff in his
+      nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at the side, he
+      could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same rat, he
+      wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights, in one of
+      the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he was a boy?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know you always say that,&rdquo; replied Louisa, impassively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice or
+      intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair, drawn
+      simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest brown which
+      assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in contour and spirit,
+      conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of figure, she sat upright
+      in her straight-backed chair, with her large, capable hands on her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believed in you as much as you'd let me,&rdquo; she went on, indifferently,
+      almost wearily. &ldquo;But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did or
+      didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What had I
+      to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world you were
+      in more than once in two or three years. How should I know whether you
+      were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it was you were at?
+      Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London&mdash;but elsewhere you
+      might or you might not&mdash;how could I tell? And moreover, I don't feel
+      that I know you very well; you've grown into something very different from
+      the boy Joel that left the shop&mdash;it must be twenty years ago. I can
+      only know about you and your affairs what you tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But my point is,&rdquo; pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
+      intent glance, &ldquo;you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to succeed.
+      I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued failure
+      to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;I don't remember ever having said that to myself,&rdquo; she admitted,
+      listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke
+      with more animation: &ldquo;You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was
+      very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking
+      about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a stroke,
+      finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your life. But
+      what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof over my
+      head&mdash;to keep the little business from disappearing altogether. It's
+      been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the big
+      jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the invalid
+      husband to support for between three and four years&mdash;a dead weight on
+      me every week&mdash;and then the children to look after, to clothe and
+      educate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. &ldquo;Don't think
+      I'm ungrateful&rdquo;&mdash;she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile&mdash;&ldquo;but
+      I almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What it
+      means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't be able
+      to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of life&mdash;and
+      they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what will become
+      of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam in
+      Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
+      moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over,&rdquo; he
+      persisted, doggedly&mdash;&ldquo;and I told you there'd be more where that came
+      from, and that I stood to pull off the great event&mdash;even then, now,
+      you didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking
+      about, did you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. &ldquo;For heaven's sake,
+      Joel,&rdquo; she said, sharply&mdash;&ldquo;you become a bore with that stupid
+      nonsense. I want to be patient with you&mdash;I do indeed sympathize with
+      you in your misfortunes&mdash;you know that well enough&mdash;but you're
+      very tiresome with that eternal harping on what I believed and what I
+      didn't believe. Now, are you going to stop to supper or not?&mdash;because
+      if you are I must send the maid out. And there's another thing&mdash;would
+      it be of any help to you to bring your things here from the hotel? You can
+      have Alfred's room as well as not&mdash;till Christmas, at least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel till I'd settled my
+      bill,&rdquo; suggested Thorpe tentatively, in a muffled voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The practical woman reflected for an instant. &ldquo;I was thinking,&rdquo; she
+      confessed then, &ldquo;that it might be cheaper to leave your things there, and
+      buy what little you want&mdash;I don't imagine, from what I've seen, that
+      your wardrobe is so very valuable&mdash;but no, I suppose the bill ought
+      to be paid. Perhaps it can be managed; how much will it be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over to her chair. With his
+      thick hands on his sister's shoulders he stooped and kissed her on the
+      forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?&rdquo; he said, as he straightened
+      himself behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unaccustomed caress&mdash;so different in character from the
+      perfunctory salute with which he had greeted her on his arrival from
+      foreign parts, six months before&mdash;brought a flush of pleased surprise
+      to her plain face. Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted
+      gaze she was bending upon the fireless grate. Something extraordinary,
+      unaccountable, was in the manner of her brother. She recalled that, in
+      truth, he was more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell what
+      wild, uncanny second nature had not grown up in him under those outlandish
+      tropical skies? He had just told her that his ruin was absolute&mdash;overwhelming&mdash;yet
+      there had been a covert smile in the recesses of his glance. Even now, she
+      half felt, half heard, a chuckle from him, there as he stood behind her!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain loomed up and
+      possessed her. She flung herself out of the chair, and, wheeling, seized
+      its back and drew it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare of
+      frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rdquo;&mdash;she began, stammering&mdash;&ldquo;What is the matter, Joel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly at her for a further
+      moment. Then he tossed his head, and laughed abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, old girl,&rdquo; he adjured her. &ldquo;Try and hold yourself together, now&mdash;to
+      hear some different kind of news. I've been playing it rather low down on
+      you, for a fact. Instead of my being smashed, it's the other way about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp upon the chair-back.
+      Her breathing troubled her as she regarded him, and tried to take in the
+      meaning of his words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean&mdash;you've been lying to me about&mdash;about your
+      Company?&rdquo; she asked, confusedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;no&mdash;not at all,&rdquo; he replied, now all genial heartiness. &ldquo;No&mdash;what
+      I told you was gospel truth&mdash;but I was taking a rise out of you all
+      the same.&rdquo; He seemed so unaffectedly pleased by his achievement in kindly
+      duplicity that she forced an awkward smile to her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand in the least,&rdquo; she said, striving to remember what he
+      had told her. &ldquo;What you said was that the public had entirely failed to
+      come in&mdash;that there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
+      flotation expenses&mdash;those were your own words. Of course, I don't
+      pretend to understand these City matters&mdash;but it IS the case, isn't
+      it, that if people don't subscribe for the shares of a new company, then
+      the company is a failure?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that may be said to be the case&mdash;as a general rule,&rdquo; he nodded
+      at her, still beaming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then&mdash;of course&mdash;I don't understand,&rdquo; she owned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've explained it to
+      you,&rdquo; he said, seating himself, and motioning her to the other chair. &ldquo;But
+      yes, of course you will. You're a business woman. You know what figures
+      mean. And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You remember that
+      I told you&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie out before the
+      shops close.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Supper? No&mdash;I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked up for that.
+      I'll get something at the hotel before I go to bed, if I feel like it. But
+      say!&rdquo;&mdash;the thought suddenly struck him&mdash;&ldquo;if you want to come out
+      with me, I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London. What d'ye
+      say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;I shall have some bread and cheese and beer at nine.
+      That's my rule, you know. I don't like to break it. I'm always queer next
+      day if I do. But now make haste and tell me&mdash;you're really not broken
+      then? You have really come out well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height, and spread his
+      bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a
+      triumphant glow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Broken?&rdquo; he echoed her word, with emphasis. &ldquo;My dear Louisa, I'm not the
+      sort that gets broken. I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall break
+      them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender, excitedly
+      telling his story to her. Sometimes he threw the words over his shoulder;
+      again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his hands often from his
+      pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the meaning of his speech&mdash;and
+      then she found it peculiarly difficult to realize that he was her brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced
+      this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for
+      her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with
+      the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings in
+      strange lands&mdash;and these he had frequently told her about before.
+      Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a new
+      thread. One after another, these experiences of his, as he related them,
+      turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and malice
+      had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a hundred
+      times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch Indies, in
+      those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless waste when he knew
+      them and might have owned them, and now were yielding fabulous millions to
+      fellows who had tricked and swindled him&mdash;everywhere he had missed by
+      just a hair's breadth the golden consummation. In the Western hemisphere
+      the tale repeated itself. There had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil
+      just before the Empire fell, in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in
+      British Columbia when the first rumours of rich ore were whispered about&mdash;many
+      times when fortune seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had
+      always played him false. There was never a friendship for him which could
+      withstand the temptation of profitable treason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession slipping
+      through his fingers, only to strain and tighten them for a clutch at
+      another. It did not surprise his hearer&mdash;nor indeed did it
+      particularly attract her attention&mdash;that there was nowhere in this
+      rapid and comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the
+      wage-earning sort. Apparently, he had done no work at all, in the
+      bread-winner's sense of the word. This was so like Joel that it was taken
+      for granted in his sister's mind. All his voyages and adventures and
+      painful enterprises had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer&mdash;the
+      passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst, to get something
+      for nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last
+      it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and
+      crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that place
+      that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago.
+      Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his narrative that he
+      now became vague as to details. There were concessions of rubber forests
+      mentioned, and the barter of these for other concessions with money to
+      boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about where the true
+      boundary of Guatemala ran&mdash;but she failed clearly to understand much
+      about it all. His other schemes and mishaps she had followed readily
+      enough. Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw everything
+      jumbled and distorted, as through a haze. Once or twice she interrupted
+      him to ask questions, but he seemed to attach such slight importance to
+      her comprehending these details that she forbore. Only one fact was it
+      necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode, apparently. When he quitted
+      Tehuantepec, to make his way straight to London, at the beginning of the
+      year, he left behind him a rubber plantation which he desired to sell, and
+      brought with him between six and seven thousand pounds, with which to pay
+      the expenses of selling it. How he had obtained either the plantation or
+      the money did not seem to have made itself understood. No doubt, as his
+      manner indicated when she ventured her enquiries, it was quite irrelevant
+      to the narrative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that no villain
+      had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans. He at least mentioned no
+      one who had wronged him there. When he came to London, however, there were
+      villains and to spare. He moved to the mantel, when he arrived at this
+      stage of the story, and made clear a space for his elbow to rest among the
+      little trinkets and photographs with which it was burdened. He stood still
+      thereafter, looking down at her; his voice took on a harsher note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much of this story, also, she knew by heart. This strange, bearded,
+      greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often during the past
+      half-year to the little book-shop, and the widow's home above it, his
+      misshapen handbag full of papers, his heart full of rage, hope, grief,
+      ambition, disgust, confidence&mdash;everything but despair. It was true,
+      it had never been quite real to her. He was right in his suggestion that
+      she had never wholly believed in him. She had not been able to take
+      altogether seriously this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who
+      talked about millions. It was true that he had sent her four hundred
+      pounds for the education of her son and daughter; it was equally true that
+      he had brought with him to London a sum which any of his ancestors, so far
+      as she knew about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he treated
+      as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate the machinery of his great
+      enterprise. She had heard, at various times, the embittered details of the
+      disappearance of this money, little by little. Nearly a quarter of it, all
+      told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart of a company-promoter,
+      who had cozened Joel into the belief that London could be best approached
+      through him. When at last this wretch was kicked downstairs, the effect
+      had been only to make room for a fresh lot of bloodsuckers. There were
+      so-called advertising agents, so-called journalists, so-called &ldquo;men of
+      influence in the City,&rdquo;&mdash;a swarm of relentless and voracious harpies,
+      who dragged from him in blackmail nearly the half of what he had left,
+      before he summoned the courage and decision to shut them out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands he stumbled next&mdash;a
+      group of City men concerned in the South African market, who impressed him
+      very favourably at the outset. He got to know them by accident, and at the
+      time when he began to comprehend the necessity of securing influential
+      support for his scheme. Everything that he heard and could learn about
+      them testified to the strength of their position in the City. Because they
+      displayed a certain amiability of manner toward him and his project, he
+      allowed himself to make sure of their support. It grew to be a certainty
+      in his mind that they would see him through. He spent a good deal of money
+      in dinners and suppers in their honour, after they had let him understand
+      that this form of propitiation was not unpleasant to them. They chaffed
+      him about some newspaper paragraphs, in which he was described as the
+      &ldquo;Rubber King,&rdquo; with an affable assumption of amusement, under which he
+      believed that he detected a genuine respect for his abilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for the better part of
+      two months, he laid before them, at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a
+      dinner in a private room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
+      They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property, and place it upon
+      the market; in consideration of their finding the ready money for this
+      exploitation, they were to have for themselves two-fifths of the shares in
+      the Company ultimately to be floated. They listened to these details, and
+      to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself, with rather
+      perfunctory patience, but committed themselves that evening to nothing
+      definite. It took him nearly a week thereafter to get an answer from any
+      of them. Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at all, it would
+      be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving nine-tenths of the shares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his original amazement, that
+      they named these preposterous terms merely because they expected to be
+      beaten down, and he summoned all his good nature and tact for the task of
+      haggling with them. He misunderstood their first show of impatience at
+      this, and persevered in the face of their tacit rebuffs. Then, one day, a
+      couple of them treated him with overt rudeness, and he, astonished out of
+      his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he could hardly tell why
+      or how, they were all enemies of his. They closed their office doors to
+      him; even their clerks treated him with contemptuous incivility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him, curiously enough, as no
+      other misadventure of his life had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her, at the
+      time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why it should disturb him
+      so profoundly: to her mind, these men had done nothing so monstrous after
+      all. But to him, their offense swallowed up all the other indignities
+      suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. A sombre lust
+      for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated nobody else
+      as he hated them. How often she had heard him swear, in solemn vibrating
+      tones, that to the day of his death his most sacred ambition should be
+      their punishment, their abasement in the dust and mire!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant against the
+      mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took point and shape. It was about
+      these very men that he was talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And think of it!&rdquo; he was saying, impressively. &ldquo;It's magnificent enough
+      for me to make this great hit&mdash;but I don't count it as anything at
+      all by comparison with the fact that I make it at their expense. You
+      remember the fellows I told you about?&rdquo; he asked abruptly, deferring to
+      the confused look on her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;you make it out of them,&rdquo; she repeated, in an uncertain voice.
+      It occurred to her that she must have been almost asleep. &ldquo;But did I miss
+      anything? Have you been telling what it is that you have made?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;that you shall have in good time. You don't seem to realize it,
+      Louisa. I can hardly realize it myself. I am actually a very rich man. I
+      can't tell how much I've got&mdash;in fact, it can be almost as much as I
+      like&mdash;half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want to
+      make it that much. Yes&mdash;it takes the breath away, doesn't it? But
+      best of all&mdash;a thousand times best of all&mdash;practically every
+      dollar of it comes out of those Kaffir swine&mdash;the very men that tried
+      to rob me, and that have been trying to ruin me ever since. I tell you
+      what I wish, Louise&mdash;I wish to God there could only be time enough,
+      and I'd take it all in half-sovereigns&mdash;two millions of them, or
+      three millions&mdash;and just untwist every coin, one by one, out from
+      among their heart-strings. Oh&mdash;but it'll be all right as it is. It's
+      enough to make a man feel religious&mdash;to think how those thieves are
+      going to suffer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&rdquo; she said, slowly after reflection, &ldquo;it all rather frightens me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly accentuated
+      itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and, stooping, lit
+      the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff awkwardness
+      over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note of
+      the room&mdash;the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that
+      had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and
+      begrimed low ceiling&mdash;all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to which
+      she had been condemned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frightens you?&rdquo; he queried, with a kind of jovial tenderness, as she got
+      to her feet; &ldquo;frightens you, eh? Why, within a month's time, old lady,
+      you'll be riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers folding
+      their arms up behind, and you'll be taking it all as easy and as natural
+      as if you'd been born in a barouche.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows: &ldquo;Barouche?
+      That's what we'd call in England a landau.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined
+      meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the
+      snapping sparks. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling with
+      pride in her voice. &ldquo;I was born here over the shop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, good God! so was I,&rdquo; he commented, lustily. &ldquo;But that's no reason
+      why I shouldn't wind up in Park Lane&mdash;or you either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had nothing to say to this, apparently. After a little, she seated
+      herself again, drawing her chair closer to the hearth. &ldquo;It's years since
+      I've lit this fire before the first of November,&rdquo; she remarked, with the
+      air of defending the action to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we're celebrating,&rdquo; he said, rubbing his hands over the reluctant
+      blaze. &ldquo;Everything goes, tonight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment of her mind.
+      &ldquo;You set out to tell me what it was all about,&rdquo; she reminded him. &ldquo;You see
+      I'm completely in the dark. I only hear you say that you've made a great
+      fortune. That's all I know. Or perhaps you've told me as much as you care
+      to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, not at all,&rdquo; he reassured her, pulling his own chair toward him with
+      his foot, and sprawling into it with a grunt of relief. &ldquo;If you'll draw me
+      a glass of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. It's not a
+      thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed to a human being, for that
+      matter&mdash;but you'll enjoy it, and it'll be safe enough with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily after her: &ldquo;No
+      more beer when that keg runs dry, you know. Nothing but champagne!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister brought him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty,&rdquo; he said, when he put the glass down.
+      &ldquo;Truth is&mdash;I've lost track of myself altogether since&mdash;since the
+      big thing happened. I seem to be somebody else&mdash;a comparative
+      stranger, so to speak. I've got to get acquainted with myself, all over
+      again. You can't imagine what an extraordinary feeling it is&mdash;this
+      being hit every few minutes with the recollection that you're worth half a
+      million. It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down. There
+      are such thousands of things to do&mdash;you dance about, all of a
+      flutter. You don't know where to begin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Begin where you left off,&rdquo; suggested Louisa. &ldquo;You were going to tell me
+      how&mdash;how 'the big thing' happened. You're always coming to it&mdash;and
+      never getting any further.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification, he plunged forthwith
+      into the tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remember my telling you at the time how I got my Board together. I'm
+      speaking now of the present Company&mdash;after I'd decided to be my own
+      promoter, and have at least some kind of 'a look-in' for my money. There
+      wasn't much money left, by the way; it was considerably under three
+      thousand. But I come to that later. First there was the Board. Here was
+      where that Lord Plowden that I told you about&mdash;the man that came over
+      on the ship with me&mdash;came in. I went to him. I&mdash;God! I was
+      desperate&mdash;but I hadn't much of an idea he'd consent. But he did! He
+      listened to me, and I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the Syndicate
+      would have cut my throat if I hadn't pulled away,&mdash;and he said, 'Why,
+      yes, I'll go on your Board.' Then I told him more about it, and presently
+      he said he'd get me another man of title&mdash;a sky-scraper of a title
+      too&mdash;to be my Chairman. That's the Marquis of Chaldon, a tremendous
+      diplomatic swell, you know, Ambassador at Vienna in his time, and Lord
+      Lieutenant and all sorts of things, but willing to gather in his five
+      hundred a year, all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?&rdquo; asked the
+      sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten quid a week, and a
+      few extras. The other Directors get three hundred. This Lord Plowden is
+      one of them&mdash;but I'll tell you more about him later on. Then there's
+      Watkin, he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson, he's a
+      wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm in Dundee, but gets along
+      the best way he can on a very dicky business here in London, now. And then
+      there's General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say, but I
+      guess he needs all he can get. He's started wearing his fur-coat already.
+      Well, that's my Board. I couldn't join it, of course, till after allotment&mdash;that's
+      because I'm the vendor, as they call it&mdash;but that hasn't interfered
+      at all with my running the whole show. The Board doesn't really count, you
+      know. It only does what I want it to do. It's just a form that costs me
+      seventeen hundred a year, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seventeen hundred a year,&rdquo; she repeated, mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see. Or first, there were
+      other things to be done. I saw that a good broker's name counted for a lot
+      on a prospectus. I picked out one that I'd heard was reasonable&mdash;it'd
+      been a splendid name if I could have got it&mdash;but he calmly said his
+      price was two thousand pounds, all cash down&mdash;and I came away.
+      Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much of anything yet, and so wasn't
+      so stiff about his figure. He agreed to take 500 pounds cash, and 2,000 in
+      shares. It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned out, at the
+      pinch, to be the one man in a million for me. But I'll tell you about him
+      later. He's the Broker, mind; you mustn't forget him. Well, then, he and I
+      got a Solicitor&mdash;he took 200 pounds cash, but he had to have 2,000
+      shares&mdash;and the firm of Auditors&mdash;they were 100 pounds cash and
+      1,000 shares. Every company has to have these people pasted on to it, by
+      law. Oh yes, and then you must have your Bankers. You don't pay them
+      anything, though, thank God! Well, then, there was the machinery complete,
+      all ready to start. I took a handsome set of offices, and furnished them
+      up to the nines&mdash;but that I was able to do pretty well on credit. You
+      see, ready money was getting short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now came the biggest pull of all. There was the press to be worked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke as if there were no other papers in London but the financial
+      journals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up. You've got no more
+      idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have of&mdash;of a coil of
+      snakes thawing out hungry in the spring. Why, if one blackmailer came to
+      me, I swear a hundred did. They scared the life out of me, the first month
+      or so. And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say they can
+      keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it worth their while. But they
+      all wanted too much money for me&mdash;and for a while I was at my wits'
+      ends. At last I got a fellow&mdash;he's not behaved so badly, all things
+      considered&mdash;who had some sporting blood in his veins, and he was
+      willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds, if I could pay 1,500
+      pounds down, and the rest in shares. But that was just what I couldn't do,
+      you see, so finally he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in shares&mdash;and
+      as I say he's done it tolerably well. There was one editor that I had to
+      square personally&mdash;that is to say, 100 pounds cash&mdash;it had to be
+      in sovereigns, for notes could be traced&mdash;and a call of 2,000 shares
+      at par,&mdash;he's the boss pirate that everybody has to square&mdash;and
+      of course there were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule I
+      just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out. The moment a fellow
+      came in, and handed me his card, and said he had proofs of two kinds of
+      articles in his pocket, one praising me, one damning me, I told him to go
+      and see my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then to go to
+      hell. That's the way you've got to talk in the City,&rdquo; he added, as if in
+      apologetic explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa looked impassively at her brother. &ldquo;Oh, I've heard the expression
+      as far west as the Strand,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then came the issue. That was last Saturday. You saw the prospectus
+      in Saturday morning's papers, and in the weeklies. The list was to be kept
+      open, it said, till Wednesday morning&mdash;that was yesterday. That is to
+      say, during all that time, people could apply for shares.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which they didn't do&mdash;according to your account,&rdquo; the sister
+      suggested, dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair, and eyed her with a
+      momentary quizzical gleam in his eye. Then he became serious again. The
+      recollection of what he was now to narrate brought a frown to his brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On Tuesday afternoon,&rdquo; he began, with portentous deliberation&mdash;&ldquo;Or
+      no, first I must explain something. You see, in bringing out a company,
+      you can't put up too stout a bluff. I mean, you've got to behave as if you
+      were rolling in wealth&mdash;as if everything was coming your way, and
+      fortunes were to be made by fastening to you. I don't know that it often
+      fools anybody very much, but it's part of the game, and you must play it.
+      Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday morning, and has his
+      jobber shout out that he'll buy 'Rubber Consols'&mdash;that's what our
+      shares are called on the street&mdash;at an eighth premium; that is to
+      say, he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were offering to the
+      public for twenty shillings. Of course, you see, the object of that was to
+      create the impression that there was a regular God-almighty rush for our
+      shares. As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled anybody&mdash;but
+      at least there was the chance that it might start up some dealing in the
+      shares&mdash;and all those things help. Besides, you got the sales noticed
+      in the papers, and that might start up applications from the public. Well,
+      the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday. On Monday, when it
+      might still be possible to change the luck, he bought 3,500 more, still at
+      that premium of an eighth. He bought some Tuesday morning too&mdash;say
+      4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and keep an eye on the
+      Broker. He's worth watching&mdash;as you'll see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's his name?&rdquo; asked the sister, with an accession of alertness in her
+      face. &ldquo;You call him 'Broker'&mdash;and that doesn't mean anything to me.
+      They're all brokers, aren't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Semple&mdash;Colin Semple, that's his name. He's a young Scotchman&mdash;father's
+      a Presbyterian minister. He's a little, insignificant runt of a chap to
+      look at&mdash;but I learned a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by
+      his looks. However&mdash;where was I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon, weren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long breath in
+      preparation for the dramatic recital before him. &ldquo;On Tuesday afternoon,&rdquo;
+       he began again, with impressive slowness, &ldquo;I was walking on Throgmorton
+      Street, about four o'clock. It was raining a little&mdash;it had been
+      raining on and off all day&mdash;a miserable, rotten sort of a day, with
+      greasy mud everywhere, and everybody poking umbrellas into you. I was out
+      walking because I'd 'a' cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office
+      another ten minutes. All that day I hadn't eaten anything. I hadn't slept
+      worth speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was
+      worse than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve
+      pounds in the bank&mdash;and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I
+      tell you, I was just plumb busted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen the cuss before
+      during the day, walking up and down near my offices. I took notice of him,
+      because he was the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking cripple you
+      ever saw in your life. Now I read what was on his boards. It was the bill
+      of a paper that I had refused to be bled by, and there it was in big
+      letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!' 'Thorpe's Audacity Punished!' Those
+      were the words. I can see them with my eyes shut. I stood there, looking
+      at the fellow, and I suppose there was something in the way I looked, for
+      he stopped too. Of course, he didn't know me from Adam, but all the same,
+      I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me&mdash;as if we two had a joke
+      between us. And at that I burst out laughing&mdash;I simply roared with
+      laughter, like a boy at a pantomime&mdash;and I took that last half-crown
+      out of my pocket, and I gave it to the sandwich-man. God! you should have
+      seen his face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't particularly mind, Joel,&rdquo; said his sister, &ldquo;but I never heard you
+      swear so much before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what the&mdash;what the deuce!&rdquo; he protested, impatiently. &ldquo;Don't
+      interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street. The members of the
+      Stock Exchange were coming out of 'the house,' and making up little groups
+      on the pavement. They do business inside, you know, until closing time&mdash;this
+      day it happened to be four o'clock&mdash;and then they come out and deal
+      in the street with one another, with the kerb-stone mob, who are not
+      allowed inside, standing round to watch the thing. I came along into the
+      thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts of things&mdash;'East
+      Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,' and what not, but these went in
+      one ear and out the other. If there ever was a man with no stomach for the
+      market it was me. But then someone roared out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five hundred Rubber at
+      seven-eighths! Sell five hundred at three-quarters! At three-quarters you
+      have 'em! Rubber Consols! Sell a thou. at three-quarters!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This thing went into my brain like a live coal. I stopped and looked up
+      at the fellow&mdash;and by God, it was one of the men I've been talking
+      about&mdash;one of those Kaffir scoundrels. I wish I was better at
+      remembering names&mdash;but I knew his face. There were some of the others
+      around him, and they laughed at me, and he laughed at me. Oh, they had a
+      heap of fun out of me&mdash;for a minute or two. Pretty good fun, too! I
+      guess they'll remember it quite a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on!&rdquo; Louisa adjured him. The obvious proximity of the dramatic climax
+      drew her forward in her chair, and brought a glow of expectation to her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got myself away from that crowd somehow&mdash;I think I was afraid if I
+      stayed I'd strangle the one who was shouting on the steps&mdash;and I went
+      toward my office. But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage to
+      go in. I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any other office in Austin
+      Friars, and I had a kind of feeling that the sight of those carpets, and
+      oak-tables and desks, and brass-railings and so on would make me sick. I
+      owed for 'em all, bear in mind&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;Joel,&rdquo; the sister interposed. &ldquo;One thing I don't understand.
+      How many people had applied for shares? You haven't mentioned that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of his present mood. &ldquo;It
+      was hardly worth mentioning,&rdquo; he answered, with bitter mirth. &ldquo;Between
+      five and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. I think the
+      withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand. We
+      offered a hundred thousand, you know.&mdash;But let me go on with my
+      story. I stood there, in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance.
+      The words of that Jew&mdash;'Sell Rubber Consols at three-quarters!'&mdash;buzzed
+      inside my head as if they would burst it open. I turned&mdash;and I
+      happened to see my Broker&mdash;the Scotchman, Semple, you know&mdash;coming
+      along toward me. Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on
+      me. In less than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten outfit turned
+      upside down, with me on top. I made a jump, and ran to meet Semple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him, with a grip tight
+      on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little chap was looking mighty sick. He figured up in his mind. 'I'm
+      afraid it's eight thousand five hundred, all told,' he said, in a sort of
+      Presbyterian whimper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well&mdash;how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver their goods&mdash;that
+      is, supposing we got a settlement?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face. He looked puzzled for a
+      minute. Then he put out his lip. Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a
+      razor, and we looked into one another's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters, a minute ago,' I
+      told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was onto the game like lightning. 'Wait for me in the office,' he
+      whispered. 'We'll go nap on this!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With that he was off like a streak. He stopped running just before he got
+      to the corner, though, and began walking slowly, sauntering along, you
+      know, as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books. I watched him
+      out of sight&mdash;and then I went back, and up to the offices. The
+      furniture didn't scare me a bit this time. Why, I stopped and felt of the
+      brass-railing just outside the Board Room, and I said to myself&mdash;'Pshaw!
+      We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she felt was intended to
+      be a significant look. She shrank from the confession that its meaning was
+      Greek to her. &ldquo;Well&mdash;and what next?&rdquo; she asked, guardedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Semple came back in twenty minutes or so&mdash;and the next morning he
+      was at it again&mdash;and what with him and his jobber, by George, on the
+      quiet, they picked up nearly eighteen thousand of our shares. Some they
+      paid fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six and even ten.
+      That doesn't matter; it's of no more importance than the coppers you give
+      to crossing-sweepers. The thing was to get the shares&mdash;and by God
+      we've got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares, that's what we've
+      got. Now, do you see what that means?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why yes,&rdquo; she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption of confidence.
+      &ldquo;Of course, you know the property is so good that you'll make a profit on
+      the shares you've bought far below their value. But I don't think I quite
+      see&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter. &ldquo;Don't think you
+      quite see?&rdquo; he gurgled at her, with tears of pleasure in his eye. &ldquo;Why,
+      you dummy, you haven't got the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's
+      all about. The value of the property's got nothing in the world to do with
+      it. That's neither here nor there. If there wasn't any such property in
+      existence, it would be just the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this, and explained more
+      gently: &ldquo;Why, don't you see, Lou, it's this way. This is what has
+      happened. We've got what's called a corner on the bears. They're caught
+      short, and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content. What&mdash;you
+      don't understand now? Why, see here! These fellows who've sold twenty-six
+      thousand of our shares&mdash;they haven't got them to sell, and they can't
+      get them. That is the point&mdash;they can't get them for love nor money&mdash;they
+      must pay me my own price for them, or be ruined men. The moment they
+      realize the situation, they will begin offering a premium for Rubber
+      Consols. The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds, then four&mdash;six&mdash;ten&mdash;twenty&mdash;thirty&mdash;whatever
+      I want to drive it to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes. It seemed to her that she
+      understood now. It was very exciting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he went on, taking approving note of the new light of
+      comprehension in her glance, &ldquo;we did something that Tuesday afternoon
+      beside buy up these shares. Semple rushed off to his office, and he and
+      his clerks got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out in all
+      the different names they could be safe in using, and they put these into
+      the bank with the application money&mdash;Semple found that&mdash;and next
+      day he went and saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
+      auditors&mdash;and got them to pool the shares that I've promised to give
+      them. A pool? That means they agree to transfer their shares to me as
+      trustee, and let me deal with them as I like&mdash;of course to their
+      advantage. In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't be
+      dealt with in this transaction. So you see the thing is hermetically
+      sealed. Nobody can get a share except from me, and at my price. But these
+      fellows that have sold them&mdash;they've got to have them, don't you see.
+      They had their little temporary joke with me on the street that afternoon&mdash;and
+      now they must walk up to the captain's office and settle. They've got to
+      pay me at least half a million pounds for that few minutes' fun of theirs.
+      I may make it a good deal more; I don't know yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Joel!&rdquo; she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction. His rather languid
+      indecision as to whether half a million was going to be enough, impressed
+      her more powerfully than had any detail of his narrative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for her what there was to
+      tell. &ldquo;This afternoon my Board met to allot the shares. They saw the
+      applications, amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares. It took
+      their breath away&mdash;they had heard that things were going quite the
+      other way with us. They were so tickled that they asked no questions The
+      allotment went through like a greased pig. About 5,000 shares went to
+      those who had actually applied for them, and 88,000 were solemnly given to
+      the dummy applicants. Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these
+      dummies. Nobody winked so much as an eyelash. But I've found since that
+      one of the directors&mdash;that Lord Plowden I told you about&mdash;was
+      onto the thing all the while. But he's all right. Everybody's all right.
+      Of course the dummies' shares still stand in their names&mdash;on paper&mdash;but
+      in reality I've got them all in my safe&mdash;in my pocket you might say.
+      They are really mine, you understand. So now there's nothing for us to do
+      but to apply to the Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and
+      meanwhile lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. Or fry in
+      their own fat, eh? That's better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; she commented slowly, &ldquo;you say there are no shares to be bought&mdash;and
+      yet as I understand it, there are those five thousand that were sent out
+      to the people who really applied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bravo, Lou!&rdquo; he answered her jovially. &ldquo;You actually do understand the
+      thing. You've put your finger straight on the point. It is true that those
+      shares are out against us&mdash;or might be turned against us if they
+      could be bought up. But in reality, they don't count at all. In the first
+      place, you see, they're scattered about among small holders, country
+      clergymen and old maids on an annuity and so on&mdash;all over the
+      country. Even if these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose it
+      was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell. The bigger the
+      price they were offered, the more mulish they would be about holding.
+      That's always the way with them. But even if they did all sell, their five
+      thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket. There would be over twenty
+      thousand others to be accounted for. That would be quite enough for my
+      purposes. Oh, I figured all that out very carefully. My own first notion
+      was to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand, and even a
+      little over. Then, you see, we might have allotted everything to the
+      dummies, and sent back the money and applications of the genuine ones. But
+      that would have been rather hard to manage with the Board. The Markiss
+      would have said that the returns ought to be made pro rata&mdash;that is,
+      giving everybody a part of what they applied for&mdash;and that would have
+      mixed everything up. And then, too, if anybody suspected anything, why the
+      Stock Exchange Committee would refuse us a special settlement&mdash;and,
+      of course, without that the whole transaction is moonshine. It was far too
+      risky, and we didn't send back a penny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all pretty risky, I should think,&rdquo; she declared as she rose. &ldquo;I
+      should think you'd lie awake more than ever now&mdash;now that you've
+      built your hopes so high and it'd be so awful to have them come to
+      nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smilingly shook his head. &ldquo;No, it can no more fail than that gas can
+      fail to burn when you put a light to it. It's all absolute. My
+      half-million is as right as if it were lying to my credit in the Bank of
+      England. Oh, that reminds me,&rdquo; he went on in a slightly altered tone&mdash;&ldquo;it's
+      damned comical, but I've got to ask you for a little money. I've only got
+      about seven pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it would give me
+      away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. Of course he'd let me
+      have anything I wanted&mdash;but, you can see&mdash;I don't like to ask
+      him just at the moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a wistful gaze. &ldquo;You're
+      quite sure, Joel?&rdquo;&mdash;she began&mdash;&ldquo;and you haven't told me&mdash;how
+      long will it be before you come into some of this money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo;&mdash;he in turn paused over his words&mdash;&ldquo;well, I suppose that
+      by next week things will be in such shape that my bank will see I'm good
+      for an overdraft. Oh heavens, yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching
+      some ready. But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now&mdash;I
+      tell you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill, paying one
+      hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me have now. Come, old lady:
+      you don't get such interest every day, I'll bet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want any interest from you, Joel,&rdquo; she replied, simply. &ldquo;If
+      you're sure I can have it back before Christmas, I think I can manage
+      thirty pounds. It will do in the morning, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded an amused affirmative. &ldquo;Why&mdash;you don't imagine, do you,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;that all this gold is to rain down, and none of it hit you?
+      Interest? Why of course you'll get interest&mdash;and capital thrown in.
+      What did you suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't ask anything for myself,&rdquo; she made answer, with a note of
+      resolution in her voice. &ldquo;Of course if you like to do things for the
+      children, it won't be me who'll stand in their light. They've been spoiled
+      for my kind of life as it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll do things for everybody,&rdquo; he affirmed roundly. &ldquo;Let's see&mdash;how
+      old is Alfred?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll be twenty in May&mdash;and Julia is fourteen months older than he
+      is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gad!&rdquo; was Thorpe's meditative comment. &ldquo;How they shoot up! Why I was
+      thinking she was a little girl.&rdquo; &ldquo;She never will be tall, I'm afraid,&rdquo;
+       said the literal mother. &ldquo;She favours her father's family. But Alfred is
+      more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer&mdash;but
+      of course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them&mdash;and
+      they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in the
+      country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age: he's got
+      the same good opinion of himself, too&mdash;and he's not a bit fonder of
+      hard work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's one mighty big difference between us, though,&rdquo; remarked Thorpe.
+      &ldquo;He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old father
+      hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman&mdash;the nephew of a rich
+      man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,&rdquo; she replied,
+      with visible apprehension. &ldquo;You mustn't encourage him to build too high
+      hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know&mdash;and anything might happen to
+      you. And then&mdash;you may marry, and have sons of your own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his brows swiftly&mdash;as if the thought were new to his mind.
+      A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his
+      lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an
+      eye about for his coat and hat. &ldquo;I'll be round in the morning&mdash;on my
+      way to the City. Good-bye till then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by the
+      big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This
+      deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the last
+      possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud nodded
+      to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some quaint
+      novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece with
+      what had been happening all day&mdash;merely one more token of the general
+      upheaval in the routine of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that his
+      old manners and usages and methods of thought&mdash;the thousand familiar
+      things that made up the Thorpe he had been&mdash;were becoming strange to
+      him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now, as
+      he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all
+      disappeared&mdash;been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With
+      the two large bags which the porter was looking after&mdash;both of a
+      quite disconcerting freshness of aspect&mdash;and the new overcoat and
+      shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a
+      voyage of discovery in the unknown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to
+      the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after
+      breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in the
+      mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin, tawny
+      moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence; the jaw
+      and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years, seemed
+      of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way, misshapen. Many times
+      during the day, at his office, at the restaurant where he lunched, at
+      various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of
+      getting reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-glass. The little
+      mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most in this endeavour. Each
+      returned to him an image so different from all the others&mdash;some
+      cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion of its
+      own&mdash;that it had become possible for him to strike an average
+      tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old
+      book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his own
+      clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring
+      implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived his
+      youth. The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man spread
+      over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing all
+      earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he had had
+      during the day in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and embroidered
+      braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors, toilet articles,
+      studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the gratified tradesmen
+      to give him the best of everything&mdash;this delight had been
+      distinctively boyish. He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could have
+      risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected upon
+      the contents of his portmanteaus. To apprehend their full value one must
+      have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful
+      advantage&mdash;that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
+      nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could be
+      without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and mostly
+      unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to appreciate
+      to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good
+      tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and his
+      evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume for
+      shooting harassed his mind. He had brought along with him, for this
+      eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and leather,
+      much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable by its
+      suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic country.
+      At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had packed it, to
+      be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject had soon risen,
+      however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy as his conceptions
+      of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's investigations and
+      purchases. He had reached the point now of hoping that it would rain
+      bitterly on the morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since
+      he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time
+      was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in this
+      matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another. He
+      would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in
+      readiness on the arrival of his host. As it was, he could not even tell
+      the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now less than
+      two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of intercepting
+      his friend at the front of the station; then halted, and went back, upon
+      the recollection that while he was going out one way, Plowden might come
+      in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now, became severally painful
+      to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere beyond the barrier provoked
+      within him an impulse to tearful profanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken
+      young man came up, touched his hat, and asked: &ldquo;Will you kindly show me
+      which is your luggage, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the
+      glaringly new bags&mdash;and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at
+      discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right; my man will look out for your things,&rdquo; said the latter,
+      as they shook hands. &ldquo;We will go and get our places.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. A lean, elderly man in a
+      sort of guard's uniform hobbled obsequiously before them down the
+      platform, opened to them a first-class compartment with a low bow and a
+      deprecatory wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door upon
+      them. &ldquo;The engine will be the other way, my Lord, after you leave Cannon
+      Street,&rdquo; he remarked through the open window, with earnest deference. &ldquo;Are
+      there any of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook his head at the second.
+      The elderly man at this, with still another bow, flapped out a green flag
+      which he had been holding furled behind his back, and extended it at arm's
+      length. The train began slowly to move. Mr. Thorpe reflected to himself
+      that the peerage was by no means so played-out an institution as some
+      people imagined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ho-ho!&rdquo; the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed his hat into the rack
+      above his head. &ldquo;We shall both be the better for some pure air. London
+      quite does me up. And you&mdash;you've been sticking at it months on end,
+      haven't you? You look rather fagged&mdash;or at all events you did
+      yesterday. You've smartened yourself so&mdash;without your beard&mdash;that
+      I can't say I'd notice it to-day. But I take it every sensible person is
+      glad to get away from London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put my nose outside
+      London since I landed here.&rdquo; Thorpe rose as he spoke, to deposit his hat
+      also in the rack. He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's was
+      an ordinary low black bowler. &ldquo;I can tell you, I SHALL be glad of the
+      change. I would have bought the tickets,&rdquo; he went on, giving words at
+      random to the thought which he found fixed on the surface of his mind, &ldquo;if
+      I'd only known what our station was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss the subject. He
+      took a cigar case from his pocket, and offered it to Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether,&rdquo; he said, as they
+      lighted their cigars. &ldquo;I was up late last night&mdash;turned out late this
+      morning, been late all day, somehow&mdash;couldn't catch up with the clock
+      for the life of me. Your statement to me last night&mdash;you know it
+      rather upset me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other smiled. &ldquo;Well, I guess I know something about that feeling
+      myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today like a hen with her head cut
+      off. But it's fun, though, aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every
+      once in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course it means a
+      thousand times more to me than it does to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern of Cannon
+      Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro on the platform, and a
+      number of them shook the handle of the locked door. There was an effect of
+      curses in the sound of their remarks which came through the closed window.
+      Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, that's where you mistake,&rdquo; said Plowden, contemplating the mouthful
+      of smoke he slowly blew forth. &ldquo;My dear man, you can't imagine anybody to
+      whom it would mean more than it does to me&mdash;I hope none of those
+      fellows have a key. They're an awful bore on this train. I almost never go
+      by it, for that reason. Ah, thank God we're off!&mdash;But as I was
+      saying, this thing makes a greater difference to me than you can think of.
+      I couldn't sleep last night&mdash;I give you my word&mdash;the thing upset
+      me so. I take it you&mdash;you have never had much money before; that is,
+      you know from experience what poverty is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;but you&rdquo;&mdash;the other began, and then paused. &ldquo;What I mean
+      is,&rdquo; he resumed, &ldquo;you were never, at any rate, responsible to anybody but
+      yourself. If you had only a sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for
+      that matter, you could accommodate yourself to the requirements of the
+      situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy it any more than I should&mdash;but
+      at least it was open to you to do it, without attracting much attention.
+      But with me placed in my ridiculous position&mdash;poverty has been the
+      most unbearable torture one can imagine. You see, there is no way in which
+      I can earn a penny. I had to leave the Army when I was twenty-three&mdash;the
+      other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it was impossible for
+      me to drag along with a title and an empty pocket. I daresay that I ought
+      to have stuck to it, because it isn't nearly so bad now, but twelve years
+      ago it was too cruel for any youngster who had any pride about him&mdash;and,
+      of course, my father having made rather a name in the Army, that made it
+      so much harder for me. And after that, what was there? Of course, the bar
+      and medicine and engineering and those things were out of the question, in
+      those days at least. The Church?&mdash;that was more so still. I had a try
+      at politics&mdash;but you need money there as much as anywhere else&mdash;money
+      or big family connections. I voted in practically every division for four
+      years, and I made the rottenest speeches you ever heard of at Primrose
+      League meetings in small places, and after all that the best thing the
+      whips could offer me was a billet in India at four hundred a year, and
+      even that you took in depreciated rupees. When I tried to talk about
+      something at home, they practically laughed in my face. I had no leverage
+      upon them whatever. They didn't care in the least whether I came up and
+      voted or stopped at home. Their majority was ten to one just the same&mdash;yes,
+      twenty to one. So that door was shut in my face. I've never been inside
+      the House since&mdash;except once to show it to an American lady last
+      summer&mdash;but when I do go again I rather fancy&rdquo;&mdash;he stopped for
+      an instant, and nodded his handsome head significantly&mdash;&ldquo;I rather
+      fancy I shall turn up on the other side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics,&rdquo; interposed Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left London Bridge
+      behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions, and leant back
+      comfortably. &ldquo;Of course there was the City,&rdquo; he went on, speaking
+      diagonally across to his companion, between leisurely intervals of
+      absorption in his cigar. &ldquo;There have been some directors' fees, no doubt,
+      and once or twice I've come very near to what promised to be a big thing&mdash;but
+      I never quite pulled it off. Really, without capital what can one do?&mdash;I'm
+      curious to know&mdash;did you bring much ready money with you to England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Between six and seven thousand pounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if it's a fair question&mdash;how much of it have you got left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question,
+      but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to
+      answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. &ldquo;Oh, less than a hundred,&rdquo; he said,
+      and laughed aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden also laughed. &ldquo;By George, that's fine!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;It's splendid.
+      There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know. Something told me
+      it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was that that made me
+      come to you as I did&mdash;and tell you that you were a great man, and
+      that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of courage is so rare!
+      When a man has it, he can stand the world on its head.&rdquo; &ldquo;But I was plumb
+      scared, all the while, myself,&rdquo; Thorpe protested, genially. &ldquo;Courage? I
+      could feel it running out of my boots.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes, but that's the great thing,&rdquo; insisted the other. &ldquo;You didn't
+      look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was
+      sublime. And nothing else matters&mdash;it was sublime.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Curious&mdash;that thing happened to me once before,&rdquo; commented Thorpe,
+      with ruminating slowness. &ldquo;It was out on the plains, years ago, and I was
+      in pretty hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north, and
+      some cowboys held me up, and were going to make kindling wood of me, they
+      being under the impression that I was a horse-thief they were looking
+      after. There was five or six minutes there when my life wasn't worth a
+      last year's bird's-nest&mdash;and I tell you, sir, I was the scaredest man
+      that ever drew the breath of life. And then something happened to be said
+      that put the matter right&mdash;they saw I was the wrong man&mdash;and
+      then&mdash;why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. They half
+      emptied their flasks down my throat, and they rode with me all the way to
+      the next town, and there they wanted to buy everything liquid in the place
+      for me. But what I was speaking of&mdash;do you know, those fellows got a
+      tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much that they told me so, but
+      they told others about it. They really thought I was game to the core&mdash;when
+      in reality, as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you ever heard of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's just it,&rdquo; said Plowden, &ldquo;the part of you which was engaged in
+      making mental notes of the occasion thought you were frightened; we will
+      say that it was itself frightened. But the other part of you, the part
+      that was transacting business, so to speak&mdash;that wasn't in the least
+      alarmed. I fancy all born commanders are built like that. Did you ever see
+      General Grant?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What reminded me of him&mdash;there is an account in his Memoirs of how
+      he felt when he first was given a command, at the beginning of the Civil
+      War. He was looking about for the enemy, who was known to be in the
+      vicinity, and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was, the more
+      he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed as if cowardice were
+      getting complete mastery of him. And then suddenly it occurred to him that
+      very likely the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of the enemy,
+      and that moment his bravery all returned to him. He went in and gave the
+      other man a terrible thrashing. It doesn't apply to your case,
+      particularly&mdash;but I fancy that all really brave men have those inner
+      convictions of weakness, even while they are behaving like lions. Those
+      must have been extraordinarily interesting experiences of yours&mdash;on
+      the plains. I wish I could have seen something of that part of America
+      when I was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come my way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden smiled. &ldquo;I'm afraid I did think it was West at the time. But since
+      my return I've been warned that I mustn't call Chicago West. That was as
+      far as I went. I had some business there, or thought I had. When my father
+      died, that was in 1884, we found among his papers a lot of bonds of some
+      corporation purporting to be chartered by the State of Illinois. Our
+      solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find out nothing about
+      them, and there the matter rested. Finally, last year, when I decided to
+      make the trip, I recollected these old bonds, and took them with me. I
+      thought they might at least pay my expenses. But it wasn't the least good.
+      Nobody knew anything about them. It seems they related to something that
+      was burned up in the Great Fire&mdash;either that, or had disappeared
+      before that time. That fire seems to have operated like the Deluge&mdash;it
+      cancelled everything that had happened previously. My unhappy father had a
+      genius for that kind of investment. I shall have great pleasure in showing
+      you tomorrow, a very picturesque and comprehensive collection of
+      Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I remember it, eighty thousand
+      dollars&mdash;that is, sixteen thousand pounds. I would entertain with joy
+      an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot. My dear father bought them&mdash;I
+      should not be surprised to learn that he bought them at a premium. If they
+      ever touched a premium for a day, that is certainly the day that he would
+      have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a
+      hundred thousand pounds' worth of paper&mdash;that is, on its face&mdash;upon
+      which the solicitors realized, I think it was thirteen hundred pounds.
+      It's hard to imagine how he got them&mdash;but there were actually bonds
+      among them issued by Kossuth's Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well&mdash;now
+      you can see the kind of inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and
+      sister more or less to look after, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated
+      expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now
+      betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I see that well enough,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;But what I don't perhaps
+      quite understand&mdash;well, this is it. You have this place of yours in
+      the country, and preserve game and so on&mdash;but of course I see what
+      you mean. It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a
+      comfortable living, is poverty to a man in your position.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the place,&rdquo; said Plowden. &ldquo;It isn't mine at all. I could never have
+      kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has
+      been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you
+      know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three
+      daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest, got
+      the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me eventually,
+      but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as my place, but
+      that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to explain to
+      everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's enough. It's a
+      dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that you're going to see
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm very glad, too,&rdquo; said the other, with unaffected sincerity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the ambitions I have in the world,&rdquo; the nobleman went on, sitting
+      upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, &ldquo;centre round
+      Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are
+      things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very small
+      way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud voice
+      and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics. He got a
+      peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a soldier, had a
+      mild voice and a soft heart. He gave a certain military distinction to the
+      peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the fortune. And then I come: I
+      can't be either a Chancellor or a General, and I haven't a penny to bless
+      myself with. You can't think of a more idiotic box for a man to be in. But
+      now&mdash;thanks to you&mdash;there comes this prospect of an immense
+      change. If I have money at my back&mdash;at once everything is different
+      with me. People will remember then promptly enough that I am a Hadlow, as
+      well as a Plowden. I will make the party whips remember it, too. It won't
+      be a Secretary's billet in India at four hundred a year that they'll offer
+      me, but a Governorship at six thousand&mdash;that is, if I wish to leave
+      England at all. And we'll see which set of whips are to have the honour of
+      offering me anything. But all that is in the air. It's enough, for the
+      moment, to realize that things have really come my way. And about that&mdash;about
+      the success of the affair&mdash;I suppose there can be no question
+      whatever?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the slightest,&rdquo; Thorpe assured him. &ldquo;Rubber Consols can go up to any
+      figure we choose to name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped himself
+      after he had given his companion a light. Then he threw himself back
+      against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. &ldquo;I'm not going to say
+      another word about myself,&rdquo; he announced, pleasantly. &ldquo;I've had more than
+      my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a moment the
+      reverse of the medal. You're doing wonderful things for me. I only wish it
+      were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I can do for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that'll be all right,&rdquo; said the other, rather vaguely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind just
+      what you want to do,&rdquo; Plowden reflected aloud. &ldquo;Of course it has come
+      suddenly upon you&mdash;just as it has upon me. There are things in plenty
+      that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a long way
+      off. It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we shall proceed
+      to do, when the power is actually in our hands. But have you any plans at
+      all? Do you fancy going into Parliament, for example?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered Thorpe, meditatively. &ldquo;I think I should like to go into
+      Parliament. But that would be some way ahead. I guess I've got my plans
+      worked out a trifle more than you think. They may not be very definite, as
+      regards details, but their main direction I know well enough. I'm going to
+      be an English country gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. He seemed
+      annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so, turning abruptly first
+      to stare out of the window, then shifting his position on the seat, and at
+      last stealing an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his tongue
+      was at a loss for an appropriate comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. Plowden
+      saw that at once, but it relieved even more than it surprised him to see
+      also that Thorpe appeared not to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in
+      good-natured if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that'll be all right, too,&rdquo; he said, with the evident intention of
+      reassurance. &ldquo;I can do it right enough, so far as the big things are
+      concerned. It'll be in the little things that I'll want some steering.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've already told you&mdash;you may command me to the utmost of my
+      power,&rdquo; the other declared. Upon reflection, he was disposed to be ashamed
+      of himself. His nerves and facial muscles had been guilty of an
+      unpardonable lapse into snobbishness&mdash;and toward a man, too, who had
+      been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its courtesy and
+      generosity than any he had encountered in all the &ldquo;upper circles&rdquo; put
+      together. He recalled all at once, moreover, that Thorpe's &ldquo;h's&rdquo; were
+      perfect&mdash;aud, for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow&rdquo;&mdash;he began again, confronting with verbal awkwardness
+      the other's quizzical smile&mdash;&ldquo;don't think I doubt anything about you.
+      I know well enough that you can do anything&mdash;be anything&mdash;you
+      like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe laughed softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-school man,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. &ldquo;No&mdash;I didn't know
+      that,&rdquo; he admitted, frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon,&rdquo; Thorpe went on, &ldquo;as they called them in my
+      day. That's gone out now, I'm told, since they've moved to the big
+      buildings in Hammersmith. I did very well at school, too; came out in the
+      first fourteen. But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further. He
+      insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's and learning the
+      book-business. He had precisely the same kind of dynastic idea, you know,
+      that you fellows have. His father and his grand-father had been
+      booksellers, and he was going to hand on the tradition to me, and my son
+      after me. That was his idea. And he thought that Paul's would help this&mdash;but
+      that Oxford would kill it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, he was right there&mdash;but he was wrong in supposing there
+      was a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough, mind you&mdash;but
+      damn the people that came to buy them, I couldn't stand it. You stood two
+      hours watching to see that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and at
+      the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. While you were
+      doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off with a book worth
+      eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. I didn't hit it off with the old
+      man, either. We didn't precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook. I
+      hung about London for some years, trying this thing and that. Once I
+      started a book-shop of my own&mdash;but I did no good here. Finally I
+      turned it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've
+      been in almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to
+      be shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting
+      to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger&mdash;but
+      I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my father's book-shop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the other's mood. He was
+      silent for a moment, then lifted his head as if something had occurred to
+      him. &ldquo;You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed to your
+      father's business&mdash;and your son after you&mdash;you're not married,
+      are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe slowly shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our station is the next,&rdquo; said the younger man. &ldquo;It's a drive of
+      something under two miles. You'd better light another cigar.&rdquo; He added, as
+      if upon a casual afterthought: &ldquo;We can both of us think of marrying now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied with
+      various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed
+      suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively by
+      clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
+      horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins, and
+      Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial
+      silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them
+      from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close behind
+      him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the question.
+      Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst forth with
+      high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight, once the main
+      road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies to regulate. He
+      kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the animal&mdash;&ldquo;So&mdash;so&mdash;quiet,
+      my pet,&mdash;so&mdash;so&mdash;easy, my beauty&mdash;-so&mdash;so&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
+      strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth of
+      steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a modified
+      pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed, in the
+      gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good deal as to
+      how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence was such a
+      law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could not so much
+      as hear them sigh or gasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the most
+      fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily developed
+      into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower than ever.
+      Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all at once upon
+      an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel road, and
+      halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse. Thorpe, as he
+      stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a low,
+      pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
+      curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
+      conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
+      front of the central portion of this house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A profusion of hospitable lights&mdash;tall wax-candles in brackets among
+      the vines against the trellised wall&mdash;gave to this outlying entrance
+      what the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
+      comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
+      There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
+      and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
+      massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
+      Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
+      broad doorway of the house proper stood open&mdash;with warm lights
+      glowing richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
+      swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
+      somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once
+      there were a number of young men&mdash;at the horse's head, at the back
+      and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and beyond&mdash;each
+      presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica of all the
+      others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them apart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at his
+      watch. &ldquo;We did it in a bit over eight minutes,&rdquo; he remarked, with obvious
+      satisfaction. &ldquo;With four people and heavy roads that's not so bad&mdash;not
+      so bad. But come inside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like of
+      which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with a big
+      staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and left,
+      half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old and
+      uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of tigers
+      and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase about the
+      room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic weapons
+      caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer peeped out
+      on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of hooks crowded
+      with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a fire glowed and
+      blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans
+      drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation. The
+      irregularity of every thing outside&mdash;the great table in the centre of
+      the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books, flasks,
+      newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers, and leggings
+      scattered under the benches at the sides&mdash;all this self-renewing
+      disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise.
+      It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch&mdash;and to find it in the
+      ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to overflowing with
+      servants, amazed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His
+      mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished at
+      nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat. Another
+      moved toward the staircase with his two bags.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you will follow Pangbourn,&rdquo; said his host, indicating this second
+      domestic, &ldquo;he will look after you. You would like to go up and change now,
+      wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus,
+      taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low
+      passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing of
+      the house. The servant ushered him into a room&mdash;and, in despite of
+      himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and
+      most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be&mdash;spacious and quaintly
+      rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
+      effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and
+      chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm, cozy
+      glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at the
+      photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high posts
+      and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted face of the
+      servant, smiled richly to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe
+      looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was conscious
+      of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to unpack them
+      as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel after another
+      and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa beside him. He
+      did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he had ever seen
+      carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of
+      his tongue&mdash;but he did not utter these words. After circling idly,
+      hands in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he
+      invented something which it seemed better for him to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,&rdquo; he remarked,
+      casually. &ldquo;My man has been buying them today&mdash;and I don't know what
+      he mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went
+      astray or was stolen at some station or other&mdash;the first part of the
+      week&mdash;I think it must have been Leeds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said Pangbourn, without emotion. &ldquo;They're very careless, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading them
+      on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging the
+      razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to foresee
+      everything&mdash;for there was not an instant's hesitation in the
+      clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in
+      one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set the
+      patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican
+      shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its
+      constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
+      sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the trick of
+      making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been fashioned
+      expressly for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for
+      Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now he would
+      be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind. Conceivably he
+      might even get this identical Pangbourn&mdash;treasure though he were.
+      Money could command everything on this broad globe&mdash;and why not
+      Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became
+      apparent that the man's task was nearing completion&mdash;and then frowned
+      at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the
+      end of a visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you dress now, sir?&rdquo; asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct enunciation
+      conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo; said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall you require me any further, sir?&rdquo; the man reframed the question,
+      deferentially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Oh&mdash;no,&rdquo; replied Thorpe. &ldquo;No&mdash;I'll get along all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing. The
+      candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror presented a
+      somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he was used to&mdash;but
+      upon second thought he preferred this restrained aristocratic glimmer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with his
+      shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the
+      darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait for
+      someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before he could
+      answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and firelight that
+      it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward to meet his host
+      who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have they looked after you all right?&rdquo; said Plowden, nonchalantly. &ldquo;Have
+      a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never will
+      keep matches in a bedroom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and
+      stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. &ldquo;I thought I'd tell
+      you before we went down&rdquo;&mdash;he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the
+      mantel, looked down at his handsome head&mdash;&ldquo;my sister has a couple of
+      ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on
+      shipboard a Miss Madden&mdash;an American, you know&mdash;very tall and
+      fine, with bright red hair&mdash;rather remarkable hair it was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember the lady,&rdquo; said Thorpe, upon reflection, &ldquo;but we didn't meet.&rdquo;
+       He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those days it by
+      no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to him to know
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden smiled a little. &ldquo;Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun&mdash;if
+      she's in the mood. My mother and sister&mdash;I had them call on her in
+      London last spring&mdash;and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no
+      end of money, you know&mdash;at least a million and a half&mdash;dollars,
+      unfortunately. Her parents were Irish&mdash;her father made his pile in
+      the waggon business, I believe&mdash;but she's as American as if they'd
+      crossed over in&mdash;what was it, the 'Sunflower'?&mdash;no, the
+      'Mayflower.' Marvelous country for assimilation, that America is! You
+      remember what I told you&mdash;it's put such a mark on you that I should
+      never have dreamt you were English.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence.
+      This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was
+      not altogether grateful to his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The other one,&rdquo; continued Plowden, &ldquo;is Lady Cressage. You'll be
+      interested in her&mdash;because a few years ago she was supposed to be the
+      most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder&mdash;he
+      would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived&mdash;but he
+      was drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!&rdquo; he
+      started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face&mdash;&ldquo;it didn't
+      in the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick.
+      How did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. &ldquo;Why, you introduced me to him
+      yourself, didn't you?&rdquo; he asked, slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it
+      over in his mind. &ldquo;By George! I think you're right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'd quite
+      forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see&mdash;oh yes, I reconstruct it
+      readily enough now. Poor old chappie&mdash;he needs all he can get. He was
+      bothering her about money&mdash;that was it, I remember now&mdash;but what
+      an idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying&mdash;there's no one
+      else but my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster&mdash;twenty
+      or thereabouts&mdash;and he purports to be reading for his exams for the
+      Army. If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but
+      cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well&mdash;that's
+      the party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance.
+      If you've finished your cigarette&rdquo;&mdash;he threw his own into the grate,
+      and rose as he spoke&mdash;&ldquo;we may as well be moving along. By the way,&rdquo;
+       he concluded, as they walked toward the door, &ldquo;I've an idea that we won't
+      say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to
+      keep it as a little surprise&mdash;for my mother and sister, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored equanimity
+      needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He had become
+      temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in the big
+      drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much at his
+      ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had feared. He
+      stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had wandered in
+      examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with serenity the
+      five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious of the
+      conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a new footing of
+      assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hon. Balder Plowden&mdash;a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous
+      shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows
+      and eyelashes&mdash;had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating
+      for his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable
+      mystery connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of
+      terriers toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering
+      ruddy firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was
+      seated at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe
+      bent his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened
+      to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were
+      concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He
+      said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed to like
+      him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted, motherliness of
+      her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor throughout the evening. She
+      had not once failed to nod her head and smile and twinkle her little kind
+      eyes through their spectacles at him, whenever by word or look he had
+      addressed her. Nor did his original half-suspicion, that this was her
+      manner to people in general, justify itself upon observation. She was
+      civil, even excessively civil, to the other two guests, but these ladies
+      did not get the same eager and intent smile that he could command. He
+      reasoned it out that Plowden must have said something pleasant to his
+      mother about him&mdash;perhaps even to the point of explaining that he was
+      to be the architect of their fortunes&mdash;but he did not like to ascribe
+      all her hospitable warmth to that. It was dear to him to believe that she
+      liked him on his own merits&mdash;and he did believe it, as his softened
+      glance rested upon her where she sat almost facing him in her padded,
+      wicker chair&mdash;small, white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face
+      radiating a kind of alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder, of
+      course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all a
+      busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American&mdash;the
+      tall young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars.
+      She was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the
+      inner life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way
+      desired to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a
+      deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken
+      his few words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony
+      reserve close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean
+      only that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did&mdash;but to
+      him, really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago&mdash;why, yes,
+      even a fortnight ago&mdash;the golden rumour of millions would have shone
+      round her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
+      Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a mere
+      three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman to
+      have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference with
+      which he considered her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a
+      sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in part
+      the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano. Although
+      it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told him that
+      they were listening to the music each holding the other's hand. This tacit
+      embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung together, these two
+      young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions all the evening, that
+      this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady Cressage, and the small,
+      swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the house, peering through her
+      pince-nez from under unduly thick black brows, formed a party of their
+      own. Their politeness toward him had been as identical in all its little
+      shades of distance and reservation as if they had been governed from a
+      single brain-centre. It would be unfair to them to assume from their
+      manner that they disliked him, or were even unfavourably impressed by him.
+      The finesse of that manner was far too delicate a thing to call into use
+      such rough characterizations. It was rather their action as a unit which
+      piqued his interest. He thought he could see that they united upon a
+      common demeanour toward the American girl, although of course they knew
+      her much better than they knew him. It was not even clear to him that
+      there were not traces of this combination in their tone toward Plowden and
+      the Honourable Balder. The bond between them had twisted in it strands of
+      social exclusiveness, and strands of sex sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the
+      impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed these
+      impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him
+      consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He had
+      formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the idea
+      that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest
+      weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
+      his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions
+      about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had
+      scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle which
+      included ladies&mdash;certainly never in the presence of such certificated
+      and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however, was to be filled
+      with experiences of this nature. Already, after this briefest of ventures
+      into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of the great subject
+      springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women sticking together,
+      for example&mdash;here before his eyes was one of the prettiest instances
+      of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two figures on the sofa, so
+      markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit to each other in such a
+      sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really touching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the piano.
+      Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of it as it was
+      reflected upon this beautiful facial outline&mdash;sensitive,
+      high-spirited, somewhat sad withal&mdash;appealed to something in him. He
+      moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces, and
+      halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the Honourable
+      Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious wish for
+      silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that the music
+      said less than nothing to his ears&mdash;that it was the face that had
+      beckoned him to advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
+      this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
+      beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
+      thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and chin.
+      It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he could not be
+      sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said to
+      himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which belonged
+      so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in diamonds. The pride
+      and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of the great lady&mdash;they
+      were all there in their supreme expression. And yet&mdash;why, she was no
+      great lady at all. She was the daughter of his old General Kervick&mdash;the
+      necessitous and haughtily-humble old military gentleman, with the grey
+      moustache and the premature fur coat, who did what he was told on the
+      Board without a question, for a pitiful three hundred a year. Yes&mdash;she
+      was his daughter, and she also was poor. Plowden had said so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
+      father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to have
+      invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a directorship.
+      But no&mdash;there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even forgotten
+      that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have been his
+      sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady Cressage, who
+      gave him the hint to help the General to something if he could. And when
+      you came to think of it, these aristocrats and military men and so on, had
+      no other notion of making money save by directorships. Clearly, that was
+      the way of it. Plowden had remembered Kervick's name, when the chance
+      arose to give the old boy a leg up, and then had clean forgotten the
+      circumstance. The episode rather increased his liking for Plowden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer
+      sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so
+      nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of him
+      but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
+      Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's
+      daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him, and
+      about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial
+      position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very
+      fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should
+      render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the piano
+      before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from the others
+      a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and enthusiasm of
+      which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been deaf to something
+      that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks which seemed to be
+      regarded as apposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What IS it?&rdquo; asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. &ldquo;I don't know
+      when anything has touched me so much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or
+      two,&rdquo; replied Miss Madden. &ldquo;I arranged and harmonized them&mdash;and,
+      oddly enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music&mdash;and musicians&mdash;like
+      this,&rdquo; affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs next
+      morning before anybody else in the house, apparently, was astir. At all
+      events, he saw no one in either the hall or the glass vestibule, as he
+      wandered about. Both doors were wide open, however, to the mild, damp
+      morning air. He found on one of the racks a cap that was less
+      uncomfortable than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason told him
+      they ought to be. The disquieting impression of bad dreams hung about him.
+      The waking hour&mdash;always an evil time for him in these latter days of
+      anxiety&mdash;had been this morning a peculiarly depressing affair. It had
+      seemed to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness, that he was
+      a hopelessly ruined and discredited man; the illusion of disaster had
+      been, indeed, so complete and vivid that, even now, more than an hour
+      later, he had not shaken off its effects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along the gravel paths, to
+      the task of reassuring himself. There were still elements of chance in the
+      game, of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight, to
+      demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum&mdash;that it was
+      nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed the situation in
+      painstaking detail, and at every point it was all right, or as nearly all
+      right as any human business could be. He scolded himself sharply for this
+      foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. &ldquo;Look at
+      Plowden!&rdquo; he bade his dolorous spirit. &ldquo;See how easy he takes things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very easily indeed. He had
+      talked with eloquence and feeling about the miseries and humiliations of a
+      peerage inadequately endowed with money, but no traces of his sufferings
+      were visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman himself looked the
+      very image of contented prosperity&mdash;handsome, buoyant, light-hearted,
+      and, withal, the best-groomed man in London. And this ancestral home of
+      his&mdash;or of his mother's, since he seemed to insist upon the
+      distinction&mdash;where were its signs of a stinted income? The place was
+      overrun with servants. There was a horse which covered a distance of
+      something like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out, Hadlow House
+      suggested nothing but assured plenty. Yet its master told the most
+      unvarying tales of poverty, and no doubt they were in one sense true. What
+      he wished to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for himself from, was
+      the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved as if they were rich.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by high hedges and trees
+      from what seemed to be a public road beyond, were fairly spacious, but the
+      sleek decorum of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was scarcely
+      interesting. He liked better to study the house itself, which in the
+      daylight revealed itself as his ideal of what a historic English
+      country-house of the minor class should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been a period in his youth when architecture had attracted him
+      greatly as offering a congenial and lucrative career. Not much remained to
+      him now of the classifications and phraseology which he had gone to the
+      trouble of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked at
+      buildings with a kind of professional consciousness. Hadlow House said
+      intelligible things to him, and he was pleased with himself for
+      understanding them. It was not new in any part, apparently, but there was
+      nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never been a castle, or a
+      fortified residence. No violent alteration in habits or needs
+      distinguished its present occupants from its original builders. It had
+      been planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
+      not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle people to have
+      homes, without fighting to defend them. One could fancy that its calm and
+      infinitely comfortable history had never been ruffled from that day to
+      this. He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening that the
+      house stood upon the site of an old monastery. No doubt that accounted for
+      its being built in a hollow, with the ground-floor on the absolute level
+      of the earth outside. The monks had always chosen these low-lying
+      sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they have done so? he
+      wondered&mdash;and then came to a sudden mental stop, absorbed in a
+      somewhat surprised contemplation of a new version of himself. He was
+      becoming literary, historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open
+      again, to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors. He had
+      read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old book-shop! For many years
+      that boyhood of eager concern in the printed page had seemed to him to
+      belong to somebody else. Now, all at once, it came back to him as his own
+      possession; he felt that he could take up books again where he had dropped
+      them, perhaps even with the old rapt, intent zest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he would gather for
+      himself. And it should be in no wise for show&mdash;the gross ostentation
+      of the unlettered parvenu&mdash;but a genuine library, which should
+      minister to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon
+      his interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be
+      smooth and simple. He seemed not to have reasoned it out to himself in
+      detail before, but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough. Why
+      should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings about himself, as if he
+      had come out of the gutter?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why indeed? He had passed through&mdash;and with credit, too&mdash;one of
+      the great public schools of England. He had been there on a footing of
+      perfect equality, so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic families
+      or of great City potentates. And as to birth, he had behind him three
+      generations at least of scholarly men, men who knew the contents, as well
+      as the commercial value, of the books they handled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling. The tradition of
+      Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of how he requited it by securing
+      Caxton's &ldquo;Golden Legend&rdquo; for the library of that distinguished collector,
+      under the very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of Marlborough, was
+      tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop. And Thorpe's father,
+      too, though no such single achievement crowned his memory, had been the
+      adviser and, as one might say, the friend of many notable writers and
+      patrons of literature. The son of such forbears needed only money to be
+      recognized by everybody as a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his mother's side, now that he thought of it, there was something
+      perhaps better still than a heritage of librarians' craft and tastes. His
+      mother's maiden name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the
+      solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact, in the course of
+      domestic discussions. Who the Stormonts were he could not recall that he
+      had ever learned, but his mother had been very clear indeed about their
+      superiority to the usual ruck of people. He would ask his sister whether
+      she knew anything about them. In the meantime there was no denying that
+      Stormont was a fine-sounding name. He reflected that it was his own middle
+      name&mdash;and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him a card-plate on
+      which appeared the legend&mdash;&ldquo;Mr. Stormont Thorpe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an inspiration! &ldquo;Joel&rdquo; he had not used for so many years that now,
+      after six months' familiarity with it on his sister's lips, he could not
+      get accustomed to it. The colourless and non-committal style of &ldquo;J. S.
+      Thorpe,&rdquo; under which he had lived so long, had been well enough for the
+      term of his exile&mdash;the weary time of obscure toil and suspense. But
+      now, in this sunburst of smiling fortune, when he had achieved the right
+      to a name of distinction&mdash;here it was ready to his hand. A fleeting
+      question as to whether he should carry the &ldquo;J&rdquo; along as an initial put
+      itself to his mind. He decided vigorously against it. He had always had a
+      prejudice against men who, in the transatlantic phrase, parted either
+      their hair or their names in the middle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had made his unheeding way past the house to the beginning of the
+      avenue of trees, which he remembered from the previous evening's drive. To
+      his right, an open space of roadway led off in the direction of the
+      stables. As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take, the
+      sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear, and he stood still. In a
+      moment there came into view, round a curve in the leafy distance, two
+      horses with riders, advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that
+      the riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him, and then it
+      was to be seen that they were the pair he had judged to be such close
+      friends last night&mdash;Lady Cressage and the daughter of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his cap and bowed. Their
+      cheeks were glowing and their eyes sparkling with the exhilaration of
+      their ride. Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished in his
+      eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity. She seemed to carry
+      herself better in the saddle than she did out of it; the sweep of her
+      habit below the stirrup lent dignity to her figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly toward the
+      stepping-block&mdash;how should he bring within the compass of thought the
+      impressions he had had of her as she passed? There seemed to have been no
+      memory in his mind to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she had
+      made. Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like some
+      queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable. He stared after her,
+      mutely bewildered at the effect she produced upon him&mdash;until he saw
+      that a groom had run from the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity to
+      dismount. The angry thought that he might have done this himself rose
+      within him&mdash;but there followed swiftly enough the answering
+      conviction that he lacked the courage. He did not even advance to proffer
+      his services to the other young lady, while there was still time. The
+      truth was, he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company of which
+      they made part, the previous evening. There had been an hour or more,
+      indeed, before the party broke up, in which he had borne the lion's share
+      of the talk&mdash;and they had appeared as frankly entertained as the
+      others. In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he had
+      addressed his monologue of reminiscences&mdash;curious experiences and
+      adventures in Java and the Argentine, in Brazil and the Antilles and
+      Mexico and the far West&mdash;it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he
+      seemed to discern the most genuine interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The whimsical theory that
+      the wine at dinner had given him a spurious courage occurred to him. He
+      shrugged his shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his pockets, turned
+      toward the stables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stable-yard is, from some points of view, the prettiest thing about
+      Hadlow. There is a big, uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of which,
+      from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous girth and height.
+      All around this enclosure are buildings of the same pale yellowish brick
+      as the mansion itself, but quaintly differing one from another in design
+      and size. Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a laundry, a brewery, and
+      half a dozen structures the intention of which is now somewhat uncertain&mdash;some
+      flat-topped, some gabled, others with turrets, or massive grouped
+      chimneys, or overhanging timbered upper stories&mdash;form round this
+      unkempt, shadowed green a sort of village, with a communal individuality
+      of its own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great
+      house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices of
+      this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge themselves
+      into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the enquiring gaze a
+      specific character, of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak
+      itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned the
+      trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck. Plainly enough, the
+      monks' servants lived and worked here; half the buildings on the side
+      nearest the house belong to their time, and one of them still bears a
+      partially-defaced coat of arms that must have belonged to an Abbot. And
+      when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb and vocabulary of servitude
+      were altered in this square. Its population crossed themselves less, and
+      worked much harder, but they remained in a world of their own, adjacent
+      aud subject to the world of their masters, yet separated from it by oh!
+      such countless and unthinkable distances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. He counted three men and a
+      boy who visibly belonged to this department. The dog-cart of the previous
+      evening had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained the
+      stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now beneath the sponge of
+      one of the hostlers. Under cover, he discerned two other carriages, and
+      there seemed to be at least half a dozen horses. The men who, in the half
+      gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these animals made a curious
+      whistling noise as they worked. Everybody in the yard touched a forelock
+      to him as he passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at his leisure, through
+      an open gate in the wall at the back, into the gardens behind the house.
+      There was not much in the way of flowers to look at, but he moved about
+      quite unconscious of any deprivation. A cluster of greenhouses, massed
+      against the southern side of the mansion, attracted his listless fancy,
+      and he walked toward what appeared to be an entrance to them. The door was
+      locked, but he found another further on which opened to his hand. The air
+      was very hot and moist inside, and the place was so filled with
+      broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants that he had to stoop to make his
+      way through to the end. The next house had a more tolerable atmosphere,
+      and contained some blossoms to which he gave momentary attention. In the
+      third house, through the glass-door, he could see a man&mdash;evidently a
+      gardener&mdash;lifting some pots to a shelf overhead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thought occurred to him that by entering into conversation with this
+      man, he might indirectly obtain a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at
+      Hadlow. It was now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry.
+      Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something? he wondered.
+      Perhaps there had been some such summons, and he had not heard it. It
+      might be the intelligent thing for him to return to the house, at all
+      events, and sit in the hall where the servants could see him, in case the
+      meal was in progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile, it suddenly
+      dawned upon him that the face and figure were familiar. He stared more
+      intently at the man, casting about in his memory for a clue to his
+      identity. It came to him that the person he had in mind was a fellow named
+      Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished and down-at-the-heels sort of
+      hotel and general store on the road from Belize to Boon Town, in British
+      Honduras. Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson. What on earth was he doing
+      here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration to this problem. It was of more
+      immediate importance to recall the circumstances of his contact with the
+      man. He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel his headquarters for
+      the better part of a month&mdash;the base of supplies from which he made
+      numerous prospecting tours into the mountains of the interior. Had he paid
+      his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about that. He could even
+      recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like scale of charges, and the
+      lack of perception of opportunity, which characterized the bill in
+      question. He remembered now his impression that Gafferson would never do
+      any good. It would be interesting to know what kind of an impression he,
+      in turn, had produced on his thriftless host. At any rate, there was no
+      good reason why he should not find out. He opened the door and went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gardener barely looked up from his occupation, and drew aside to let
+      the newcomer pass with no sign of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe halted,
+      and tried to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about such
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing?&rdquo; he asked, in the tentative tone of one who is in no
+      need of information, but desires to be affable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drying off the first lot of gloxinias,&rdquo; answered the other. &ldquo;Some people
+      put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright, close to the glass. It
+      stands to reason, if you think about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly,&rdquo; said Thorpe, with conviction. In his mind he contrasted
+      the independence of Gafferson's manner with the practised servility of the
+      stable-yard&mdash;and thought that he liked it&mdash;and then was not so
+      sure. He perceived that there was no recognition of him. The gardener, as
+      further desultory conversation about his work progressed, looked his
+      interlocutor full in the face, but with a placid, sheep-like gaze which
+      seemed to be entirely insensible to variations in the human species.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you ever get back here to England?&rdquo; Thorpe was emboldened to ask
+      at last. In comment upon the other's stare of puzzled enquiry, he went on:
+      &ldquo;You're Gafferson, aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw you, you were
+      running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize. That was in
+      '90.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gafferson&mdash;a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a straggling
+      reddish beard&mdash;turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. &ldquo;I
+      suppose you would have been stopping at Government House,&rdquo; he remarked.
+      &ldquo;That was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to
+      see my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because of
+      the Gaffersoniana hybrids. There was a good bit in the papers about them
+      last spring.&rdquo; Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put
+      into words. &ldquo;Well, it beats all,&rdquo; he mused aloud. &ldquo;Why, man, there's gold
+      in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed as you
+      were. And there's cocoa&mdash;and some day they'll coin money in rubber,
+      too. All that country's waiting for is better communications. And you were
+      on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land&mdash;and yet here you are
+      back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in the mud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond his earlier
+      limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness. &ldquo;No, I wasn't in the
+      Governor's outfit at all. I was looking for gold then&mdash;with
+      occasionally an eye on rubber. I stopped at your place. Don't you remember
+      me? My name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one of your
+      niggers were with me three or four days once, up on the ridge beyond the
+      Burnt Hills&mdash;why, you remember, the nigger was from San Domingo, and
+      he was forever bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those on
+      the mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby wrinkle his nose, and
+      you found a pepper coming through the swamp, and you tipped me the wink,
+      and you handed that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him.
+      Hell! You must remember that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would have been the Chavica pertusum,&rdquo; said Gafferson, thoughtfully.
+      He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in the story itself with some
+      difficulty. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I remember it,&rdquo; he admitted, finally. &ldquo;I shouldn't
+      have known you though. I'm the worst in the world about remembering
+      people. It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I go up to London
+      to the shows, I don't remember the men that I had the longest talks with
+      the time before. Once you get wrapped up in your flowers, you've got no
+      room in your head for anything else&mdash;that's the way of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. &ldquo;So this is the sort of thing
+      you really like, eh? You'd rather be doing this, eh? than making your pile
+      in logwood and mahogany out there, or floating a gold mine?&rdquo; Gafferson
+      answered quite simply: &ldquo;I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile. I got led
+      into going out there when I was a youngster, and there didn't seem to be
+      any good in trying to get back, but I wasn't making more than a bare
+      living when you were there, and after that I didn't even do that much. It
+      took me a good many years to find out what my real fancy was. I hated my
+      hotel and my store, but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an American
+      gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place, and he saw that I
+      was as near ruined as they make 'em, and he says to me, 'You're no good to
+      run a hotel, nor yet a store, and this aint your country for a cent. What
+      you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't afford to do it here,
+      because nobody'll pay you for it, but you gather up your seeds and roots
+      and so on, and come along with me to Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll put fat on
+      your bones.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word, and I was with him
+      two years, and then I thought I'd like to come to England, and since then
+      I've worked my way up here, till now I take a Royal Horticultural medal
+      regular, and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll be in
+      the market next spring that's named after my master. And what could I ask
+      more 'n that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite right,&rdquo; said Thorpe. &ldquo;What time do they have breakfast here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild
+      glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the
+      advent of this new topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me they eat at all hours,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But if you want to see
+      his Lordship,&rdquo; he went on, considering, &ldquo;about noon would be your best
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See his Lordship!&rdquo; repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin. &ldquo;Why I'm a
+      guest here in the house. All I want is something to eat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A guest,&rdquo; Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was nothing
+      unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp glance failed to detect
+      any trace of offensive intention in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet it
+      seemed to pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised, and that
+      there were abundant grounds for his surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes,&rdquo; said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he could summon,
+      &ldquo;your master is one of my directors. I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm
+      going to make a rich man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place
+      here, and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away over Sunday
+      to oblige him. By the way&mdash;I shall buy an estate in the country as
+      soon as the right thing offers, and I shall want to set up no end of
+      gardens and greenhouses and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a
+      better man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole arrangement
+      of it in your hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever his Lordship agrees to,&rdquo; the gardener replied, sententiously. He
+      turned to the staging, and took up one of the pots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door, which
+      he could see opened upon the lawn. He was conscious of annoyance with this
+      moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a splendid
+      chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship&mdash;it might even be
+      called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship&mdash;and who had so
+      clumsily failed to rise to the situation. The bitter thought of going back
+      and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he paused
+      for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. The gratuity
+      would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit in which
+      it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And moreover, was
+      it so certain that he would take it? He had not said &ldquo;sir&rdquo; once, and he
+      had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. The rules were
+      overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course, but if there
+      was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided that he could
+      not afford the risk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward
+      the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful and
+      resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw that a
+      white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him beside
+      the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two padded
+      sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian workmanship.
+      The sound was delightful, but even more so was the implication that it
+      betokened breakfast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been fingering
+      in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. &ldquo;That's the kind of
+      concert I like,&rdquo; he declared, bestowing the patronage of a jovial smile
+      upon her pleased and comely face. &ldquo;Show me the way to this breakfast that
+      you've been serenading about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly
+      the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. &ldquo;Thorpe,&rdquo; he
+      said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia&mdash;&ldquo;Thorpe&mdash;yes&mdash;I
+      remember his initials&mdash;J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me
+      about him? and what was it he told me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe
+      found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of
+      embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight to
+      note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined
+      himself seated with four ladies at a table&mdash;three of them, moreover,
+      ladies of title&mdash;and doing it all so well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to speak,
+      which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their deportment
+      the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and fresh and
+      natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with an air of
+      good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right places;
+      they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well,
+      accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the
+      outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which had
+      assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most
+      fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything he
+      said as amusing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, when we're by ourselves,&rdquo; the kindly little old hostess explained to
+      him, &ldquo;my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour
+      yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's
+      farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind of
+      compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of
+      habits. Why we do it I couldn't say&mdash;because he never comes down in
+      any event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow&mdash;and you know in town he
+      sleeps very ill indeed&mdash;and so we don't dream of complaining. We're
+      only too glad&mdash;for his sake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Balder,&rdquo; commented the sister, &ldquo;he's as bad the other way. He gets up
+      at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the
+      still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we never
+      see him till luncheon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been on the point of asking so many times,&rdquo; Miss Madden interposed&mdash;&ldquo;is
+      Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in Matthew Arnold's poem?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was his father's choice,&rdquo; Lady Plowden made answer. &ldquo;I think the
+      Viking explanation is the right one&mdash;it certainly isn't in either
+      family. I can't say that it attracted me much&mdash;at first, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but it fits him so splendidly,&rdquo; said Lady Cressage. &ldquo;He looks the
+      part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier
+      names&mdash;and you have only to look at him to see that he was
+      predestined for a soldier from his cradle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then,&rdquo;
+       put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. &ldquo;The
+      poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous, as
+      his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a
+      soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition
+      with the Army, and he's mad about everything military&mdash;and surely
+      he's as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
+      of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory&mdash;and yet that
+      suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. And all over England there are
+      young gentlemen like that&mdash;the very pick of the hunting-fields,
+      strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men England
+      wants to have fighting her battles&mdash;and they can't get places in the
+      Army because&mdash;what was it Balder came to grief over last time?&mdash;because
+      they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran that's the capital of
+      Persia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the
+      point of the bayonet&mdash;and find out their names afterward&mdash;but it
+      seems that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is
+      superior clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages&mdash;and
+      much good they will do us when the time of trouble comes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you think the purchase-system was better?&rdquo; asked the American lady.
+      &ldquo;It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prefer it?&rdquo; said Lady Plowden. &ldquo;A thousand times yes! My husband made one
+      of the best speeches in the debate on it&mdash;one do I say?&mdash;first
+      and last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
+      the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it
+      would have been those speeches. He pointed out all the evils that would
+      follow the change. You might have called it prophetic&mdash;the way he
+      foresaw what would happen to Balder&mdash;or not Balder in particular, of
+      course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower
+      classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered
+      about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do they
+      respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his learning?
+      Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him with the
+      greatest contempt. The man they will serve is the man whose birth gives
+      him the right to command them, or else the man with money in his pockets
+      to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders they
+      understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace, among
+      our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away from
+      England, in a time of war?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, mamma,&rdquo; the Hon. Winifred intervened, &ldquo;don't you see how badly that
+      might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little money, and
+      all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people&mdash;and so on?
+      It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions&mdash;and I'm
+      sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness. &ldquo;You see so
+      little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of
+      its movements. The people who make fortunes in England are every whit as
+      important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually I'm
+      sure they are often much more deserving. Every generation sniffs at its
+      nouveaux riches, but by the next they have become merged in the
+      aristocracy. It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been
+      that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start from a wealthy
+      merchant, or some other person who made a fortune. They are really the
+      back-bone of England. You should keep that always in mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course&mdash;I see what you mean&rdquo;&mdash;Winnie replied, her dark cheek
+      flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. She had passed her twenty-fifth
+      birthday, but her voice had in it the docile self-repression of a
+      school-girl. She spoke with diffident slowness, her gaze fastened upon her
+      plate. &ldquo;Of course&mdash;my grandfather was a lawyer&mdash;and your point
+      is that merchants&mdash;and others who make fortunes&mdash;would be the
+      same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Lady Plowden. &ldquo;And do tell us, Mr. Thorpe&rdquo;&mdash;she
+      turned toward where he sat at her right and beamed at him over her
+      spectacles, with the air of having been wearied with a conversation in
+      which he bore no part&mdash;&ldquo;is it really true that social discontent is
+      becoming more marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not an American, you know,&rdquo; he reminded her. &ldquo;I only know one or two
+      sections of the country&mdash;and those only as a stranger. You should ask
+      Miss Madden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me?&rdquo; said Celia. &ldquo;Oh, I haven't come up for my examinations yet. I'm like
+      Balder&mdash;I'm preparing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us,&rdquo; suggested Lady Cressage,
+      mildly, &ldquo;is about the flowers in the tropics&mdash;in Java, for example,
+      or some of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speaking of flowers,&rdquo; Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact; &ldquo;I met
+      out in one of the greenhouses here this morning, an old acquaintance of
+      mine, the gardener, Gafferson. The last time I saw him, he was running the
+      worst hotel in the world in the worst country in the world&mdash;out in
+      British Honduras.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he's a wonderful gardener,&rdquo; said Lady Cressage. &ldquo;He's a magician; he
+      can do what he likes with plants. It's rather a hobby of mine&mdash;or
+      used to be&mdash;and I never saw his equal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn environment on the
+      Belize road, and his success in making them laugh drew him on to other
+      pictures of the droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. The
+      ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen to him; the charm of
+      having them all to himself, and of holding them in interested
+      entertainment by his discourse&mdash;these ladies of supremely refined
+      associations and position&mdash;seemed to provide an inspiration of its
+      own. He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating itself to
+      their critical ears. His language was producing itself with as much
+      delicacy of selection as if it came out of a book&mdash;and yet preserving
+      the savour of quaint, outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly liked.
+      Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts, and glance
+      across the table, warned him that they were to rise, he said deliberately
+      to himself that this had been the most enjoyable episode of his whole
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel, out in the hall, and
+      Winnie indicated them to him with the obvious suggestion that he was
+      expected to smoke. He looked her over as he lit his cigar&mdash;where she
+      stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs, and concluded that
+      she was much nicer upon acquaintance than he had thought. Her slight
+      figure might not be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were ladylike.
+      The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind to her thin and
+      swarthy, though distinguished, features. They bore the stamp of caste, and
+      so did the way she looked at one through her eye-glasses, from under those
+      over-heavy black eyebrows, holding her head a little to one side. Though
+      it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit of her own, her gentle,
+      almost anxious, deference to her mother had shown that she had it under
+      admirable control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's book-shop the previous
+      day. Unfortunately it did not give her age, but that was not so important,
+      after all. She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter of one Viscount
+      and the sister of another. Her grandfather had been an Earl, and the book
+      had shown her to possess a bewildering number of relationships among
+      titled folks. All this was very interesting to him&mdash;and somewhat
+      suggestive. Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in his brain as he
+      looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions of entertaining his
+      guests,&rdquo; she remarked to him, over her shoulder. The other ladies had not
+      joined them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I'm all right,&rdquo; he protested cordially. &ldquo;I should hate to have him
+      put himself out in the slightest.&rdquo; Upon consideration he added: &ldquo;I suppose
+      he has given up the idea of shooting to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think not,&rdquo; she answered.&rdquo; The keeper was about this morning, that is&mdash;and
+      he doesn't often come unless they are to go out with the guns. I suppose
+      you are very fond of shooting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;I've done some&mdash;in my time,&rdquo; Thorpe replied, cautiously.
+      It did not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire his first gun
+      on English soil. &ldquo;It's a good many years,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;since I had the
+      time and opportunity to do much at it. I think the last shooting I did was
+      alligators. You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of a hand I
+      shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't the least idea. Is the
+      shooting round I here pretty good?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says my brother Balder
+      kills all the birds off every season. Balder's by way of being a
+      crack-shot, you know. There are some pheasants, though. We saw them flying
+      when we were out this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her upon the question
+      of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make some difference in his garb, yet the
+      mental vision of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed itself now
+      as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out of his mind to have
+      conceived anything so preposterous as rigging himself out, among these
+      polished people, like a cow-puncher down on his luck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder when your brother will expect to start,&rdquo; he began, uneasily.
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I ought to go and get ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, here comes his man,&rdquo; remarked the sister. A round-faced,
+      smooth-mannered youngster&mdash;whom Thorpe discovered to be wearing
+      cord-breeches and leather leggings as he descended the stairs&mdash;advanced
+      toward him and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. &ldquo;His
+      Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes&mdash;and he hopes you'll be
+      ready, sir,&rdquo; the valet said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room,&rdquo; Miss Winnie bade him, and with
+      a gesture of comprehensive submission he went away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution for his
+      difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. It would never have occurred to him
+      that Pangbourn was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
+      obvious it had been to her. These old families did something more than
+      fill their houses with servants; they mastered the art of making these
+      servants an integral part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a
+      man to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then dress you,
+      into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems that we're going shooting,&rdquo; Thorpe found himself explaining, a
+      few moments later in his bedroom, to the attentive Pangbourn. He decided
+      to throw himself with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful
+      good-feeling. &ldquo;I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I
+      got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead&mdash;and so I
+      fetched along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make me feel more at
+      home in the saddle than anything else would. You know how fond a man gets
+      of old, loose things like that. But about this shooting&mdash;I want you
+      to fix me out. What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You
+      can manage them for me, can't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pangbourn could and did&mdash;and it was upon his advice that the Mexican
+      jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt
+      uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe, as
+      he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe, felt
+      that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of
+      pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent to his appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will find a cap below, sir,&rdquo; Pangbourn announced, with serenity, and
+      Thorpe, who had been tentatively fingering the big, flaring sombrero,
+      thrust it back upon its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done, and there was
+      nobody now to bear him company. He lit another cigar, tried on various
+      caps till he found a leathern one to suit him, and then dawdled about the
+      room and the adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than half
+      an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt, did not commend
+      itself so warmly to him as did some others. Everybody else, however,
+      seemed to regard it as so wholly a matter of course that Plowden should do
+      as he liked, that he forbore formulating a complaint even to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs once more. &ldquo;His
+      Lordship will be down very shortly now, sir,&rdquo; he declared&mdash;&ldquo;and will
+      you be good enough to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase&mdash;the
+      existence of which he had not suspected&mdash;into a bare-looking
+      apartment fitted like a pantry with shelves. After the semi-gloom of the
+      hall, it was almost glaringly lighted. The windows and another door
+      opened, he saw, upon a court connected with the stable-yard. By this
+      entrance, no doubt, had come the keeper, a small, brown-faced,
+      brown-clothed man of mature years, with the strap of a pouch over his
+      shoulder, who stood looking at the contents of the shelves. He
+      mechanically saluted Thorpe in turn, and then resumed his occupation.
+      There were numerous gun cases on the lower shelf, and many boxes and bags
+      above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did his Lordship say what gun?&rdquo; the keeper demanded of the valet. He had
+      a bright-eyed, intent glance, and his tone conveyed a sense of some broad,
+      impersonal, out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders and eloquently
+      shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?&rdquo; the keeper turned to Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out the meaning of the
+      query. &ldquo;Oh, anything'll do for me,&rdquo; he said, awkwardly smiling. &ldquo;It's
+      years since I've shot&mdash;I daresay one gun'll be quite the same as
+      another to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking all his measurements
+      as a sportsman. &ldquo;You'd do best with 'B,' sir, I fancy,&rdquo; the functionary
+      decided at last, and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the notion that &ldquo;B&rdquo;
+       must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys. He watched the
+      operation of putting the gun together, and then took it, and laid it over
+      his arm, and followed the valet out into the hall again, in dignified
+      silence. To the keeper's remark&mdash;&ldquo;Mr. Balder has its mate with him
+      today, sir,&rdquo; he gave only a restrained nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord Plowden appeared. He
+      came down the stairs then with the brisk, rather impatient air of a busy
+      man whose plans are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others. He was
+      fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat and cap, gloves,
+      scarf round his throat and all&mdash;and he behaved as if there was not a
+      minute to lose. He had barely time to shake perfunctorily the hand Thorpe
+      offered him, and utter an absent-minded &ldquo;How are you this morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door, bearing his
+      master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully, &ldquo;We are very late
+      today, Barnes.&rdquo; They went out, and began striding down the avenue of trees
+      at such a pace that the keeper and his following of small boys and dogs,
+      who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot to keep up with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would afford
+      exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate talk with his host, but
+      he perceived very soon that this was not to be the case. They walked
+      together for half a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and
+      then across some fields, but the party was close at their heels, and
+      Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort, save an occasional
+      remark about the birds and the covers between him and the keeper, was
+      impracticable. The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
+      leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course was deflected
+      toward him, but even when they came up to him, the expedition seemed to
+      gain nothing of a social character. The few curt words that were
+      exchanged, as they halted here to distribute cartridges and hold brief
+      consultation, bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe, breathing heavily over
+      the unwonted exercise and hoping for nothing so much as that they would
+      henceforth take things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that the
+      two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders of this
+      elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed to a certain point in one
+      direction, and that nobleman, followed by his valet with the gun and the
+      stool, set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility, vaulted
+      the gate, and moved away down the lane at the bidding of the keeper.
+      Neither of them had intervened to mitigate the destiny of their guest, or
+      displayed any interest as to what was going to become of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this&mdash;and though
+      afterward, when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station
+      under a clump of trees at the autocrat's behest, he strove to soothe his
+      ruffled feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely
+      correct deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
+      Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction
+      about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of
+      which nettled him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from the
+      spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the skyline
+      of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool which his
+      valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment that he had
+      never wanted to sit down so much before in his life&mdash;and he turned on
+      his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had
+      begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses
+      of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he hastened
+      back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when he heard
+      the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came his way, he
+      liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended pride with
+      him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the responsibility he
+      had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden's guest had no sport, the blame
+      for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant keeper. Then a noise
+      of a different character assailed his ears, punctuated as it were by
+      distant boyish cries of &ldquo;mark!&rdquo; These cries, and the buzzing sound as of
+      clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at
+      once a most urgent affair of his own. He strained his eyes upon the
+      horizon of the thicket&mdash;and, as if by instinct, the gun sprang up to
+      adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and followed automatically the
+      thundering course of the big bird, and then, taking thought to itself,
+      leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first pheasant reeled in the air,
+      described a somersault, and fell like a plummet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for
+      joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never
+      have been a cleaner &ldquo;kill.&rdquo; In the warming glow of his satisfaction in
+      himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden and
+      Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel delight
+      of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the shrill
+      bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was conscious
+      of even a certain tenderness for this keeper&mdash;and again the cry of
+      &ldquo;mark!&rdquo; rose, strenuously addressed to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest of
+      the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but when
+      Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with as
+      indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously that
+      no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by way of the
+      spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game carried by two
+      of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a rabbit, and his
+      heart leaped within him at the count.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Thorpe?&rdquo; asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and the
+      sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his mood.
+      &ldquo;I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. &ldquo;Let some of the
+      boys run over,&rdquo; he said slowly. &ldquo;There are nine birds within sight, and
+      there are two or three in the bushes&mdash;but they may have got away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gad!&rdquo; said Balder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Magnificent!&rdquo; was his brother's comment&mdash;and Thorpe permitted
+      himself the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything
+      that remained of Thorpe's visit. He set down to it without hesitation the
+      visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The
+      temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of
+      the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him,
+      but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred
+      little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally at
+      arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own restored
+      self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to the
+      whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the man
+      of the pheasants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was
+      alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was
+      much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town,
+      his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day. He had
+      been so perfectly at home&mdash;and in such a home! There were some things
+      which came uppermost again and again&mdash;but of them all he dwelt most
+      fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses and
+      conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his guide,
+      and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of what she
+      had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music of the voice
+      lingered in his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she is old Kervick's daughter!&rdquo; he said to himself more than once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London
+      nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in
+      indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be so
+      brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage irony
+      of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged dark
+      prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which the
+      line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke about
+      people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed to be still
+      lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid gloomy
+      approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South Eastern or
+      the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its wake, and
+      occupied its accustomed half-hour&mdash;complicated, however, upon this
+      occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said he
+      lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the idea
+      that any other railway could be half so bad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the
+      champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up
+      additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay and
+      mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the
+      newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing a
+      bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and
+      inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to
+      be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive and
+      resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed either
+      a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the Dover line
+      at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough&mdash;almost too short. The
+      conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the Southern
+      lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the window,
+      and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit from which
+      he was returning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his
+      mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to him,
+      ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
+      superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over
+      and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself with
+      its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at the
+      mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street through
+      towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colin Semple was happily in his office&mdash;a congeries of small, huddled
+      rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a corner
+      of the court&mdash;and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like one
+      who is assured of both his way and his welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk who
+      sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish this task.
+      He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied,
+      impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the personification of
+      business&mdash;without an ounce of distracting superfluous flesh upon his
+      wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or
+      humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected and fined
+      down to absolute essentials. He could understand a joke if it was useful
+      to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke cigarettes, with a natural
+      air, if these exercises seemed properly to belong to the task he had in
+      hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing anything for the mere human reason
+      that he liked to do it. There was more than a touch of what the rustic
+      calls &ldquo;ginger&rdquo; in his hair and closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had
+      the complementary florid skin. His eyes&mdash;notably direct, confident
+      eyes&mdash;were of a grey which had in it more brown than blue. He wore a
+      black frock-coat, buttoned close, and his linen produced the effect of a
+      conspicuous whiteness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin lips relax
+      for an instant as a deferred greeting. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he asked, impassively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?&rdquo; asked Thorpe in turn. &ldquo;I want a talk
+      with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two, he
+      remarked, &ldquo;Go ahead till we're stopped,&rdquo; and seated himself on the corner
+      of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig. Thorpe
+      unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've worked out the whole scheme,&rdquo; he began, as if introducing the
+      product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. &ldquo;I'm going to leave England
+      almost immediately&mdash;go on the Continent and loaf about&mdash;I've
+      never seen the Continent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple regarded him in silence. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he observed at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see the idea, don't you?&rdquo; Thorpe demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the idea is everything,&rdquo; protested the other. &ldquo;We've been thinking of
+      beginning the campaign straight away&mdash;but the true game now is to lie
+      low&mdash;silent as the grave. I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular
+      is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
+      I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else&mdash;and so
+      there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me,
+      d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The
+      Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of course,
+      and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show, but practically
+      the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general impression that I've
+      gone to pieces. Now d'ye see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,&rdquo; commented Semple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would move heaven and
+      hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind of what was
+      going on. The only weak point in our game is just there. Absolutely
+      everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally, then, our
+      play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We don't want to
+      raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we're up to, till after
+      we're safe past that rock. So we go on in the way to attract the least
+      possible attention. You or your jobber makes the ordinary application for
+      a Special Settlement, with your six signatures and so on; and I go abroad
+      quietly, and the office is as good as shut up, and nobody makes a peep
+      about Rubber Consols&mdash;and the thing works itself. You do see it,
+      don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see well enough the things that are to be seen,&rdquo; replied Semple, with a
+      certain brevity of manner. &ldquo;There was a sermon of my father's that I
+      remember, and it had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are
+      seen, but at the things which are not seen.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. &ldquo;Semple,&rdquo; he said,
+      bringing his chair forward to the desk, &ldquo;that's what I've come for. I want
+      to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you've laid out
+      already, in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid back to
+      you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that to one side. Now then,
+      leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought to have out
+      of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not thinking of
+      your 2,000 vendor's shares&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;I'm not thinking much of them, either,&rdquo; interposed Semple, with
+      a kind of dry significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they'll be all right,&rdquo; Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as
+      he did so. &ldquo;No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come to
+      you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Twenty thousand pounds,&rdquo; said Semple, readily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. &ldquo;I had thought thirty would be a
+      fairer figure,&rdquo; he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The broker put out his under-lip. &ldquo;You will find people rather disposed to
+      distrust a man who promises more than he's asked,&rdquo; he remarked coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I know what you mean,&rdquo; Thorpe hurried to say, flushing
+      awkwardly, even though the remark was so undeserved; &ldquo;but it's in my
+      nature. I'm full of the notion of doing things for people that have done
+      things for me. That's the way I'm built. Why&rdquo;&mdash;he halted to consider
+      the advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord
+      Plowden, and decided against it&mdash;&ldquo;why, without you, what would the
+      whole thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone&mdash;the money
+      for the applications&mdash;I could have no more got at it than I could at
+      the Crown Jewels in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once&mdash;if
+      you don't mind the question&mdash;how did you happen to have so much ready
+      money lying about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for
+      them,&rdquo; the broker explained. &ldquo;If they get five per cent. for the four
+      months, they'll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take
+      thirty thousand instead of twenty&mdash;if it presents itself to your mind
+      in that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; assented Thorpe. &ldquo;Write it now, if you like.&rdquo; He pushed his
+      chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. &ldquo;What I
+      want to do is this,&rdquo; he said, looking up. &ldquo;I'll make the promise for
+      thirty-two thousand, and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in cash
+      now&mdash;a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang about on the
+      Continent for four months. I judge you think it'll be four months before
+      things materialize, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come
+      shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then
+      the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin&mdash;and it is for you
+      to say how long you allow that to go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But about the two thousand pounds now,&rdquo; Thorpe reminded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I will do that in this way,&rdquo; said Semple, kicking his small legs
+      nonchalantly. &ldquo;I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you, for cash
+      down, NOT vendor's shares, you observe&mdash;and then I will take your
+      acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given date. In
+      that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would have a stake
+      in the game.&rdquo; &ldquo;Your stake's pretty big, already,&rdquo; commented Thorpe,
+      tentatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's just a fancy of mine,&rdquo; said the other, with his first smile. &ldquo;I like
+      to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very exciting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two
+      letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on
+      the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and
+      wrote a cheque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want it open?&rdquo; he asked over his shoulder. &ldquo;Are you going to get
+      it cashed at once?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;cross it,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;I want it to go through my bankers.
+      It'll warm their hearts toward me. I shan't be going till the end of the
+      week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business in Frankfort once,
+      and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?&rdquo; Thorpe asked him, as he
+      folded the cheque in his pocket-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes&mdash;many things,&rdquo; responded the broker, lightly. &ldquo;It's a
+      pleasure, for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you call it buying,&rdquo; said Thorpe, and then softened his words with
+      an apologetic laugh. &ldquo;I didn't tell you, did I? I've been spending
+      Saturday and Sunday with Plowden&mdash;you know, the Lord Plowden on my
+      Board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know of him very well,&rdquo; observed the Scotchman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual
+      form with guinea-pigs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,&rdquo; Thorpe asserted,
+      warmly. &ldquo;He's really a splendid fellow&mdash;with his little oddities,
+      like the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place? I
+      should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
+      country-houses you ever saw&mdash;older than hell, you know&mdash;and it's
+      kept up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what
+      his real income is supposed to be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly
+      with the palm of his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked,&rdquo; Thorpe went on, &ldquo;because he had so much to say about his
+      poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his
+      doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all
+      over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of
+      England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I
+      knocked the pheasants!&rdquo; A clerk showed his head at the door, with a
+      meaning gesture. &ldquo;I must go now,&rdquo; said Semple, briskly, and led the way
+      out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
+      brief injunction, &ldquo;Don't go away without seeing me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's slaves
+      were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe noted the
+      manner in which some of them studied the large bill of fare placarded
+      beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him luxuriously to rattle
+      the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had been as anxious about pence
+      as the hungriest of those poor devils, only a week before. And now! He
+      thrust up the door in the roof of the cab, and bade the driver stop at his
+      bank. Thence, after some brief but very agreeable business, and a hurried
+      inspection of the &ldquo;Court&rdquo; section of a London Directory, he drove to a
+      telegraph station and despatched two messages. They were identical in
+      terms. One sought General Kervick at his residence&mdash;he was in
+      lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square country&mdash;and the other
+      looked for him at his club. Both begged him to lunch at the Savoy at two
+      o'clock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his hotel&mdash;an
+      unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to his rooms.
+      There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway, and he
+      sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned presently into
+      a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop of his family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks
+      and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy to
+      his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a dismal
+      and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift. It was so
+      little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that the two
+      might have computed their age by the chronological systems of different
+      planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and she had been
+      sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the doorway bore
+      still its century-old legend, &ldquo;Thorpe, Bookseller.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the
+      books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy
+      guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious
+      recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that very
+      spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its
+      expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions if
+      he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with a rattle,
+      instead of being set here in the highway of the world's brain-movement, an
+      agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered if in his time he
+      could have looked such a vacant and sour young fool. No&mdash;no. That
+      could not be. Boys were different in his day&mdash;and especially boys in
+      book-shops. They read something and knew something of what they handled.
+      They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague as these might be, to
+      become in their time bookmen also. And in those days there still were
+      bookmen&mdash;widely-informed, observant, devoted old bookmen&mdash;who
+      loved their trade, and adorned it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to
+      apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's
+      servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before
+      how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men. The
+      thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two
+      generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named
+      Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of
+      buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked
+      acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and
+      friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the
+      law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a
+      book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as
+      the Plowdens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way
+      along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small open
+      space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a high
+      desk. She did not look up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;I visited his Lordship all right.&rdquo; He announced his presence
+      thus genially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you're the better for it,&rdquo; she remarked, turning to him, after a
+      pause, her emotionless, plain face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, immensely,&rdquo; he affirmed, with robust jocularity. &ldquo;You should have
+      seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe'
+      there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you&mdash;all to myself
+      at breakfast two days running. And such ladies&mdash;finer than silk. Oh,
+      it's clear as daylight&mdash;I was intended for a fashionable career.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled in a faint, passive way. &ldquo;Well&mdash;they say 'better late than
+      never,' you know.&rdquo; &ldquo;And after all, IS it so very late?&rdquo; he said, adopting
+      her phrase as an expression of his thought. &ldquo;I'm just turned forty, and I
+      feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there, the other day&mdash;and
+      do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first Lord Plowden was
+      when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into the House of
+      Commons until he was seven-and-forty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,&rdquo; she commented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The
+      mother, Lady Plowden&mdash;why she made me feel as if I was at the very
+      least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me, and
+      listened to me, and said friendly things to me&mdash;why, just as anybody
+      might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa laughed in his face. &ldquo;Don't be a fool, Joel,&rdquo; she adjured him, with
+      a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience with
+      the buoyancy of his smile. &ldquo;Why, of course, you'll know her,&rdquo; he
+      protested. &ldquo;What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going to
+      allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in your
+      window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm a
+      millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a
+      thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's no good talking about it at all,&rdquo; she observed, after a little
+      pause. &ldquo;It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And as I said the other
+      night, if you want to do things for the children, that's another matter.
+      They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody chooses to teach
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are they now?&rdquo; he asked. Upon the instant another plan began to
+      unfold itself in the background of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at different places, of
+      course. I was recommended to send Julia there&mdash;one of our old
+      customers is a Governor, or whatever it's called&mdash;and he got special
+      terms for her. She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he
+      arranged it very nicely for her&mdash;and there is such a good boys'
+      college there, it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. Julia is to
+      finish at Christmas-time&mdash;and what I'm going to do with her afterward
+      is more than I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she pretty?&rdquo; the uncle of Julia enquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's very nice,&rdquo; the mother answered, with vague extenuation in her
+      tone. &ldquo;I don't know about her looks&mdash;she varies so much. Sometimes I
+      think she's pretty&mdash;and then again I can't think it. She's got good
+      features, and she holds herself well, and she's very much the lady&mdash;rather
+      too much, I think, sometimes&mdash;but it all depends upon what you call
+      pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after her father's family. The
+      Dabneys are all little people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. &ldquo;And what's Alfred like?&rdquo; he
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He wants to be an artist!&rdquo; There was a perceptible note of apprehension
+      in the mother's confession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;why shouldn't he&mdash;if he's got a bent that way?&rdquo; demanded
+      Thorpe, with reproof in his tone. &ldquo;Did you want him to be a shop-keeper?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to see him a doctor,&rdquo; she replied with dignity. &ldquo;It was
+      always my idea for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it's no good&mdash;even as an idea,&rdquo; he told her. &ldquo;Doctors are like
+      parsons&mdash;they can't keep up with the times. The age is outgrowing
+      them. Only the fakirs in either profession get anything out of it,
+      nowadays. It's all mystery and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick&mdash;medicine
+      is&mdash;and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist, you're
+      not in it. But an artist stands on his merits. There is his work&mdash;done
+      by his own hands. It speaks for itself. There's no deception&mdash;it's
+      easy enough to tell whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good,
+      people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them. Of course, it
+      won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking, whether his pictures sell
+      well or not. But probably he'd give it up, if he didn't make a hit of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that there's any crying need that he should do anything. My
+      own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army, but I wouldn't dream of
+      forcing it on him against his will. I had a bitter enough dose of that,
+      myself, with father. I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps argue
+      with him, if I thought he was making a jack of himself&mdash;but I
+      wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he wants to be an artist, in God's name
+      let him go ahead. It can be made a gentlemanly trade&mdash;and the main
+      thing is that he should be a gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. &ldquo;If you
+      don't mind, I don't know that I do,&rdquo; she said when it was finished.
+      &ldquo;Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick
+      temper. He reminds me of father&mdash;oh, ever so much more than you do.
+      He contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he's a good fellow, isn't he?&rdquo; urged Thorpe. &ldquo;I mean, he's got his
+      likable points? I'm going to be able to get along with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't get along with him very well,&rdquo; the mother admitted, reluctantly,
+      &ldquo;but I daresay with a man it would be different. You see, his father was
+      ill all those four years, and Alfred hated the shop as bad as you did, and
+      perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair. I want to be fair to
+      him, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word,&rdquo; Thorpe insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, mercy yes,&rdquo; Louisa made ready answer. &ldquo;My only fear is&mdash;whether
+      you won't find him too much of a gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe knitted his brows. &ldquo;I only hope we're talking about the same
+      thing,&rdquo; he said, in a doubtful tone. Before she could speak, he lifted his
+      hand. &ldquo;Never mind&mdash;I can see for myself in ten minutes more than you
+      could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan. I'm going on the Continent
+      in a few days' time, to stay for three or four months. I've got nothing
+      special to do&mdash;just to travel about and see things and kill time&mdash;I
+      shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland and Paris and the Rhine and all
+      sorts of places&mdash;and it occurred to me that I'd take the two
+      youngsters with me. I could get acquainted with them, that way, and they'd
+      be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would feel good to have
+      some of my own flesh and blood about me&mdash;and I suppose they'd be
+      tickled to death to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,&rdquo; Mrs. Dabney
+      objected, blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something
+      good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. &ldquo;What on earth difference
+      does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and let the kids
+      wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl was going to
+      quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four months
+      travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around in her
+      own tracks there at Cheltenham?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought to
+      see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him. Whatever
+      he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special start for
+      it.&rdquo; He added, upon a luminous afterthought: &ldquo;Perhaps his seeing the old
+      Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of wanting to be an
+      artist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction.
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;if you really think it's best,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;I don't know that
+      I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
+      Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if they
+      were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now you
+      come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether&mdash;and all I
+      can say is&mdash;I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write
+      them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have some
+      travelling clothes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can wait till you get her ready&mdash;only you must hurry up about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on the
+      desk. &ldquo;I will give you back that thirty,&rdquo; he said, as he wrote, &ldquo;and
+      here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
+      will you? and if you want more tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for
+      leaving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand, was
+      conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible letters
+      before her mental vision. &ldquo;Even now I don't believe in him,&rdquo; the
+      impalpable legend ran.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him
+      hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the
+      luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of the
+      appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were
+      fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently
+      removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon, speaking French to
+      the waiter throughout. Divested of his imposing great-coat, he was seen to
+      be a gentleman of meagre flesh as well as of small stature. He had the
+      Roman nose, narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth and chin
+      of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits of the Duke of
+      Wellington. His face and neck were of a dull reddish tint, which seemed at
+      first sight uniformly distributed: one saw afterward that it approached
+      pallor at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in minute patches on
+      the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose. Against this flushed skin, the
+      closely-cropped hair and small, neatly-waxed moustache were very white
+      indeed. It was a thin, lined, care-worn face, withal, which in repose, and
+      particularly in profile, produced an effect of dignified and philosophical
+      melancholy. The General's over-prominent light blue eyes upon occasion
+      marred this effect, however, by glances of a bold, harsh character, which
+      seemed to disclose unpleasant depths below the correct surface. His manner
+      with the waiters was abrupt and sharp, but undoubtedly they served him
+      very well&mdash;much better, in truth, than Thorpe had ever seen them
+      serve anybody before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe observed his guest a good deal during the repast, and formed
+      numerous conclusions about him. He ate with palpable relish of every dish,
+      and he emptied his glass as promptly as his host could fill it. There was
+      hardly a word of explanation as to the purpose of their meeting, until the
+      coffee was brought, and they pushed back their chairs, crossed their legs,
+      and lighted cigars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was lucky to catch you with my wire, at such short notice,&rdquo; Thorpe said
+      then. &ldquo;I sent two, you know&mdash;to your chambers and your club. Which of
+      them found you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chambers,&rdquo; said the General. &ldquo;I rarely dress till luncheon time. I read
+      in bed. There's really nothing else to do. Idleness is the curse of my
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been wondering if you'd like a little occupation&mdash;of a
+      well-paid sort,&rdquo; said Thorpe slowly. He realized that it was high time to
+      invent some pretext for his hurried summons of the General.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; responded the other, &ldquo;I should like anything that had money
+      in it. And I should very much like occupation, too&mdash;if it were, of
+      course, something that was&mdash;was suitable to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Thorpe, meditatively. &ldquo;I've something in my mind&mdash;not at
+      all definite yet&mdash;in fact, I don't think I can even outline it to you
+      yet. But I'm sure it will suit you&mdash;that is, if I decide to go on
+      with it&mdash;and there ought to be seven or eight hundred a year for you
+      in it&mdash;for life, mind you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General's gaze, fastened strenuously upon Thorpe, shook a little.
+      &ldquo;That will suit me very well,&rdquo; he declared, with feeling. &ldquo;Whatever I can
+      do for it&rdquo;&mdash;he let the sentence end itself with a significant
+      gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so,&rdquo; commented the other, trifling with the spoon in his cup.
+      &ldquo;But I want you to be open with me. I'm interested in you, and I want to
+      be of use to you. All that I've said, I can do for you. But first, I'm
+      curious to know everything that you can tell me about your circumstances.
+      I'm right in assuming, I suppose, that you're&mdash;that you're not any
+      too well-fixed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General helped himself to another little glass of brandy. His mood
+      seemed to absorb the spirit of the liqueur. &ldquo;Fixed!&rdquo; he repeated with a
+      peevish snap in his tone. &ldquo;I'm not 'fixed' at all, as you call it. Good
+      God, sir! They no more care what becomes of me than they do about their
+      old gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position&mdash;and
+      everything&mdash;and they round on me like&mdash;like cuckoos.&rdquo; His pale,
+      bulging eyes lifted their passionless veil for an instant as he spoke, and
+      flashed with the predatory fierceness of a hawk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom &ldquo;they&rdquo; might mean. The temper
+      visibly rising in the old man's mind was what he had hoped for. He
+      proceeded with an informed caution. &ldquo;Don't be annoyed if I touch upon
+      family matters,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It's a part of what I must know, in order to
+      help you. I believe you're a widower, aren't you, General?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other, after a quick upward glance, shook his head resentfully. &ldquo;Mrs.
+      Kervick lives in Italy with HER son-in-law&mdash;and her daughter. He is a
+      man of property&mdash;and also, apparently, a man of remarkable credulity
+      and patience.&rdquo; He paused, to scan his companion's face. &ldquo;They divide him
+      between them,&rdquo; he said then, from clenched teeth&mdash;&ldquo;and I&mdash;mind
+      you&mdash;I made the match! He was a young fellow that I found&mdash;and I
+      brought him home and introduced him&mdash;and I haven't so much as an
+      Italian postage-stamp to show for it. But what interest can you possibly
+      take in all this?&rdquo; The unamiable glance of his eyes was on the instant
+      surcharged with suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many daughters have you?&rdquo; Thorpe ventured the enquiry with inward
+      doubts as to its sagacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three,&rdquo; answered the General, briefly. It was evident that he was also
+      busy thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ask because I met one of them in the country over Sunday,&rdquo; Thorpe
+      decided to explain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old soldier's eyes asked many questions in the moment of silence.
+      &ldquo;Which one&mdash;Edith?&mdash;that is, Lady Cressage?&rdquo; he enquired. &ldquo;Of
+      course&mdash;it would have been her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded. &ldquo;She made a tremendous impression upon me,&rdquo; he observed,
+      watching the father with intentness as he let the slow words fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well she might,&rdquo; the other replied, simply. &ldquo;She's supposed to be the
+      most beautiful woman in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;I guess she is,&rdquo; Thorpe assented, while the two men eyed each
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the third sister unmarried?&rdquo; it occurred to him to ask. The tone of
+      the question revealed its perfunctory character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;Beatrice&mdash;she's of no importance,&rdquo; the father replied. &ldquo;She
+      goes in for writing, and all that&mdash;she's not a beauty, you know&mdash;she
+      lives with an old lady in Scotland. The oldest daughter&mdash;Blanche&mdash;she
+      has some good looks of her own, but she's a cat. And so you met Edith! May
+      I ask where it was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At Hadlow House&mdash;Lord Plowden's place, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General's surprise at the announcement was undoubted. &ldquo;At Plowden's!&rdquo;
+       he repeated, and added, as if half to himself, &ldquo;I thought that was all
+      over with, long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you'd tell me about it,&rdquo; said Thorpe, daringly. &ldquo;I've made it
+      plain to you, haven't I? I'm going to look out for you. And I want you to
+      post me up, here, on some of the things that I don't understand. You
+      remember that it was Plowden who introduced you to me, don't you? It was
+      through him that you got on the Board. Well, certain things that I've seen
+      lead me to suppose that he did that in order to please your daughter. Did
+      you understand it that way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite likely, in one sense,&rdquo; returned the General. He spoke with
+      much deliberation now, weighing all his words. &ldquo;He may have thought it
+      would please her; he may not have known how little my poor affairs
+      concerned her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; pursued Thorpe, argumentatively, &ldquo;he had an object in
+      pleasing her. Let me ask the question&mdash;did he want to marry her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most men want to marry her,&rdquo; was the father's non-committal response. His
+      moustache lifted itself in the semblance of a smile, but the blue eyes
+      above remained coldly vigilant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;I guess that's so too,&rdquo; Thorpe remarked. He made a fleeting
+      mental note that there was something about the General which impelled him
+      to think and talk more like an American than ever. &ldquo;But was HE specially
+      affected that way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Kervick, judicially, &ldquo;I think it was understood that if he
+      had been free to marry a penniless wife, he would have wished to marry
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; Thorpe began again, with a kind of diffident hesitation&mdash;&ldquo;do
+      you happen to have formed an idea&mdash;supposing that had been the case&mdash;would
+      she have accepted him?&rdquo; &ldquo;Ah, there you have me,&rdquo; replied the other. &ldquo;Who
+      can tell what women will accept, and what they will refuse? My daughter
+      refused Lord Lingfield&mdash;and he is an Under-Secretary, and will be
+      Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister, and a rich man. After that, what are
+      you to say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You speak of her as penniless,&rdquo; Thorpe remarked, with a casual air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six hundred a year,&rdquo; the father answered. &ldquo;We could have rubbed along
+      after a fashion on it, if she had had any notions at all of taking my
+      advice. I'm a man of the world, and I could have managed her affairs for
+      her to her advantage, but she insisted upon going off by herself. She
+      showed not the slightest consideration for me&mdash;but then I am
+      accustomed to that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the old gentleman read in this an
+      encouragement to expand his grievances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In my position,&rdquo; he continued, helping himself to still another tiny
+      glass, &ldquo;I naturally say very little. It is not my form to make complaints
+      and advertise my misfortunes. I daresay it's a fault. I know it kept me
+      back in India&mdash;while ever so many whipper-snappers were promoted over
+      my head&mdash;because I was of the proud and silent sort. It was a
+      mistake, but it was my nature. I might have put by a comfortable provision
+      for my old age, in those days, if I had been willing to push my claims,
+      and worry the Staff into giving me what was my due. But that I declined to
+      do&mdash;and when I was retired, there was nothing for me but the ration
+      of bread and salt which they serve out to the old soldier who has been too
+      modest. I served my Queen, sir, for forty years&mdash;and I should be
+      ashamed to tell you the allowance she makes me in my old age. But I do not
+      complain. My mouth is closed. I am an English gentleman and one of Her
+      Majesty's soldiers. That's enough said, eh? Do you follow me? And about my
+      family affairs, I'm not likely to talk to the first comer, eh? But to you
+      I say it frankly&mdash;they've behaved badly, damned badly, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER son-in-law. He has large
+      estates in one of the healthiest and most beautiful parts; he has a
+      palace, and more money than he knows what to do with&mdash;but it seems
+      that he's not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well&mdash;but
+      that doesn't enter into anyone's calculations. No! let the worn-out old
+      soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb! That's the spirit of woman-kind. And
+      my daughter Edith&mdash;does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me&mdash;I
+      secured for her the very greatest marriage in England. She would have been
+      Duchess of Glastonbury today if her husband had not played the fool and
+      drowned himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that you say?&rdquo; put in Thorpe, swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was as good as suicide,&rdquo; insisted the General, with doggedness. His
+      face had become a deeper red. &ldquo;They didn't hit it off together, and he
+      left in a huff, and went yachting with his father, who was his own
+      sailing-master&mdash;and, as might be expected, they were both drowned.
+      The title would have gone to her son&mdash;but no, of course, she had no
+      son&mdash;and so it passed to a stranger&mdash;an outsider that had been
+      an usher in a school, or something of that sort. You can fancy what a blow
+      this was to me. Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a
+      childless widow thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then, to cap
+      all, she takes her six hundred a year and goes off by herself, and gives
+      me the cold shoulder completely. What is it Shakespeare says? 'How sharper
+      than a serpent's teeth'&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an emphasis which
+      abruptly broke the quotation in half. He had been frowning moodily at his
+      guest for some minutes, relighting his cigar more than once meanwhile. He
+      had made a mental calculation of what the old man had had to drink, and
+      had reassured himself as to his condition. His garrulity might have an
+      alcoholic basis, but his wits were clear enough. It was time to take a new
+      line with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to hear you abuse your daughter,&rdquo; he admonished him now,
+      with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance. &ldquo;Damn it all, why
+      shouldn't she go off by herself, and take care of her own money her own
+      way? It's little enough, God knows, for such a lady as she is. Why should
+      you expect her to support you out of it? No&mdash;sit still! Listen to
+      me!&rdquo;&mdash;he stretched out his hand, and laid it with restraining
+      heaviness upon the General's arm&mdash;&ldquo;you don't want to have any row
+      with me. You can't afford it. Just think that over to yourself&mdash;you&mdash;can't
+      afford&mdash;it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Major-General Kervick's prominent blue eyes had bulged forth in rage till
+      their appearance had disconcerted the other's gaze. They remained still
+      too much in the foreground, as it were, and the angry scarlets and violets
+      of the cheeks beneath them carried an unabated threat of apoplexy&mdash;but
+      their owner, after a moment's silence, made a sign with his stiff white
+      brows that the crisis was over. &ldquo;You must remember that&mdash;that I have
+      a father's feelings,&rdquo; he gasped then, huskily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected. He had
+      learned what he wanted to know about this veteran. If he had the fierce
+      meannesses of a famished old dog, he had also a dog's awe of a stick. It
+      was almost too easy to terrorize him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I make allowances for all that,&rdquo; Thorpe began, vaguely. &ldquo;But it's
+      important that you should understand me. I'm this sort of a man: whatever
+      I set out to do, and put my strength into it, that I do! I kill every
+      pheasant I fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It's a way I have. To
+      those that help me, and are loyal to me, I'm the best friend in the world.
+      To those that get in my way, or try to trip me up, I'm the devil&mdash;just
+      plain devil. Now then&mdash;you're getting three hundred a year from my
+      Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my friend Plowden. You
+      don't do anything to earn this money; you're of no earthly use on the
+      Board. If I chose, I could put you off at the end of the year as easily as
+      I can blow out this match. But I propose not only to keep you on, but to
+      make you independent. Why do I do that? You should ask yourself that
+      question. It can't be on account of anything you can do for the Company.
+      What else then? Why, first and foremost, because you are the father of
+      your daughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me tell you the kind of man I am,&rdquo; said the General, inflating his
+      chest, and speaking with solemnity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I know the kind of man you are,&rdquo; Thorpe interrupted him, coolly. &ldquo;I
+      want to talk now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was merely,&rdquo; Kervick ventured, in an injured tone, &ldquo;that I can be as
+      loyal as any man alive to a true friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'll be the true friend, then,&rdquo; said Thorpe, with impatient
+      finality. &ldquo;And now this is what I want to say. I'm going to be a very rich
+      man. You're not to say so to anybody, mind you, until the thing speaks for
+      itself. We're keeping dark for a few months, d'ye see?&mdash;lying low.
+      Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well now, I wouldn't give a
+      damn to be rich, unless I did with my money the things that I wanted to
+      do, and got the things with it that I wanted to get. Whatever takes my
+      fancy, that's what I'll do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-new project which
+      seemed, by some surreptitious agency, to have already taken his fancy. It
+      was a curious project; there were attractive things about it, and
+      objections to it suggested themselves as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I may decide,&rdquo; he began speaking again, still revolving this hypothetical
+      scheme in his thoughts&mdash;&ldquo;I may want to&mdash;well, here's what occurs
+      to me as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye see? and
+      it seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be so poor. Well,
+      then&mdash;I might say to you, here's two thousand a year, say, made over
+      to you in your name, on the understanding that you turn over half of it,
+      say, to her. She could take it from you, of course, as her father. You
+      could say you made it out of the Company. Of course it might happen, later
+      on, that I might like to have a gentle hint dropped to her, d'ye see, as
+      to where it really came from. Mind, I don't say this is what is going to
+      be done. It merely occurred to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added a second thought:
+      &ldquo;You'd have to set about making friends with her, you know. In any case,
+      you'd better begin at that at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General remained buried in reflection. He lighted a cigarette, and
+      poured out for himself still another petit verre. His pursed lips and
+      knitted brows were eloquent of intense mental activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, do you see any objections to it?&rdquo; demanded Thorpe, at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not quite see the reasons for it,&rdquo; answered the other, slowly. &ldquo;What
+      would you gain by it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean&mdash;gain?&rdquo; put in the other, with peremptory
+      intolerance of tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture. These hands
+      were withered, but remarkably well-kept. &ldquo;I suppose one doesn't do
+      something for nothing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I see what I would gain, and what she
+      would gain, but I confess I don't see what advantage you would get out of
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No-o, I daresay you don't,&rdquo; assented Thorpe, with sneering serenity. &ldquo;But
+      what does that matter? You admit that you see what you would gain. That's
+      enough, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man's veined temples twitched for an instant. He straightened
+      himself in his chair, and looked hard at his companion. There was a
+      glistening of moisture about his staring eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It surely isn't necessary&mdash;among gentlemen&rdquo;&mdash;he began,
+      cautiously picking his phrases&mdash;&ldquo;to have quite so much that's
+      unpleasant, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;you're right&mdash;I didn't mean to be so rough,&rdquo; Thorpe
+      declared, with spontaneous contrition. Upon the instant, however, he
+      perceived the danger that advantage might be taken of his softness. &ldquo;I'm a
+      plain-spoken man,&rdquo; he went on, with a hardening voice, &ldquo;and people must
+      take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance, that I intended to
+      be of service to you&mdash;and that that ought to interest you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General seemed to have digested his pique. &ldquo;And what I was trying to
+      say,&rdquo; he commented deferentially, &ldquo;was that I thought I saw ways of being
+      of service to you. But that did not seem to interest you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How&mdash;service?&rdquo; Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know my daughter so much better than you do,&rdquo; explained the other; &ldquo;I
+      know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar with the whole
+      situation than you can possibly be&mdash;I wonder that you won't listen to
+      my opinion. I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I think
+      you should hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so, too,&rdquo; Thorpe declared, readily enough. &ldquo;What IS your
+      opinion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave an embarrassed
+      little laugh. &ldquo;But I can't form what you might call an opinion,&rdquo; he
+      protested, apologetically, &ldquo;till I understand a bit more clearly what it
+      is you propose to yourself. You mustn't be annoyed if I return to that&mdash;'still
+      harping on my daughter,' you know. If I MUST ask the question&mdash;is it
+      your wish to marry her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking of
+      something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness that
+      the question had been unduly intimate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry,&rdquo; he replied,
+      thoughtfully. &ldquo;I may, and I may not. But&mdash;starting with that proviso&mdash;I
+      suppose I haven't seen any other woman that I'd rather think about
+      marrying than&mdash;than the lady we're speaking of. However, you see it's
+      all in the air, so far as my plans go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the air be it,&rdquo; the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. &ldquo;Let us consider it
+      as if it were in the air&mdash;a possible contingency. This is what I
+      would say&mdash;My&mdash;'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being
+      a difficult lady&mdash;'uncertain, coy, and hard to please' as Scott says,
+      you know&mdash;and it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which
+      brings her to the surface. She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a
+      horror of it. Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you
+      know. I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother carried it
+      through. But&mdash;yes&mdash;about her&mdash;I think she is afraid to
+      marry again. If she does ever consent, it will be because poverty has
+      broken her nerve. If she is kept on six hundred a year, she may be
+      starved, so to speak, into taking a husband. If she had sixteen hundred&mdash;either
+      she would never marry at all, or she would be free to marry some handsome
+      young pauper who caught her fancy. That would be particularly like her.
+      You would be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her for
+      yourself. D'ye follow me? If you'll leave it to me, I can find a much
+      better way than that&mdash;better for all of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hm!&rdquo; said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. &ldquo;I see what you
+      mean,&rdquo; he remarked at last. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time, deferring to
+      the reverie of his host. When finally he offered a diversion, in the form
+      of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook himself, and then ponderously
+      rose to his feet. He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made his
+      way out without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the Embankment
+      garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him the fact of his presence.
+      &ldquo;Which way are you going?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; Thorpe answered absently. &ldquo;I think&mdash;I think I'll take
+      a walk on the Embankment&mdash;by myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. &ldquo;But when am I
+      to see you again?&rdquo; he enquired, with an effect of solicitude that defied
+      control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See me?&rdquo; Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him by surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are things to be settled, are there not?&rdquo; the other faltered, in
+      distressed doubt as to the judicious tone to take. &ldquo;You spoke, you know,
+      of&mdash;of some employment that&mdash;that would suit me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort to recall his
+      wandering attention. &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; he said, with lethargic vagueness&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      haven't thought it out yet. I'll let you know&mdash;within the week,
+      probably.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. Walking
+      heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat
+      pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the
+      idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he gave
+      the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred
+      consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within him,
+      his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter
+      self-disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep, had
+      followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still
+      regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after
+      the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the
+      fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; he said
+      to himself, &ldquo;there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is a cad,
+      in the presence of a gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his niece
+      and nephew from Bern to Montreux.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at
+      the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the
+      steam from the window with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both
+      stared a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations of
+      petulance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it too provoking!&rdquo; cried the girl, turning to her uncle at last.
+      &ldquo;This is where we are now&mdash;according to Baedeker: 'As the train
+      proceeds we enjoy a view of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the
+      left, the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For all one can see,
+      we might as well be at Redhill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is pretty hard luck,&rdquo; Thorpe assented, passively glancing past her at
+      the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured the view. &ldquo;But hang
+      it all&mdash;it must clear up some time. Just you have patience, and
+      you'll see some Alps yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where we're going,&rdquo; the young man interposed, &ldquo;the head-porter told me it
+      was always cloudier than anywhere else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think that can be so,&rdquo; Thorpe reasoned, languidly, from his
+      corner. &ldquo;It's a great winter resort, I'm told, and it rather stands to
+      reason, doesn't it? that people wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as
+      all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland,&rdquo; said the girl&mdash;&ldquo;they
+      would do anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. &ldquo;Well, you can comfort yourself
+      with the notion that you'll be coming again. The mountains'll stay here,
+      all right,&rdquo; he assured her. The young people smiled back at him, and with
+      this he rearranged his feet in a new posture on the opposite seat, lighted
+      another cigar, and pillowed his head once more against the hard, red-plush
+      cushion. Personally, he did not in the least resent the failure of the
+      scenery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For something more than three months, this purposeless pleasure-tour had
+      been dragging him about from point to point, sleeping in strange beds,
+      eating extraordinarily strange food, transacting the affairs of a
+      sight-seer among people who spoke strange languages, until he was
+      surfeited with the unusual. It had all been extremely interesting, of
+      course, and deeply improving&mdash;but he was getting tired of talking to
+      nobody but waiters, and still more so of having nothing to do which he
+      could not as well leave undone if he chose. After a few days more of
+      Switzerland&mdash;for they had already gazed with blank faces at this
+      universal curtain of mist from such different points of view as Lucerne,
+      Interlaken, and Thun&mdash;it was clear to him that they would, as he
+      phrased it, to himself, make a break for home. Unless, indeed, something
+      happened at Montreux. Ah, would anything happen at Montreux? For four days
+      his mind had been automatically reverting to that question; it lurked
+      continually in the background of his thoughts, now, as he smoked and idly
+      ruminated, on his way southward through the fog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the rest of the prolonged trip had been without any specific motive,
+      so far as he was concerned. The youngsters had planned all its routes and
+      halts and details of time and connections, and he had gone along, with
+      cheerful placidity, to look at the things they bade him observe, and to
+      pay the bills. Perhaps in all things their tastes had not been his tastes.
+      He would have liked more of Paris, he fancied, and less of the small Dutch
+      and North German towns which they seemed to fancy so much. Still, the beer
+      was good&mdash;and really their happiness, as a spectacle, had given him
+      more satisfaction than a thousand miles of boulevards could have done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He liked this niece and nephew of his more than he could ever have
+      imagined himself liking any young people. They had been shy with him at
+      the outset&mdash;and for the first week his experiment had been darkened
+      by the belief that, between themselves, they did not deem him quite good
+      enough. He had been wise enough, then, to have it out with the girl&mdash;she
+      was the one to whom he felt it easiest to talk frankly&mdash;and had
+      discovered, to his immense relief, that they conceived him to be regarding
+      them as encumbrances. At breakfast next morning, with tactful geniality,
+      he set everything right, and thereafter they were all extremely happy
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as he could judge, they were very superior young people, both
+      intellectually and spiritually. The girl spoke French, and her brother
+      German, with what seemed to him remarkable proficiency. Their young minds
+      were the repositories of an astounding amount of information: they knew
+      who Charles the Bold was; they pointed out to their uncle the distinction
+      between Gothic and Romanesque arches; they explained what was the matter
+      with the Anabaptists; they told him that the story of the Bishop and the
+      rats at Bingen was a baseless myth, and that probably there had never been
+      any such man as William Tell. Nor did they get all this out of the
+      guide-books which they pored over with such zest. It was impossible not to
+      see that they were familiar with large numbers of the subjects that these
+      books discussed, and that the itinerary which they marked out had
+      reference to desires and interests that they had cultivated for
+      themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Julia, upon even first sight, made a much pleasanter impression than her
+      mother's hesitating description had prepared him for. As he came to know
+      her well, he ceased to remember that there was a question in any mind as
+      to her being a pretty girl. There was less colour in her face than he
+      could have wished. Her smooth, pallid skin, almost waxen in texture, had a
+      suggestion of delicate health which sometimes troubled him a little, but
+      which appealed to the tenderness in his nature all the time. The face was
+      unduly thin, perhaps, but this, and the wistful glance of the large grey
+      eyes in repose, made up an effect that Thorpe found touched him a good
+      deal. Even when she was in visibly high spirits, the look in these eyes
+      seemed to him to be laying claim to his protection. She could be merry
+      upon occasion, in a gentle and tranquil way, and as her self-confidence
+      expanded under the shelter of their growing intimacy, she disclosed to her
+      uncle plenty of initiative and individuality&mdash;but what he felt in her
+      most was a peculiarly sweet and girlish trustfulness, which made him like
+      himself more than he had ever done before. He could feel that he was at
+      his very best&mdash;a hitherto unsuspected best&mdash;when Julia was
+      about. He wanted to buy for her everything in the windows upon which she
+      bestowed the most casual approving glance. It was a delight merely to look
+      at her, and to meditate upon the felicity of being able to do things for
+      so charming a girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfred made a less direct demand upon his uncle's admiration, but he was a
+      very good fellow all round. He was big and fair and muscular, and nothing
+      about him but his spectacles seemed in Thorpe's mind to be related to his
+      choice of art as a profession. That so robust and hearty a young fellow
+      should wish to put paint on a canvas with small brushes, was to the uncle
+      an unaccountable thing. It was almost as if he had wanted to knit, or do
+      embroidery. Of the idleness and impatience of discipline which his mother
+      had seemed to allege against him, Thorpe failed to detect any signs. The
+      young man was never very late in the morning, and, beside his tireless
+      devotion to the task of hunting up old pictures in out-of-the-way places,
+      did most of the steward's work of the party with intelligence and
+      precision. He studied the time-tables, audited the hotel-bills, looked
+      after the luggage, got up the street-maps of towns and the like, to such
+      good purpose that they never lost a train, or a bag, or themselves. Truly,
+      an excellent young man. Thorpe noted with especial satisfaction his fine,
+      kindly big-brother attitude toward his sister Julia&mdash;and it was
+      impossible for him to avoid the conviction that Louisa was a simpleton not
+      to appreciate such children. They did not often allude to their mother;
+      when they did, it was in language the terms of which seemed more
+      affectionate than the tone&mdash;and Thorpe said often to himself that he
+      did not blame them. It was not so much that they had outgrown their
+      mother's point of view. They had never occupied it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The journey, so far as Thorpe comprehended its character, had been shaped
+      with about equal regard for Julia's interest in the romance of history,
+      and Alfred's more technical and practical interest in art. Each had
+      sufficient sympathy with the tastes of the other, however, to prevent any
+      tendency to separation. They took their uncle one day to see where William
+      the Silent was assassinated, and the next to observe how Rembrandt's
+      theory of guild portrait-painting differed from Van der Helst's, with a
+      common enthusiasm. He scrutinized with patient loyalty everything that
+      they indicated to him, and not infrequently they appeared to like very
+      much the comments he offered. These were chiefly of a sprightly nature,
+      and when Julia laughed over them he felt that she was very near to him
+      indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus they saw Paris together&mdash;where Thorpe did relinquish some of the
+      multiplied glories of the Louvre to sit in front of a cafe by the Opera
+      House and see the funny people go past&mdash;and thence, by Bruges and
+      Antwerp, to Holland, where nobody could have imagined there were as many
+      pictures as Thorpe saw with his own weary eyes. There were wonderful old
+      buildings at Lubeck for Julia's eyes to glisten over, and pictures at
+      Berlin, Dresden, and Dusseldorf for Alfred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The assumption existed that the excursion into the Thuringenwald to see
+      the memorials of Luther was especially for the uncle's benefit, and he
+      tried solicitously to say or look nothing which might invalidate it. There
+      were other places in Germany, from Mainz to Munich, which he remembered
+      best by their different beers. They spent Christmas at Vienna, where Julia
+      had heard that its observance was peculiarly insisted upon, and then they
+      saw the Tyrol in its heaviest vesture of winter snows, and beautiful old
+      Basle, where Alfred was crazier about Holbein than he had been at Munich
+      over Brouwer. Thorpe looked very carefully at the paintings of both men,
+      and felt strengthened in his hopes that when Alfred got a little older he
+      would see that this picture business was not the thing for a young
+      gentleman with prospects to go into.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at Basle that Thorpe received a letter from London which directly
+      altered the plans of the party. He had had several other letters from
+      London which had produced no such effect. Through Semple, he had followed
+      in outline the unobtrusive campaign to secure a Special Settlement, and
+      had learned that the Stock Exchange Committee, apparently without
+      opposition, had granted one for the first week in February.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even this news, tremendously important as it was, did not prompt Thorpe to
+      interfere with the children's projects. There was no longer any point in
+      remaining away from London; there were, indeed, numerous reasons for a
+      prompt return. But he was loth to deprive the youngsters of that descent
+      into smiling, sunlit Italy upon which they had so fondly dwelt in fancy,
+      and after all Semple could do all that was needful to be done for another
+      month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So they went to Basle, and here it was that another kind of letter came.
+      It was in a strange hand, at once cramped and fluttering, which puzzled
+      the recipient a good deal; it was a long time before even the signature
+      unravelled itself. Then he forced himself to decipher it, sentence by
+      sentence, with a fierce avidity. It was from General Kervick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning Thorpe astonished his young companions by suggesting an
+      alteration in their route. In a roundabout and tentative fashion&mdash;in
+      which more suspicious observers must have detected something shamefaced&mdash;he
+      mentioned that he had always heard a great deal about Montreux as a
+      winter-resort. The fact that he called it Montroox raised in Julia's mind
+      a fleeting wonder from whom it could be that he had heard so much about
+      it, but it occurred to neither her nor her brother to question his entire
+      good faith. Their uncle had displayed, hitherto, a most comforting freedom
+      from discrimination among European towns; he had, indeed, assured them
+      many times that they were all one to him. That he should suddenly turn up
+      now with a favourite winter-resort of his own selection surprised them
+      considerably, but, upon reflection, it also pleased them. He had humoured
+      all their wishes with such unfailing and bountiful kindness, that it was a
+      delight to learn that there was something he wanted to do. They could not
+      finish their breakfast till the guide-book had been brought to the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! How splendid!&rdquo; Julia had cried then. &ldquo;The Castle of Chillon is
+      there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why of course!&rdquo; said Thorpe, complacently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They laughed gayly at him for pretending that he had known this, and he as
+      good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew a serious long breath of
+      relief, however, when their backs were turned. It had gone off much better
+      than he had feared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, on this Sunday afternoon, as the train made its sure-footed way
+      across the mountains, the thought that he was actually to alight at
+      Montreux at once fascinated and depressed him. He was annoyed with himself
+      for suffering it to get such a hold upon his mind. What was there in it,
+      anyway? There was a big hotel there, and he and his youngsters were to
+      stop at it, and if he accidentally encountered a certain lady who was also
+      stopping there&mdash;and of course the meeting would bear upon its face
+      the stamp of pure chance&mdash;what of it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if he did meet her, thus fortuitously&mdash;what would happen then? No
+      doubt a lady of her social position met abroad great numbers of people
+      that she had met at home. It would not in any way surprise her&mdash;this
+      chance encounter of which he thought so much. Were there sufficient
+      grounds for imagining that it would even interest her? He forced his mind
+      up to this question, as it were, many times, and invariably it shied and
+      evaded the leap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been times, at Hadlow House, when Lady Cressage had seemed
+      supremely indifferent to the fact of his existence, and there had been
+      other times when it had appeared manifest that he pleased her&mdash;or
+      better, perhaps, that she was willing to take note of how much she pleased
+      him. It must have been apparent to her&mdash;this fact that she produced
+      such an impression upon him. He reasoned this out satisfactorily to
+      himself. These beautiful women, trained from childhood for the conquest of
+      a rich husband, must have cultivated an extraordinary delicacy of
+      consciousness, in such matters. They must have developed for themselves
+      what might be called a sixth sense&mdash;a power of feeling in the air
+      what the men about were thinking of them. More than once he had caught a
+      glimmer of what he felt to be the operation of this sense, in the company
+      of Lady Cressage. He could not say that it had been discernible in her
+      glance, or her voice, or her manner, precisely, but he was sure that he
+      had seen it, somehow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even assuming all this&mdash;admitting that in October, on a wet
+      Sunday, in the tedium of a small country-house party, she had shown some
+      momentary satisfaction in the idea that he was profoundly impressed by her&mdash;did
+      it at all follow that in February, amid the distractions of a fashionable
+      winter-resort, and probably surrounded by hosts of friends, she would pay
+      any attention to him whatever? The abject fear that she might not even
+      remember him&mdash;might not know him from Adam when he stood before her&mdash;skulked
+      about in the labyrinths of his mind, but he drove it back whenever it
+      showed itself. That would be too ignominious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young people at the other side of the compartment, forever wiping the
+      window with the napkin, and straining their eyes to see the invisible,
+      diverted his unsettled attention. A new perception of how much he liked
+      them and enjoyed having them with him, took hold of his thoughts. It had
+      not occurred to him before, with any definiteness, that he would be
+      insupportably lonely when the time came to part with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when he dwelt upon it, it made him feel sad and old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said to himself at once, with decision, that there need be no parting
+      at all. He would take a house without delay, and they should live with
+      him. He could not doubt that this would be agreeable to them; it would
+      solve every problem for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His fancy sketched out the natural and legitimate extensions of this
+      project. There would be, first of all, a house in town&mdash;a furnished
+      house of a modest sort, having no pretension save to provide a cheerful
+      temporary shelter for three people who liked one another. Here the new
+      household would take shape, and get its right note of character.
+      Apparently Louisa would not be urged to form part of this household. He
+      said to himself with frankness that he didn't want her, and there had been
+      nothing to indicate that her children would pine for her. She showed good
+      sense when she said that her place was in the shop, and in her ancestral
+      home over the shop. No doubt there would be a certain awkwardness, visible
+      to others if not to themselves, about her living in one part of London and
+      her children in another. But here also her good sense would come on;&mdash;and,
+      besides, this furnished house in town would be a mere brief overture to
+      the real thing&mdash;the noble country mansion he was going to have, with
+      gardens and horses and hounds and artificial lakes and deer parks and
+      everything. Quite within the year he would be able to realize this
+      consummation of his dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How these nice young people would revel in such a place&mdash;and how they
+      would worship him for having given it to them for a home! His heart warmed
+      within him as he thought of this. He smiled affectionately at the picture
+      Julia made, polishing the glass with vehement circular movements of her
+      slight arm, and then grimacing in comic vexation at the deadly absence of
+      landscape outside. Was there ever a sweeter or more lovable girl in this
+      world? Would there have to be some older woman to manage the house, at the
+      beginning? he wondered. He should like it immensely if that could be
+      avoided. Julia looked fragile and inexperienced&mdash;but she would be
+      twenty-one next month. Surely that was a mature enough age for the slight
+      responsibility of presiding over servants who should be the best that
+      money could buy. Many girls were married, and given households of their
+      own to manage, when they were even younger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This reflection raised an obstacle against the smooth-flowing current of
+      his thoughts. Supposing that Julia got the notion of marrying&mdash;how
+      miserable that would make everything. Very likely she would never do any
+      such thing; he had observed in her no shadow of a sign that a thought of
+      matrimony had ever crossed her brain. Yet that was a subject upon which,
+      of course, she could not be asked to give pledges, even to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe tried to take a liberal view of this matter. He argued to himself
+      that there would be no objection at all to incorporating Julia's husband
+      into the household, assuming that she went to the length of taking one,
+      and that he was a good fellow. On this latter point, it was only the
+      barest justice to Julia's tastes and judgment to take it for granted that
+      he would be a good fellow. Yet the uncle felt uneasily that this would
+      alter things for the worse. The family party, with that hypothetical young
+      man in it, could never be quite so innocently and completely happy as&mdash;for
+      instance&mdash;the family party in this compartment had been during these
+      wonderful three months.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mechanically he rubbed the window beside him, and turned to look out with
+      a certain fixedness&mdash;as if he might chance to catch a glimpse of the
+      bridegroom with whom Julia would have it in her power to disturb the
+      serenity of their prospective home. A steep white cliff, receding sullenly
+      against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse grotesquely low for its size,
+      crouching under big shelving galleries heaped with snow; an opening in
+      front, to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a valley into which
+      they would descend&mdash;he saw these things. They remained in his mind
+      afterward as a part of something else that he saw, with his mental vision,
+      at the same moment&mdash;a strikingly real and vivid presentment of Lady
+      Cressage, attired as he had seen her in the saddle, her light hair blown
+      about a little under her hat, a spot of colour in the exquisite cheek, the
+      cold, impersonal dignity of a queen in the beautiful profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The picture was so actual for the instant that he uttered an involuntary
+      exclamation&mdash;and then looked hastily round to see whether his
+      companions had heard it. Seemingly they had not; he lolled again upon the
+      comfortless cushion, and strove to conjure up once more the apparition.
+      Nothing satisfactory came of the effort. Upon consideration, he grew
+      uncertain as to whether he had seen anything at all. At the most it was a
+      kind of half-dream which had visited him. He yawned at the thought, and
+      lighted a fresh cigar. All at once, his mind had become too indolent to do
+      any more thinking. A shapeless impression that there would be a good many
+      things to think over later on flitted into his brain and out again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, how are the mountains using you, now?&rdquo; he called out to his niece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I could shake them!&rdquo; she declared. &ldquo;Listen to this: 'A view of
+      singular beauty, embracing the greater part of the Lake of Geneva, and the
+      surrounding mountains, is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are now&mdash;or
+      were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort of valley in front
+      of us&mdash;but that is all. If I could only see one mountain with snow on
+      it&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come to that,&rdquo; Thorpe
+      insisted, with jocose perversity. &ldquo;You're on mountains yourself, all the
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what I mean,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;I want to see something like the
+      coloured pictures in the hotels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow,&rdquo; he said, for perhaps
+      the twentieth time that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&mdash;that looks like water!&rdquo; said Alfred. &ldquo;See? just beyond the
+      village. Yes, it is water. There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it isn't the right colour,&rdquo; protested Julia, peering through the
+      glass. &ldquo;It's precisely like everything else: it's of no colour at all. And
+      they always paint it such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss
+      Government ought to return you your money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wait till you see it tomorrow&mdash;or next day,&rdquo; said the uncle,
+      vaguely. He closed his eyes, and welcomed a drowsy mood. As he went off to
+      sleep, the jolting racket of the train mellowed itself into a murmur of
+      &ldquo;tomorrow or next day, tomorrow or next day,&rdquo; in his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the big hotel, Julia
+      looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. She was in such haste to behold it
+      that she had not so much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her muff still
+      in her hand. After one brief glance, she groaned aloud with vexation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both
+      dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of water&mdash;motionless,
+      inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour&mdash;which at some small distance
+      out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little further out,
+      became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the forlorn masts
+      of a couple of fishing boats, beached under the shelter of the pier, there
+      was no proof in sight that this was a lake at all. It was as uninspiring
+      to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a porch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While her uncle and brother occupied themselves with the luggage being
+      brought up by the porters, she opened a window and stepped out upon the
+      tiny balcony. A flaring sign on the inner framework of this balcony
+      besought her in Swiss-French, in the interests of order, not to feed the
+      birds. The injunction seemed meaningless to her until she perceived, over
+      by the water, several gulls lazily wheeling about. They were almost as
+      grey as the fog they circled in. Suddenly they seemed to perceive her in
+      turn, and, swerving sharply, came floating toward the hotel, with harsh,
+      almost menacing cries. She hurried in, and shut the window with decision.
+      It seemed to her that the smile with which, as she turned, she was able to
+      meet her uncle's look, was a product of true heroism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apparently this smile did not altogether delude him. &ldquo;Oh, now, you mustn't
+      get down on your luck,&rdquo; he adjured her. &ldquo;We're going to be awfully cozy
+      here. Have you seen your room? It's just there, in a little alley to the
+      right of the door. They say it has an even finer view than these windows.
+      Oh, you needn't laugh&mdash;this is the best view in the world, I'm told
+      by those who know. And as a winter-resort, why&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, look here!&rdquo; The interruption came from Alfred, who, having gone
+      out on one of the balconies, put in his head now to summon them. &ldquo;Come
+      here! Here's some fun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pointed out to Thorpe the meaning of the inscription on the sign, and
+      then pulled him forward to observe its practical defiance. A score of big
+      gulls were flapping and dodging in excited confusion close before them,
+      filling their ears with a painful clamour. Every now and again, one of the
+      birds, recovering its senses in the hurly-burly, would make a curving
+      swoop downward past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly catch in
+      its beak something that had been thrown into the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, leaning over his railing, saw that a lady on a balcony one floor
+      below, and some yards to the left, was feeding the birds. She laughed
+      aloud as she did so, and said something over her shoulder to a companion
+      who was not visible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that's pretty cool,&rdquo; he remarked to his niece, who had come to
+      stand beside him. &ldquo;She's got the same sign down there that we've got. I
+      can see it from here. Or perhaps she can't read French.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or perhaps she isn't frightened of the hotel people,&rdquo; suggested the girl.
+      She added, after a little, &ldquo;I think I'll feed them myself in the morning.
+      I certainly shall if the sun comes out&mdash;as a sort of Thanksgiving
+      festival, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her uncle seemed not to hear her. He had been struck by the exceptional
+      grace of the gestures with which the pieces of bread were flung forth. The
+      hands and wrists of this lady were very white and shapely. The movements
+      which she made with them, all unaware of observation as she was, and
+      viewed as he viewed them from above, were singularly beautiful in their
+      unconstraint. It was in its way like watching some remarkable fine
+      dancing, he thought. He could not see much of her face, from his perch,
+      but she was tall and fashionably clad. There was a loose covering of black
+      lace thrown over her head, but once, as she turned, he could see that her
+      hair was red. Even in this fleeting glimpse, the unusual tint attracted
+      his attention: there was a brilliancy as of fire in it. Somehow it seemed
+      to make a claim upon his memory. He continued to stare down at the
+      stranger with an indefinable sense that he knew something about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly another figure appeared upon the balcony&mdash;and in a flash he
+      comprehended everything. These idiotic, fighting gluttons of gulls had
+      actually pointed out to him the object of his search. It was Lady Cressage
+      who stood in the doorway, there just below him&mdash;and her companion,
+      the red-haired lady who laughed hotel-rules to scorn, was the American
+      heiress who had crossed the ocean in his ship, and whom he had met later
+      on at Hadlow. What was her name&mdash;Martin? No&mdash;Madden. He
+      confronted the swift impression that there was something odd about these
+      two women being together. At Hadlow he had imagined that they did not like
+      each other. Then he reflected as swiftly that women probably had their own
+      rules about such matters. He seemed to have heard, or read, perhaps, that
+      females liked and disliked each other with the most capricious
+      alternations and on the least tangible of grounds. At all events, here
+      they were together now. That was quite enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two ladies had gone in, and closed their window. The sophisticated
+      birds, with a few ungrateful croaks of remonstrance, had drifted away
+      again to the water. His niece had disappeared from his elbow. Still Thorpe
+      remained with his arms folded on the railing, his eyes fixed on the vacant
+      balcony, below to the left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last he went inside, the young people were waiting for him with
+      the project of a stroll before dinner. The light was failing, but there
+      was plenty of time. They had ascertained the direction in which Chillon
+      lay; a servant had assured them that it was only a few minutes' walk, and
+      Alfred was almost certain that he had seen it from the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe assented with a certain listlessness, which they had never noted in
+      his manner before, but when Julia begged him not to stir if he were in the
+      slightest degree tired, he replied honestly enough that he would do
+      anything rather than be left alone. Then, of course, they said, there
+      should be no walk, but to this he would not listen. The party trooped
+      downstairs, accordingly, and out into the street. The walking was vile,
+      but, as Julia had long ago said, if they were to be deterred by slush they
+      would never get anywhere or see anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It proved to be too late and too dark to either enter the castle or get
+      much of an idea of its exterior. Returning, they paused again to look into
+      the lighted window of the nice little book-shop. The numerous photographs
+      of what they were entitled to behold from the windows of their hotel
+      seemed more convincing than photographs usually were. As the young people
+      inspected them, they became reassured. It was not credible that such a
+      noble vista would forever deny itself to such earnest pilgrims. When their
+      uncle introduced this time his ancient formula about the certainty of
+      brilliant sunshine in the morning, they somehow felt like believing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I really think it must change,&rdquo; Julia declared, with her
+      fascinated glance upon the photographs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfred looked at his watch. &ldquo;We'd better get along to the hotel, hadn't
+      we?&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the way&rdquo;&mdash;Thorpe began, with a certain uneasiness of manner&mdash;&ldquo;speaking
+      of dinner, wouldn't you like to dine at the big table d'hote, instead of
+      up in our sitting-room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you're tired of our dining alone&mdash;by all means,&rdquo; answered Julia,
+      readily. There was obvious surprise, however, in both her look and tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tired nothing!&rdquo; he assured her. &ldquo;I like it better than anything else in
+      the world. But what I mean is&mdash;I was thinking, seeing that this is
+      such a great winter-resort, and all the swagger people of Europe come here&mdash;that
+      probably you youngsters would enjoy seeing the crowd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Julia's glance, full of affectionate appreciation, showed how wholly she
+      divined his spirit of self-sacrifice. &ldquo;We wouldn't care in the least for
+      it,&rdquo; she declared. &ldquo;We enjoy being a little party by ourselves every whit
+      as much as you do&mdash;and we both hate the people you get at table
+      d'hotes&mdash;and besides, for that matter, if there are any real swells
+      here, you may be sure they dine in their own rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, of course!&rdquo; Thorpe exclaimed swiftly, in palpable self-rebuke. &ldquo;I
+      don't know what I could have been thinking of. Of course they would dine
+      in their rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning, Thorpe rose earlier than ever&mdash;with the impression of a
+      peculiarly restless and uncomfortable night behind him. It was not until
+      he had shaved and dressed that he noted the altered character of the air
+      outside. Although it was not fully daylight yet, he could see the outlines
+      of the trees and vinerows on the big, snow-clad hill, which monopolized
+      the prospect from his window, all sharp and clear cut, as if he were
+      looking at them through an opera-glass. He went at once to the
+      sitting-room, and thrust the curtains aside from one of the windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A miracle had been wrought in the night. The sky overhead was serenely
+      cloudless; the lake beneath, stirring softly under some faint passing
+      breeze, revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. Between
+      sky and water there stretched across the picture a broad, looming,
+      dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here and there at the top by little
+      slanting patches of an intensely glowing white. He looked at this darkling
+      middle distance for a moment or two without comprehension. Then he turned
+      and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's room and beat upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get up!&rdquo; he called through the panels. &ldquo;Here's your sunrise&mdash;here's
+      your Alpine view. Go to your window and see it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A clear voice, not unmirthful, replied: &ldquo;I've been watching it for half an
+      hour, thanks. Isn't it glorious?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was more fortunate at the opposite door, for Alfred was still asleep.
+      The young man, upon hearing the news, however, made a toilet of unexampled
+      brevity, and came breathlessly forth. Thorpe followed him to the balcony,
+      where he stood collarless and uncombed, with the fresh morning breeze
+      blowing his hair awry, his lips parted, his eyes staring with what the
+      uncle felt to be a painful fixedness before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had seen many mountains in many lands. They did not interest him
+      very much. He thought, however, that he could see now why people who had
+      no mountains of their own should get excited about Switzerland. He
+      understood a number of these sentimental things now, for that matter,
+      which had been Greek to him three months before. Unreceptive as his
+      philistinism may have seemed to these delightful youngsters, it was
+      apparent enough to him that they had taught him a great deal. If he could
+      not hope to share their ever-bubbling raptures and enthusiasms, at least
+      he had come to comprehend them after a fashion, and even to discern
+      sometimes what it was that stirred them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched his nephew now&mdash;having first assured himself by a
+      comprehensive downward glance that no other windows of the hotel-front
+      were open. The young man seemed tremendously moved, far too much so to
+      talk. Thorpe ventured once some remarks about the Mexican mountains, which
+      were ever so much bigger, as he remembered them, but Alfred paid no heed.
+      He continued to gaze across the lake, watching in rapt silence one facet
+      after another catch the light, and stand out from the murky gloom,
+      radiantly white, till at last the whole horizon was a mass of shining
+      minarets and domes, and the sun fell full on his face. Then, with a
+      long-drawn sigh, he turned, re-entered the room, and threw himself into a
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's too good!&rdquo; he declared, with a half-groan. &ldquo;I didn't know it would
+      be like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why nothing's too good for us, man,&rdquo; his uncle told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THAT is,&rdquo; said the boy, simply, and Thorpe, after staring for a moment,
+      smiled and rang the bell for breakfast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Julia made her appearance, a few minutes later, the table was already
+      laid, and the waiter was coming in with the coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought we'd hurry up breakfast,&rdquo; her uncle explained, after she had
+      kissed him and thanked him for the sunrise he had so successfully
+      predicted&mdash;&ldquo;because I knew you'd both be crazy to get out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not over-estimated their eagerness, which was so great, indeed,
+      that they failed to note the excessive tranquility of his own demeanour.
+      He ate with such unusual deliberation, on this exciting morning, that they
+      found themselves at the end of their repast when, apparently, he had but
+      made a beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you mustn't wait for me at all,&rdquo; he announced to them then. &ldquo;I'm a
+      little tired this morning&mdash;and I think I'd just like to lie around
+      and smoke, and perhaps read one of your novels. But you two must get your
+      things on and lose no time in getting out. This is the very best time of
+      day, you know&mdash;for Alpine scenery. I'd hate to have you miss any of
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Under his kindly if somewhat strenuous insistence, they went to their
+      rooms to prepare for an immediate excursion. He was so anxious to have
+      them see all there was to be seen that, when Julia returned, properly
+      cloaked and befurred, and stood waiting at the window, he scolded a
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth is that boy doing?&rdquo; he exclaimed, with a latent snarl in
+      his tone which was novel to her ear. &ldquo;He'll keep you here till noon!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's shaving, I think. He won't be long,&rdquo; she replied, with great
+      gentleness. After a moment's pause, she turned from the window and came
+      gayly forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I forgot: I was going to feed the birds. There are several of them
+      out there now.&rdquo; As she spoke, she busily broke up some of the rolls on the
+      table. Her face was bright with the pleasure of the thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't much mind, Julia,&rdquo; her uncle began, with almost pleading
+      intonations, &ldquo;I rather think I wouldn't feed those birds. The rule is
+      there before our eyes, you know&mdash;and it's always been my idea that if
+      you're at a hotel it's the correct thing to abide by its rules. It's just
+      an idea of mine&mdash;and I daresay, if you think about it, you'll feel
+      the same way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl freed the last remaining bread-crumb from her gloves. &ldquo;Why, of
+      course, uncle,&rdquo; she said, with promptitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although there was no hint of protest in her tone or manner, he felt
+      impelled to soften still further this solitary demonstration of his
+      authority. &ldquo;You see I've been all round the world, my little girl,&rdquo; he
+      explained, haltingly, &ldquo;and when a man's done that, and knocked about
+      everywhere, he's apt to get finicking and notional about trifles every
+      once in a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're less so than anybody I ever knew,&rdquo; she generously interposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no I'm not. You don't know me well enough yet; that's what's the
+      matter. And you see, Julia&mdash;another thing just because you saw that
+      lady throwing out bread, that aint a very good reason why you should do
+      it. You don't know what kind of a person she may be. Girls have got to be
+      so frightfully careful about all that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Julia offered a constrained little laugh in comment. &ldquo;Oh, you don't know
+      how careful I can be,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you're not annoyed?&rdquo; he entreated her&mdash;and for answer she came
+      behind him, and rested an arm on his shoulder, and patted it. He stroked
+      her hand with his own. &ldquo;That's something like the nicest niece in the
+      world!&rdquo; he exclaimed, with fervour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last she and her brother had gone, he made short work of his
+      breakfast, and drank his coffee at a gulp. A restless activity suddenly
+      informed his movements. He lit a cigar, and began pacing up and down the
+      room, biting his lips in preoccupation as he went. After a little, he
+      opened a window, and ventured cautiously as far out on the balcony as was
+      necessary to obtain a view of the street below. Eventually, he identified
+      his nephew and niece among the pedestrians beneath him, and he kept them
+      in sight till, after more than one tiresome halt at a shop window, they
+      disappeared round a bend in the road. Then he turned and came back into
+      the room with the buoyant air of a man whose affairs are prospering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled genially to himself as he gathered from the table in one
+      capacious hand all the pieces of bread his beloved niece had broken up,
+      and advanced again to the open window. Waiting here till one of the dingy
+      gulls moving aimlessly about was headed toward him, he tossed out a
+      fragment. The bird dashed at it with a scream, and on the instant the
+      whole squawking flock were on wing. He suffered the hubbub to proceed
+      unappeased for a little while he kept a watchful though furtive eye on
+      that balcony to the left, below. Unhappily he could not get out far enough
+      to see whether the inner curtains of its window were drawn. He threw
+      another bit of bread, and then looked at his watch. It was a few minutes
+      past nine. Surely people travelling to see scenery would be up by this
+      hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The strategy of issuing just enough bread to keep the feathered concourse
+      in motion commended itself to his mind. As a precautionary measure, he
+      took all the rolls remaining on the table, and put them in the drawer of a
+      desk by the window. It even occurred to him to ring for more bread, but
+      upon consideration that seemed too daring. The waiter would be
+      sufficiently surprised at the party's appetites as it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half an hour later, his plan of campaign suddenly yielded a victory. Lady
+      Cressage appeared on her balcony, clad in some charming sort of morning
+      gown, and bareheaded. She had nothing in her hands, and seemed indifferent
+      to the birds, but when Thorpe flung forth a handful of fragments into the
+      centre of their whirling flock, she looked up at him. It was the anxious
+      instant, and he ventured upon what he hoped was a decorous compromise
+      between a bow and a look of recognition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was in no haste to answer either. He could see rather than hear that
+      she said something to her invisible companion within, the while she
+      glanced serenely in the general direction of his balcony. It seemed to him
+      that the answer to her remark, whatever it was, must have exerted a direct
+      influence upon his destiny, for Lady Cressage all at once focussed her
+      vague regard upon him, and nodded with a reasonably gracious smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's wonderful luck to find you here,&rdquo; he called down to her. Having
+      played their part, he wished now that the birds were at Jericho. Their
+      obstreperous racket made conversation very difficult. Apparently she made
+      him an answer, but he could catch nothing of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm here with my niece and nephew,&rdquo; he shouted down. &ldquo;I don't hear what
+      you say. May I come down and pay my respects&mdash;later on? What is your
+      number, and when may I come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These questions, as he flashed them in review through his mind, seemed to
+      be all right from the most exacting social point of view. Doubtless it was
+      equally all right that, before replying, she should consult her companion,
+      as she did at some length. Then she replied&mdash;and he had no difficulty
+      now in hearing her above the birds&mdash;that it would be very nice of him
+      to come, say, in an hour's time. She told him the number&mdash;and then
+      almost abruptly went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, during this hour that ensued, smoked with volcanic energy. He
+      tried to interest himself in one after another of half a dozen Tauchnitz
+      novels his niece carried about, with a preposterous absence of success. He
+      strove to arrange in some kind of sequence the things that he should say,
+      when this momentous interview should begin, but he could think of nothing
+      which did not sound silly. It would be all right, he argued to himself in
+      the face of this present mental barrenness; he always talked well enough
+      on the spur of the moment, when the time came&mdash;and still was not
+      reassured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wondered if both ladies would be there to receive him, and decided that
+      they would probably regard that as indispensable to the proprieties. In
+      that case, their conversation would necessarily be of the most casual and
+      general character. He would tell them a good deal about his niece, he
+      foresaw. A man travelling about with a niece&mdash;and such a delightfully
+      lady-like and engaging little niece&mdash;would take on some added
+      interest and dignity, he perceived, in the eyes of ladies travelling
+      alone. He essayed to estimate just how much they would probably like
+      Julia. Of course he would say nothing about her mother and the book-shop;
+      a vague allusion to a widowed sister would be ample on that head. But
+      there could be confident references to Cheltenham; he knew from what Julia
+      had said that it suggested the most satisfactory social guarantees, if
+      taken strictly by itself. And then so much would depend upon Julia
+      herself! If she succeeded in striking up a friendship with them&mdash;ah,
+      then everything would be all right. Perhaps they would take a fancy to
+      Alfred too! He was a boy, of course, but conceivably the fact that he
+      wanted to paint, and knew about pictures, would appeal to them. He seemed
+      to have heard somewhere that artists were the very devil among women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the weary time of waiting had worn itself out, somehow, and, after
+      a final polishing before his glass, he went down, and found his right
+      corridor, and knocked at the door. A pleasant voice bade him enter, and,
+      hat and gloves in hand, he went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he had imagined, both ladies were present. He had not been prepared,
+      however, for the fact that it was the American who played the part of
+      hostess. It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down, and
+      generally made him free of the apartment. When he shook hands with Lady
+      Cressage, there was somehow an effect of the incidental in the ceremony,
+      as if she were also a guest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing could have been simpler or more pleasing than the little visit
+      turned out to be. Miss Madden had suddenly grown tired of the snowless and
+      dripping English winter, and had as promptly decided to come to
+      Switzerland, where the drifts ought to be high enough, and the frosts
+      searching enough, in all conscience. They had selected Territet, because
+      it was familiar to her, and because it was on the way to Martigny and
+      Brieg, and she had had a notion of crossing either the Simplon or the St.
+      Bernard in winter. As she found now, the St. Bernard was quite
+      impracticable, but admittedly a post road was kept open over the Simplon.
+      It was said now that she would not be allowed to proceed by this, but it
+      often happened that she did the things that she was not allowed to do. The
+      hotel-people at both Brieg and Berisal had written refusing to let their
+      horses attempt the Simplon journey, and they were of course quite within
+      their rights, but there were other horses in Switzerland. One surely could
+      buy horses&mdash;and so on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe also had his turn at autobiography. He told rather whimsically of
+      his three months' experiences at the tail of the juvenile whirligigs, and
+      his auditors listened to them with mild smiles. He ventured upon numerous
+      glowing parentheses about Julia, and they at least did not say that they
+      did not want to know her. They heard with politeness, too, what he could
+      contrive to drag in about his artist-nephew, and said it must be very
+      pleasant for him to have such nice company. At least Miss Madden said
+      this: her companion, as he thought it over afterward, seemed hardly to
+      have said anything at all. She answered the few remarks which he found it
+      possible to direct to her, but the responses took no hold upon his memory.
+      He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy, or both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension, were
+      verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed itself&mdash;as
+      splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing its glaciers above the mounting
+      sunrise&mdash;in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should all be charmed if you would come up and dine with us tonight,&rdquo;
+       he said, under the abrupt impulsion of this idea. &ldquo;It's been such an age
+      since we wanderers have had the privilege of company at our table!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The felicity of these phrases from his lips attracted his admiring
+      attention, even while he waited in suspense for an answer to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladies exchanged a look. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Miss Madden, after the slightest
+      of pauses, &ldquo;we shall be very happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly thereafter Thorpe took his leave, and went downstairs and out. He
+      wandered about till luncheon time, observing the mountains across the lake
+      from various standpoints, and, as it were, with new eyes. He was
+      interested in them in a curious new fashion; they seemed to say things to
+      him. His lip curled once at the conceit that he was one of the Alps
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IT did not happen until three days later that Thorpe's opportunity to
+      speak alone with Lady Cressage came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have become fused in a
+      remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young
+      people, and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day upon the
+      striking prescience he had shown in bringing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both the ladies unaffectedly liked Julia; so much so that they seemed
+      unwilling to make any plans which did not include her. Then it was only a
+      matter of course that where she went her brother should go&mdash;and a
+      further logical step quite naturally brought in their willing uncle. If he
+      had planned everything, and now was ordering everything, it could not have
+      gone more to his liking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certain side speculations lent a savour to the satisfaction with which he
+      viewed this state of affairs. He found many little signs to confirm the
+      suspicion that the two ladies had been the readier to make much of Julia
+      because they were not overkeen about each other's society. The bright,
+      sweet-natured girl had come as a welcome diversion to a couple who in
+      seclusion did battle with tendencies to yawn. He was not quite convinced,
+      for that matter, that the American lady always went to that trouble. She
+      seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person, who would not be
+      restrained by small ordinary considerations from doing the things she
+      wanted to do. Her relations with her companion afforded him food for much
+      thought. Without any overt demonstrations, she produced the effect of
+      ordering Lady Cressage about. This, so far as it went, tended to prejudice
+      him against her. On the other hand, however, she was so good to Julia, in
+      a peculiarly frank and buoyant way which fascinated the girl, that he
+      could not but like her. And she was very good to Alfred too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was, indeed, he perceived, a great deal of individuality about the
+      friendship which had sprung up between Miss Madden and his nephew. She was
+      years his senior&mdash;he settled it with himself that the American could
+      not be less than seven-and-twenty,&mdash;yet Alfred stole covert glances
+      of admiration at her, and seemed to think of nothing but opportunities for
+      being in her company as if&mdash;as if&mdash;Thorpe hardly liked to
+      complete the comparison in his own thoughts. Alfred, of course, said it
+      was all on account of her wonderful hair; he rather went out of his way to
+      dilate upon the enthusiasm her &ldquo;colour scheme&rdquo;&mdash;whatever that might
+      mean&mdash;excited in him as an artist. The uncle had moments of profound
+      skepticism about this&mdash;moments when he uneasily wondered whether it
+      was not going to be his duty to speak to the young man. For the most part,
+      however, he extracted reassurance from Miss Madden's demeanour toward the
+      lad. She knew, it seemed, a vast deal about pictures; at least she was
+      able to talk a vast deal about them, and she did it in such a calmly
+      dogmatic fashion, laying down the law always, that she put Alfred in the
+      position of listening as a pupil might listen to a master. The humility
+      with which his nephew accepted this position annoyed Thorpe upon occasion,
+      but he reasoned that it was a fault on the right side. Very likely it
+      would help to keep the fact of the lady's seniority more clearly before
+      the youngster's mind, and that would be so much gained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And these apprehensions, after all, were scarcely to be counted in the
+      balance against the sense of achieved happiness with which these halcyon
+      days kept Thorpe filled. The initiatory dinner had gone off perfectly. He
+      could have wished, indeed, that Julia had a smarter frock, and more rings,
+      when he saw the imposing costumes and jewelled throats and hands of his
+      guests&mdash;but she was a young girl, by comparison, he reflected, and
+      there could be no doubt that they found her charming. As for Alfred, he
+      was notably fine-looking in his evening-clothes&mdash;infinitely more like
+      the son of a nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying to himself, than
+      that big dullard, the Honourable Balder. It filled him with a new pleasure
+      to remember that Alfred had visiting cards presenting his name as
+      D'Aubigny, which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate
+      Dabney really stood for. The lad and his sister had united upon this
+      excellent change long ago at Cheltenham, and oddly enough they had
+      confessed it to their uncle, at the beginning of the trip, with a show of
+      trepidation, as if they feared his anger. With radiant gayety he had
+      relieved their minds by showing them his card, with &ldquo;Mr. Stormont Thorpe&rdquo;
+       alone upon it. At the dinner table, in the proudest moment of his life, he
+      had made himself prouder still by thinking how distinguished an appearance
+      his and Alfred's cards would make together in the apartment below next
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But next day, the relations between the two parties had already become too
+      informal for cards. Julia went down to see them; they came up to see
+      Julia. Then they all went for a long walk, with luncheon at Vevey, and
+      before evening Alfred was talking confidently of painting Miss Madden.
+      Next day they went by train to St. Maurice, and, returning after dark,
+      dined without ceremony together. This third day&mdash;the weather still
+      remaining bright&mdash;they had ascended by the funicular road to Glion,
+      and walked on among the swarming luegers, up to Caux. Here, after
+      luncheon, they had wandered about for a time, regarding the panorama of
+      lake and mountains. Now, as the homeward descent began, chance led the two
+      young people and Miss Madden on ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe found himself walking beside Lady Cressage. He had upon his arm her
+      outer wrap, which she said she would put on presently. To look at the view
+      he must glance past her face: the profile, under the graceful fur cap, was
+      so enriched by glowing colour that it was, to his thought, as if she were
+      blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How little I thought, a few months ago,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that we should be
+      mountaineering together!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no one knows a day ahead,&rdquo; she responded, vaguely. &ldquo;I had probably
+      less notion of coming to Switzerland then than you had.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you don't come regularly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never seen either Germany or Switzerland before. I have scarcely
+      been out of England before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why now&rdquo;&mdash;he paused, to think briefly upon his words&mdash;&ldquo;I took
+      it for granted you were showing Miss Madden around.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It 's quite the other way about,&rdquo; she answered, with a cold little laugh.
+      &ldquo;It is she who is showing me around. It is her tour. I am the chaperone.&rdquo;
+       Thorpe dwelt upon the word in his mind. He understood what it meant only
+      in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness of the tone in
+      which it had been uttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;it didn't seem as if it were altogether&mdash;what I might call&mdash;YOUR
+      tour,&rdquo; he ventured. They had seen much of each other these past few days,
+      but it was still hard for him to make sure whether their freedom of
+      intercourse had been enlarged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence, she commented
+      upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a moment he said nothing. He went on
+      then with a renewed consciousness of risk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't be annoyed with me,&rdquo; he urged. &ldquo;I've been travelling with
+      that dear little niece of mine and her brother, so long, that I've got
+      into a habit of watching to notice if the faces I see round me are happy.
+      And when they're not, then I have a kind of fatherly notion of
+      interfering, and seeing what's wrong.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon doubtful inspiration&mdash;&ldquo;By
+      the way, speaking of fathers, I didn't know at Hadlow that you were the
+      daughter of one of my Directors&rdquo;&mdash;this smile froze upon the instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel, don't you think?&rdquo; she
+      remarked, &ldquo;than it is from here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. &ldquo;I have taken a great
+      interest in General Kervick,&rdquo; he said, almost defiantly. &ldquo;I am seeing to
+      it that he has a comfortable income&mdash;an income suitable to a
+      gentleman of his position&mdash;for the rest of his life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will be very glad of it,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I hoped that you would be glad of it too,&rdquo; he told her, bluntly. A
+      curious sense of reliance upon his superiority in years had come to him.
+      If he could make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed likely
+      that she would defer to it. &ldquo;I'm talking to you as I would to my niece,
+      you know,&rdquo; he added, plausibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face, as if the point
+      of view took her by surprise. &ldquo;I don't understand,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You are
+      providing an income for my father, because you wish to speak to me like an
+      uncle. Is that it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed, somewhat disconsolately. &ldquo;No&mdash;that isn't it,&rdquo; he said,
+      and laughed again. &ldquo;I couldn't tell, you know, that you wouldn't want to
+      talk about your father.&rdquo; &ldquo;Why, there's no reason in the world for not
+      talking of him,&rdquo; she made haste to declare. &ldquo;And if he's got something
+      good in the City, I'm sure I'm as glad as anyone. He is the sort that
+      ought always to have a good deal of money. I mean, it will bring out his
+      more amiable qualities. He does not shine much in adversity&mdash;any more
+      than I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe felt keenly that there were fine things to be said here&mdash;but
+      he had confidence in nothing that came to his tongue. &ldquo;I've been a poor
+      man all my life&mdash;till now,&rdquo; was his eventual remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don't tell me that you have been very happy in your poverty,&rdquo; she
+      adjured him, with the dim flicker of a returning smile. &ldquo;Very likely there
+      are people who are so constituted, but they are not my kind. I don't want
+      to hear them tell about it. To me poverty is the horror&mdash;the
+      unmentionable horror!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There never was a day that I didn't feel THAT!&rdquo; Thorpe put fervour into
+      his voice. &ldquo;I was never reconciled to it for a minute. I never ceased
+      swearing to myself that I'd pull myself out of it. And that's what makes
+      me sort of soft-hearted now toward those&mdash;toward those who haven't
+      pulled themselves out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your niece says you are soft-hearted beyond example,&rdquo; remarked Lady
+      Cressage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who could help being, to such a sweet little girl as she is?&rdquo; demanded
+      the uncle, fondly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is very nice,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;If one may say such a thing, I fancy
+      these three months with her have had an appreciable effect upon you. I'm
+      sure I note a difference.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's just what I've been saying to myself!&rdquo; he told her. He was visibly
+      delighted with this corroboration. &ldquo;I've been alone practically all my
+      life. I had no friends to speak of&mdash;I had no fit company&mdash;I
+      hadn't anything but the determination to climb out of the hole. Well, I've
+      done that&mdash;and I've got among the kind of people that I naturally
+      like. But then there came the question of whether they would like me. I
+      tell you frankly, that was what was worrying the heart out of me when I
+      first met you. I like to be confessing it to you now&mdash;but you
+      frightened me within an inch of my life. Well now, you see, I'm not scared
+      of you at all. And of course it's because Julia's been putting me through
+      a course of sprouts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The figure was lost upon Lady Cressage, but the spirit of the remarks
+      seemed not unpleasant to her. &ldquo;I'm sure you're full of kindness,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;You must forget that I snapped at you&mdash;about papa.&rdquo; &ldquo;All I
+      remember about that is,&rdquo; he began, his eye lighting up with the thought
+      that this time the opportunity should not pass unimproved, &ldquo;that you said
+      he didn't shine much in adversity&mdash;-any more than you did. Now on
+      that last point I disagree with you, straight. There wouldn't be any place
+      in which you wouldn't shine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that the way one talks to one's niece?&rdquo; she asked him, almost
+      listlessly. &ldquo;Such flattery must surely be bad for the young.&rdquo; Her words
+      were sprightly enough, but her face had clouded over. She had no heart for
+      the banter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah&rdquo;&mdash;he half-groaned. &ldquo;I only wish I knew what was the right way to
+      talk to you. The real thing is that I see you're unhappy&mdash;and that
+      gets on my nerve&mdash;and I should like to ask you if there wasn't
+      something I could do&mdash;and ask it in such a way that you'd have to
+      admit there was&mdash;and I don't know enough to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a wan smile for thanks. &ldquo;But of course there is nothing,&rdquo; she
+      replied, gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there must be!&rdquo; he insisted. He had no longer any clear notions as to
+      where his tongue might not lead him. &ldquo;There must be! You said I might talk
+      to you as I would to Julia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm going to, anyway,&rdquo; he went on stoutly, ignoring the note of
+      definite dissent in her interruption. &ldquo;You ARE unhappy! You spoke about
+      being a chaperone. Well now, to speak plainly, if it isn't entirely
+      pleasant for you with Miss Madden&mdash;why wouldn't you be a chaperone
+      for Julia? I must be going to London very soon&mdash;but she can stay
+      here, or go to Egypt, or wherever she likes&mdash;and of course you would
+      do everything, and have everything&mdash;whatever you liked, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The conversation is getting upon rather impossible grounds, I'm afraid,&rdquo;
+       she said, and then bit her lips together. Halting, she frowned a little in
+      the effort of considering her further words, but there was nothing severe
+      in the glance which she lifted to him as she began to speak. &ldquo;Let us walk
+      on. I must tell you that you misconceive the situation entirely. Nobody
+      could possibly be kinder or more considerate than Miss Madden. Of course
+      she is American&mdash;or rather Irish-American, and I'm English, and our
+      notions and ways are not always alike. But that has nothing to do with it.
+      And it is not so much that she has many thousands a year, and I only a few
+      hundreds. That in itself would signify nothing&mdash;and if I must take
+      help from somebody I would rather take it from Celia Madden than anybody
+      else I know&mdash;but this is the point, Mr. Thorpe. I do not eat the
+      bread of dependence gracefully. I pull wry faces over it, and I don't try
+      very much to disguise them. That is my fault. Yes&mdash;oh yes, I know it
+      is a fault&mdash;but I am as I am. And if Miss Madden doesn't mind&mdash;why&rdquo;&mdash;she
+      concluded with a mirthless, uncertain laugh&mdash;&ldquo;why on earth should
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, why should I?&rdquo; he echoed, reflectively. &ldquo;I should like desperately to
+      tell you why. Sometime I will tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on in silence for a brief space. Then she put out her hand for
+      her wrap, and as she paused, he spread it over her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am amazed to think what we have been saying to each other,&rdquo; she said,
+      buttoning the fur as they moved on again. &ldquo;I am vexed with myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And more still with me,&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No-o&mdash;but I ought to be. You've made me talk the most shocking
+      rubbish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There we disagree again, you know. Everything you've said's been perfect.
+      What you're thinking of now is that I'm not an old enough friend to have
+      been allowed to hear it. But if I'm not as old a friend as some, I wish I
+      could make you feel that I'm as solid a friend as any&mdash;as solid and
+      as staunch and as true. I wish I could hear you say you believed that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you talk of 'friends,'&rdquo; she said, in a tone not at all responsive&mdash;&ldquo;what
+      is meant by 'friends'? We've chanced to meet twice&mdash;and once we
+      barely exchanged civilities, and this time we've been hotel acquaintances&mdash;hardly
+      more, is it?&mdash;and you and your young people have been very polite to
+      me&mdash;and I in a silly moment have talked to you more about my affairs
+      than I should&mdash;I suppose it was because you mentioned my father. But
+      'friends' is rather a big word for that, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe pouted for a dubious moment. &ldquo;I can think of a bigger word still,&rdquo;
+       he said, daringly. &ldquo;It's been on the tip of my tongue more than once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She quickened her pace. The air had grown perceptibly colder. The distant
+      mountains, visible ever and again through the bare branches, were of a
+      dark and cheerless blue, and sharply defined against the sky. It was not
+      yet the sunset hour, and there were no mists, but the light of day seemed
+      to be going out of the heavens. He hurried on beside her in depressed
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their companions were hidden from view in a convolution of the winding
+      road, but they were so near that their voices could be heard as they
+      talked. Frequently the sound of laughter came backward from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're jolly enough down there,&rdquo; he commented at last, moodily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a good reason for our joining them, isn't it?&rdquo; Her tone was at
+      once casual and pointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't want to join them!&rdquo; he protested. &ldquo;Why don't you stay with me&mdash;and
+      talk?&rdquo; &ldquo;But you bully me so,&rdquo; she offered in explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The phrase caught his attention. Could it be that it expressed her real
+      feeling? She had said, he recalled, that he had made her talk. Her
+      complaint was like an admission that he could overpower her will. If that
+      were true&mdash;then he had resources of masterfulness still in reserve
+      sufficient to win any victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;not bully you,&rdquo; he said slowly, as if objecting to the word
+      rather than the idea. &ldquo;That wouldn't be possible to me. But you don't know
+      me well enough to understand me. I am the kind of man who gets the things
+      he wants. Let me tell you something: When I was at Hadlow, I had never
+      shot a pheasant in my life. I used to do tolerably well with a rifle, but
+      I hardly knew anything about a shot-gun, and I don't suppose I'd ever
+      killed more than two or three birds on the wing&mdash;and that was ages
+      ago. But I took the notion that I would shoot better than anybody else
+      there. I made up my mind to it&mdash;and I simply did it, that's all. I
+      don't know if you remember&mdash;but I killed a good deal more than both
+      the others put together. I give you that as an example. I wanted you to
+      think that I was a crack shot&mdash;and so I made myself be a crack shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is very interesting,&rdquo; she murmured. They did not seem to be walking
+      quite so fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't think I want to brag about myself,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I don't fancy
+      myself&mdash;in that way. I'm not specially proud of doing things&mdash;it's
+      the things themselves that I care for. If some men had made a great
+      fortune, they would be conceited about it. Well, I'm not. What I'm keen
+      about is the way to use that fortune so that I will get the most out of it&mdash;the
+      most happiness, I mean. The thing to do is to make up your mind carefully
+      what it is that you want, and to put all your power and resolution into
+      getting it&mdash;and the rest is easy enough. I don't think there's
+      anything beyond a strong man's reach, if he only believes enough in
+      himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But aren't you confusing two things?&rdquo; she queried. The subject apparently
+      interested her. &ldquo;To win one's objects by sheer personal force is one
+      thing. To merely secure them because one's purse is longer than other
+      people's&mdash;that's quite another matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled grimly at her. &ldquo;Well, I'll combine the two,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I suppose you will be altogether irresistible,&rdquo; she said, lightly.
+      &ldquo;There will be no pheasants left for other people at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't mind being chaffed,&rdquo; he told her, with gravity. &ldquo;So long as
+      you're good-natured, you can make game of me all you like. But I'm in
+      earnest, all the same. I'm not going to play the fool with my money and my
+      power. I have great projects. Sometime I'll tell you about them. They will
+      all be put through&mdash;every one of them. And you wouldn't object to
+      talking them over with me&mdash;would you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My opinion on 'projects' is of no earthly value&mdash;to myself or anyone
+      else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But still you'd give me your advice if I asked it?&rdquo; he persisted.
+      &ldquo;Especially if it was a project in which you were concerned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment's constrained silence she said to him, &ldquo;You must have no
+      projects, Mr. Thorpe, in which I am concerned. This talk is all very wide
+      of the mark. You are not entitled to speak as if I were mixed up with your
+      affairs. There is nothing whatever to warrant it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there, and keep
+      you there?&rdquo; he asked her, with gleeful boldness. &ldquo;And just ask yourself
+      whether you do really want to help it. Why should you? You've seen enough
+      of me to know that I can be a good friend. And I'm the kind of friend who
+      amounts to something&mdash;who can and will do things for those he likes.
+      What obligation are you under to turn away that kind of a friend, when he
+      offers himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are not in a position to nominate the questions that I am to put
+      to myself,&rdquo; she said. The effort to import decision into her tone and
+      manner was apparent. &ldquo;That is what I desire you to understand. We must not
+      talk any more about me. I am not the topic of conversation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But first let me finish what I wanted to say,&rdquo; he insisted. &ldquo;My talk
+      won't break any bones. You'd be wrong not to listen to it&mdash;because
+      it's meant to help you&mdash;to be of use to you. This is the thing, Lady
+      Cressage: You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position. Like my
+      friend Plowden&rdquo;&mdash;he watched her face narrowly but in vain, in the
+      dull light, for any change at mention of the name&mdash;&ldquo;like my friend
+      Plowden you have a position and title to keep up, and next to nothing to
+      keep it up on. But he can go down into the City and make money&mdash;or
+      try to. He can accept Directorships and tips about the market and so on,
+      from men who are disposed to be good to him, and who see how he can be of
+      use to them&mdash;and in that way he can do something for himself. But
+      there is the difference: you can't do these things, or you think you
+      can't, which is the same thing. You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by
+      notice-boards, telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that
+      way; that you mustn't say this thing or do the other. Now your friend down
+      ahead there&mdash;Miss Madden&mdash;she doesn't take much stock in
+      notice-boards. In fact, she feeds the gulls, simply because she's
+      forbidden to do it. But you&mdash;you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're
+      annoyed with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't I read
+      you right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic. There was no touch
+      of expostulation in the voice with which she answered him. &ldquo;I see what you
+      think you mean,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think!&rdquo; he responded, with self-confident emphasis. &ldquo;I'm not 'thinking.'
+      I'm reading an open book. As I say, you're not contented&mdash;you're not
+      happy; you don't try to pretend that you are. But all the same, though you
+      hate it, you accept it. You think that you really must obey your
+      notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought to do is to take a different
+      view. Why should you put up all this barbed wire between yourself and your
+      friends? It doesn't do anybody else any good&mdash;and it does you harm.
+      Why, for example, should Plowden be free to take things from me, and you
+      not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye. &ldquo;Unfortunately I
+      was not asked to join your Board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her meditatively as he
+      turned these words over in his mind. &ldquo;What I'm doing for Plowden,&rdquo; he said
+      with slow vagueness meanwhile, &ldquo;it isn't so much because he's on the
+      Board. He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me at a time
+      when that meant everything in the world to me&mdash;and I don't forget
+      things of that sort. Besides, I like him&mdash;and it pleases me to let
+      him in for a share of my good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying
+      myself. Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed to let
+      you in also for a share of that good fortune? You think there's a
+      difference, but I tell you it's imaginary&mdash;pure moonshine. Why, the
+      very people whose opinion you're afraid of&mdash;what did they do
+      themselves when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of
+      the earth had only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the
+      know' about them&mdash;and they could dine with as many duchesses as they
+      liked. I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal&mdash;I wouldn't
+      have them in my house&mdash;but it seems there wasn't any other house they
+      couldn't go to in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, there were many houses,&rdquo; she interposed. &ldquo;It wasn't a nice
+      exhibition that society made of itself&mdash;one admits that,&mdash;but it
+      was only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets,
+      you know. And&mdash;I don't think I see your application, in any event.
+      The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after
+      those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled in
+      those shares. That was all, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little shake
+      of the head. &ldquo;'On a business basis,'&rdquo; he repeated, as if talking to
+      himself. &ldquo;They like to have things 'on a business basis.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well, in a
+      reluctant, tentative way. &ldquo;I don't understand you,&rdquo; she remarked, blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me put it in this way,&rdquo; he began, knitting his brows, and marshalling
+      the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy. &ldquo;This is the
+      question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board. You
+      explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden, and couldn't do
+      them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke&mdash;but it had its meaning&mdash;at
+      least to me. Now I want to ask you&mdash;if I decide to form another
+      Company, a very small and particular Company&mdash;if I should decide to
+      form it, I say&mdash;could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
+      Of course I could ask&mdash;but what I mean is&mdash;well, I guess you
+      know what I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle
+      for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of
+      confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of
+      physical ascendancy had melted away&mdash;disappeared. He looked at Lady
+      Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and
+      nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain
+      beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the
+      silence which ensued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say,&rdquo; she
+      observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her
+      feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a
+      certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his
+      self-command. &ldquo;Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you,&rdquo; she went on.
+      &ldquo;We&mdash;we have been lagging behind unconscionably. If you wish to
+      please me, let us hurry forward now. And please!&mdash;no more talk at
+      all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But just a word&mdash;you're not angry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head very slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you do know that I'm your friend&mdash;your solid, twenty-four-carat
+      friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper&mdash;&ldquo;Yes&mdash;be
+      my friend&mdash;if it amuses you,&rdquo;&mdash;and led the way with precipitate
+      steps down the winding road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train
+      for Geneva&mdash;homeward bound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent
+      business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced
+      to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes the
+      formless impression that there were other things beside business. Their
+      uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably venturesome
+      enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his character
+      that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset him. And upset
+      he undeniably was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following
+      the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept
+      very badly, and that they must &ldquo;count him out&rdquo; of their plans for the day.
+      He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay at Territet.
+      He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and preoccupied. He ate
+      little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits a good deal, which they
+      had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce him to go out either day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity
+      synchronized with an apparent change in the attitude of their new friends
+      on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent than definable.
+      The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and affable as ever,
+      but the sense of comradeship had somehow vanished. Insensibly, the two
+      parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common. There were no
+      more trips together&mdash;no more fortuitous luncheons or formal dinners
+      as a group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this morning
+      of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the
+      snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They made
+      sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite, and that
+      the curtains were drawn aside&mdash;but there was no other token of
+      occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the
+      previous evening, of course&mdash;it lingered in their minds as a rather
+      perfunctory ceremony&mdash;but this had not prevented their hoping for
+      another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand from
+      the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously at each
+      other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward their uncle&mdash;and
+      perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and was staring with a
+      kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fortunately, it is a clear day,&rdquo; said Julia. &ldquo;We shall see Mont Blanc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears.
+      Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people
+      had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee
+      thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's as they said,&rdquo; she observed. &ldquo;You are not allowed to drive in the
+      mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint for
+      a model Republic&mdash;doesn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay they're quite right,&rdquo; Lady Cressage replied, listlessly. &ldquo;It's
+      in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains would
+      simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes&mdash;and all that.
+      I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you're on the side of the Government,&rdquo; said the other, with a twinkle
+      in her brown eyes. &ldquo;Truly now&mdash;you hated the whole idea of driving
+      over the Simplon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you like this Russian plan any better?&rdquo; demanded Celia. &ldquo;I wish
+      for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me&mdash;and let me
+      know to the uttermost just what you think.&rdquo; &ldquo;'For once'?&rdquo; queried the
+      other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of the
+      quotation to be marked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,&rdquo; Miss Madden declared. She
+      put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. &ldquo;It is not you alone&mdash;Edith.
+      Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women. You can't
+      help it. It's in your blood to keep things back. I've met numbers of
+      English ladies who, I'm ready to believe, would be incapable of telling an
+      untruth. But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she would
+      tell me the whole truth. Don't you see this case in point,&rdquo; she pursued,
+      with a little laugh, &ldquo;I could not drag it out of you that you disliked the
+      Simplon idea, so long as there was a chance of our going. Immediately we
+      find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you wanted to go,&rdquo; objected Lady Cressage, quietly. &ldquo;That was the
+      important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with the
+      matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia's face clouded momentarily. &ldquo;Those are not the kind of things I like
+      to hear you say,&rdquo; she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. &ldquo;They put
+      everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you
+      should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said
+      it a thousand times&mdash;and have I ever done anything to disprove it?
+      But I never can find out what you do want&mdash;what really will please
+      you! You never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank
+      about the things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of
+      my eye that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking
+      or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. &ldquo;That
+      is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago,&rdquo; said Lady
+      Cressage, passively&mdash;&ldquo;that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But
+      originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for
+      two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak. I
+      thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of
+      view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the
+      responsibility of defending it is not mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delightful!&rdquo; cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again.
+      &ldquo;You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with. The
+      mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford&mdash;or
+      passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up
+      arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing&mdash;if
+      I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your
+      feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in
+      silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and have
+      to watch you for weeks to make out what it was&mdash;and it would all be
+      too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You don't
+      tell me things!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve.
+      &ldquo;It is a constitutional defect&mdash;even national, according to you. How
+      shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to
+      tell you?&mdash;I forget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and then
+      to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well worth while&mdash;and
+      next Moscow&mdash;and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see the ice
+      break up. It is only in winter that you see the characteristic Russia:
+      that one has always heard. With the furs and the sledges, and the three
+      horses galloping over the snow&mdash;it seems to me it must be the best
+      thing in Europe&mdash;if you can call Russia Europe. That's the way it
+      presents itself to me&mdash;but then I was brought up in a half-Arctic
+      climate, and I love that sort of thing&mdash;in its proper season. It is
+      different with you. In England you don't know what a real winter is. And
+      so I have to make quite sure that you think you would like the Russian
+      experiment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other laughed gently. &ldquo;But if I don't know what a real winter is, how
+      can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am
+      perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes&mdash;truly&mdash;I should
+      like very much to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden sighed briefly. &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; she said, but with a notable
+      absence of conviction in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another note,
+      the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips over the
+      contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise,
+      but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's from our young friend,&rdquo; she explained, genially&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      painter-boy&mdash;Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I
+      made&mdash;that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't
+      think I promised anything of the kind&mdash;but I suppose that is a
+      detail. It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time&mdash;they
+      were to go very early, weren't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. &ldquo;It was 8:40, I think&mdash;fully half
+      an hour ago,&rdquo; she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Curious conglomeration&rdquo;&mdash;mused the other. &ldquo;The boy and girl are so
+      civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling
+      him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away
+      and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective&mdash;but they
+      will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I
+      suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he
+      must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One
+      generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put
+      on the frills. My father, for example, never altered in the slightest
+      degree the habits he formed when he was a poor workman. To the day of his
+      death, blessed old man, he remained what he had always been&mdash;simple,
+      pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty&mdash;a model peasant.
+      Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred
+      to walk in. But such nobility of mind and temper with it all! He never
+      dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path. From my
+      earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever putting a limitation upon me
+      that wasn't entirely sensible and generous. I must have been an extremely
+      trying daughter, but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he
+      thought so.&mdash;But I never stop when I begin talking of my father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him,&rdquo; Lady Cressage put
+      in. &ldquo;One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that had
+      been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her
+      earlier subject. &ldquo;Of course there is a certain difference,&rdquo; she went on,
+      carelessly,&mdash;&ldquo;this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase
+      goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me,&rdquo; said the other,
+      with interest. &ldquo;And his people were booksellers&mdash;somewhere in London&mdash;so
+      that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly has
+      more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the nouveaux
+      riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very well indeed&mdash;in
+      a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow you about his niece
+      and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that they have had a great
+      effect upon him. He sees it himself&mdash;and he's very proud of it. He
+      told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a nice effect?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don't know,&rdquo; Celia replied, idly. &ldquo;It seemed to me that he was the
+      kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished and
+      taught drawing-room tricks&mdash;I feel that merely in the interest of the
+      fitness of things. Have you looked into his eyes&mdash;I mean when they've
+      got that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred thousand dead men
+      in them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know the look you mean,&rdquo; said Lady Cressage, in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody,&rdquo; pursued Miss Madden, with
+      ostensible indifference, but fixing a glance of aroused attention upon her
+      companion's face, &ldquo;or that he has any criminal intentions whatever. He
+      behaves very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and nephew idolize
+      him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. It may be that I'm
+      altogether wrong about him&mdash;only I know I had the instinct of alarm
+      when I caught that sort of dull glaze in his eye. I met an African
+      explorer a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories were
+      told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. Perhaps it was this that put
+      it into my head&mdash;but I have a feeling that this Thorpe is an
+      exceptional sort of man, who would have the capacity in him for terrible
+      things, if the necessity arose for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; the other repeated. She toyed with the bread-crumbs
+      about her plate, and reflectively watched their manipulation into squares
+      and triangles as she went on. &ldquo;But may that not be merely the visible sign
+      of an exceptionally strong and masterful character? And isn't it, after
+      all, the result of circumstances whether such a character makes, as you
+      put it, a hundred thousand dead men, or enriches a hundred thousand lives
+      instead? We agree, let us say, that this Mr. Thorpe impresses us both as a
+      powerful sort of personality. The question arises, How will he use his
+      power? On that point, we look for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his
+      eye, and you draw hostile conclusions from it. I reply that it may mean no
+      more than that he is sleepy. But, on the other hand, I bring proofs that
+      are actively in his favour. He is, as you say, idolized by the only two
+      members of his family that we have seen&mdash;persons, moreover, who have
+      been brought up in ways different to his own, and who would not start,
+      therefore, with prejudices in his favour. Beyond that, I know of two cases
+      in which he has behaved, or rather undertaken to behave, with really
+      lavish generosity&mdash;and in neither case was there any claim upon him
+      of a substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact, quite too much disposed
+      to share his fortune with Tom, Dick, and Harry&mdash;anybody who excites
+      his sympathy or gets into his affections.&rdquo; Having said this much, Lady
+      Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. &ldquo;So now,&rdquo; she added, with a
+      flushed smile, &ldquo;since you love arguments so much, how do you answer that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia smiled back. &ldquo;Oh, I don't answer it at all,&rdquo; she said, and her voice
+      carried a kind of quizzical implication. &ldquo;Your proofs overwhelm me. I know
+      nothing of him&mdash;and you know so much!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel earnestness and
+      directness of gaze. &ldquo;I had a long, long talk with him&mdash;the afternoon
+      we came down from Glion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. She did not
+      return to the table, but after a brief pause came and took an easy-chair
+      beside her friend, who turned to face her. &ldquo;My dear Edith,&rdquo; she said, with
+      gravity, &ldquo;I think you want to tell me about that talk&mdash;and so I beg
+      you to do so. But if I'm mistaken&mdash;why then I beg you to do nothing
+      of the kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and
+      then clasped them upon her knee. &ldquo;I seem not to know what I want! What is
+      the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now&mdash;now!&rdquo; Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference,
+      apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage
+      deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is really nothing to tell,&rdquo;&mdash;she faltered, hesitatingly&mdash;&ldquo;that
+      is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it&mdash;the talk left my
+      mind in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that
+      was said&mdash;it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while
+      something else was being talked about&mdash;but the whole experience made
+      a most tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in
+      my own mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me,
+      Celia. No man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing
+      could be more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with
+      people of&mdash;well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,&mdash;but
+      this man, who is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled
+      on without any special aim that one could see&mdash;he reduced my brain to
+      a sort of porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him&mdash;babbling
+      rubbish which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be
+      accounted for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nerves,&rdquo; said Miss Madden, judicially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that is meaningless,&rdquo; the other declared. &ldquo;Anybody can say 'nerves.'
+      Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But yours is a special case of nerves,&rdquo; Celia pursued, with gentle
+      imperturbability. &ldquo;I think I can make my meaning clear to you&mdash;though
+      the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred dog
+      in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will
+      always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity&mdash;call
+      it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in your
+      case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say it broke
+      your nerve&mdash;but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old wound
+      aches when there's a storm in the air&mdash;so your old hurt distracts and
+      upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather clumsy
+      explanation, but I think it does explain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps&mdash;I don't know,&rdquo; Edith replied, in a tone of melancholy
+      reverie. &ldquo;It makes a very poor creature out of me, whatever it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather lose patience, Edith,&rdquo; her companion admonished her, gravely.
+      &ldquo;Nobody has a right to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself to
+      be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not a coward,&rdquo; the other protested. &ldquo;I could be as brave as
+      anybody&mdash;as brave as you are&mdash;if a chance were given me. But of
+      what use is bravery against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it.
+      I only wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down, or break
+      through it.&mdash;Oh yes, I know what you say! You say there is no wall&mdash;that
+      it is all an illusion of mine. But unfortunately I'm unable to take that
+      view. I've battered myself against it too long&mdash;too sorely, Celia!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. &ldquo;Oh, we women all have our walls&mdash;our
+      limitations&mdash;if it comes to that,&rdquo; she said, with a kind of
+      compassionate impatience in her tone. &ldquo;We are all ridiculous together&mdash;from
+      the point of view of human liberty. The free woman is a fraud&mdash;a
+      myth. She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality,
+      Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. I used to have
+      the most wonderful visions of what independence would mean. I thought that
+      when I was absolutely my own master, with my money and my courage and my
+      free mind, I would do things to astonish all mankind. But really the most
+      I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a German waiter. Even that
+      palls on one after a time. And if you were independent, Edith&mdash;if you
+      had any amount of money&mdash;what difference do you think it would make
+      to you? What could you do that you don't do, or couldn't do, now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, now&rdquo;&mdash;said the other, looking up with a thin smile&mdash;&ldquo;now is
+      an interval&mdash;an oasis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face, habitually serene in its
+      expression, lost something in composure as she regarded her companion. &ldquo;I
+      don't know why you should say that,&rdquo; she observed, gently enough, but with
+      an effect of reproof in her tone. &ldquo;I have never put limits to the
+      connection, in my own mind&mdash;and it hadn't occurred to me that you
+      were doing so in yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not,&rdquo; interposed Lady Cressage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you talk about an
+      'interval'? What was the other word?&mdash;'oasis'&mdash;as if this were a
+      brief halt for refreshments and a breathing-spell, and that presently you
+      must wander forth into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine.
+      We agreed that we would live together&mdash;'pool our issues,' as they say
+      in America. I wanted a companion; so did you. I have never for an instant
+      regretted the arrangement. Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I
+      have regretted. You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen,
+      and you were talented, and you seemed to like me&mdash;and I promised
+      myself that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit to your other gifts&mdash;and
+      in that I have failed wofully. You're not happy. I see that only too
+      clearly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know&mdash;I'm a weariness and a bore to you,&rdquo; broke in the other,
+      despondingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is precisely what you're not,&rdquo; Celia went on. &ldquo;We mustn't use words
+      of that sort. They don't describe anything in our life at all. But I
+      should be better pleased with myself if I could really put my finger on
+      what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided to break up our
+      establishment, I have told you that you should not go back to what you
+      regard as poverty. Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy.
+      As I say, I think you attach more importance to money than those who have
+      tested its powers would agree to&mdash;but that's neither here nor there.
+      You did not get on well on 600 pounds a year&mdash;and that is enough. You
+      shall never have less than twice that amount, whether we keep together or
+      not&mdash;and if it ought to be three times the amount, that doesn't
+      matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seem to realize, Edith&rdquo;&mdash;she spoke with increased
+      animation&mdash;&ldquo;that you are my caprice. You are the possession that I am
+      proudest of and fondest of. There is nothing else that appeals to me a
+      hundredth part as much as you do. Since I became independent, the one real
+      satisfaction I have had is in being able to do things for you&mdash;to
+      have you with me, and make you share in the best that the world can offer.
+      And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see I don't know what
+      to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I know&mdash;I behave very badly!&rdquo; Lady Cressage had risen, and with
+      visible agitation began now to pace the room. &ldquo;I deserve to be thrown into
+      the lake&mdash;I know it well enough! But Celia&mdash;truly&mdash;I'm as
+      incapable of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am possessed
+      by devils&mdash;like the people in the New Testament. Perhaps someone will
+      come along who can cast them out. I don't seem able to do it myself. I
+      can't rule myself at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences which Edith threw
+      over her shoulder as she walked appeared, upon examination, to contain a
+      suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear child,&rdquo; she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence, &ldquo;do you
+      want to marry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged a long steadfast glance
+      with her friend. Then she came slowly forward. &ldquo;Ah, that is what I don't
+      know,&rdquo; she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little in thought. Then, at
+      some passing reflection, she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she also
+      rose, and went to the mantel for another cigarette. &ldquo;Now I am going to
+      talk plainly,&rdquo; she said, with decision. &ldquo;Since the subject is mentioned,
+      less harm will be done by speaking out than by keeping still. There is a
+      debate in your mind on the matter, isn't there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more, stood at the
+      window and with bowed head looked down at the lake. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I suppose
+      it might be called that,&rdquo; she replied, in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would rather not?&rdquo; Celia, after
+      an instant's pause, went on without waiting for an answer. &ldquo;I beg that you
+      won't assume my hostility to the idea, Edith. In fact, I'm not sure I
+      don't think it would be the best thing for you to do. Marriage, a home,
+      children&mdash;these are great things to a woman. We can say that she pays
+      the price of bondage for them&mdash;but to know what that signifies, we
+      must ask what her freedom has been worth to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; interposed the other, from the window. &ldquo;What have I done with my
+      freedom that has been worth while?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much,&rdquo; murmured Celia, under her breath. She moved forward, and stood
+      beside Edith, with an arm round her waist. They looked together at the
+      lake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is Lord Plowden, is it not?&rdquo; asked the American, as the silence grew
+      constrained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over her reply. &ldquo;No,&rdquo;
+       she said at last. Upon reflection, and with a dim smile flickering in her
+      side-long glance at Celia, she added, &ldquo;He wants to marry you, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave that out of consideration,&rdquo; said Celia, composedly. &ldquo;He has never
+      said so. I think it was more his mother's idea than his, if it existed at
+      all. Of course I am not marrying him, or anybody else. But I saw at Hadlow
+      that you and he were&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;old friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He must marry money,&rdquo; the other replied. In an unexpected burst of
+      candour she went on: &ldquo;He would have asked me to marry him if I had had
+      money. There is no harm in telling you that. It was quite understood&mdash;oh,
+      two years ago. And I think I wished I had the money&mdash;then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't wish it now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After a
+      little, she spoke in a musing tone: &ldquo;He is going to have money of his own,
+      very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him
+      personally, of course, but&mdash;there is no career, no ambition, no
+      future.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Viscount has future enough behind him,&rdquo; observed Celia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't attract me,&rdquo; the other repeated, vaguely. &ldquo;He is handsome, and
+      clever, and kind and all that&mdash;but he would never appeal to any of
+      the great emotions&mdash;nor be capable of them himself He is too smooth,
+      too well-balanced, too much the gentleman. That expresses it badly&mdash;but
+      do you see what I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her, in a steady,
+      comprehending look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think I see what you mean,&rdquo; she said, with significance in her
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her companion's arm. &ldquo;But
+      I don't know myself what I mean!&rdquo; she exclaimed, despairingly, as she
+      moved away. &ldquo;I don't know!&mdash;I don't know!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not exhilarated
+      by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a' come
+      out on,&rdquo; she told them, in salutation&mdash;and for comment they all
+      glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A
+      gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the
+      discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but
+      could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving
+      across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with
+      chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy
+      stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic mutiny
+      against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers, which
+      nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go
+      home,&rdquo; she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. &ldquo;But
+      it isn't three yet&mdash;it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd
+      be more comfortable upstairs&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us,&rdquo; protested Julia. She
+      strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was
+      unmistakable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her daughter.
+      The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long, listless face
+      seem more devoid of colour than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?&rdquo; she observed, coldly.
+      &ldquo;You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes
+      upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those
+      parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old
+      magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but his
+      sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened
+      itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There has been so much to do, mamma,&rdquo; she explained, in a clear, cool
+      voice. &ldquo;We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All
+      the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me&mdash;and Alfred has
+      his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you sooner&mdash;and
+      much oftener&mdash;if we had thought you wanted us. But really, when we
+      came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible for us to
+      pretend that you were glad to see us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I was glad enough,&rdquo; Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. &ldquo;Why
+      shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you
+      expect me to shout and dance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square,&rdquo; Alfred
+      reminded her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's different,&rdquo; she declared. &ldquo;What would I be doing in Ovington
+      Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy there.
+      But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there; it would
+      be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This is my place,
+      here, and I intend to stick to it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal
+      countenance, hardened beyond their wont. &ldquo;You talk as if there had been
+      some class war declared,&rdquo; she said, with obvious annoyance. &ldquo;You know that
+      Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you as he
+      is to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Stormont!&rdquo; Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged
+      with hostile sarcasm. &ldquo;But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel,&rdquo;
+       broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. &ldquo;He has a perfect right to use the
+      one he likes best.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don't dispute his right,&rdquo; she replied, once more in her passionless
+      monotone. &ldquo;Everybody can call themselves whatever they please. It's no
+      affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's name in a way to
+      suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have your own ideas and
+      your own tastes. They are quite beyond me&mdash;but they're all right for
+      you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is that it is a great mercy
+      your uncle came along, with his pockets full of money to enable you to
+      make the most of them. If I were religious I should call that
+      providential.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that's what we DO call it,&rdquo; put in Julia, with vivacity. &ldquo;And why
+      should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of
+      it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all.
+      Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself&mdash;at least for
+      the present. But when Uncle St&mdash;when uncle says there's more than
+      enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do
+      things for you&mdash;why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should
+      refuse to allow Alfred to do things for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That you never did,&rdquo; interposed the young man, gayly. &ldquo;I'll say that for
+      you, Jule.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And never will,&rdquo; she assured him, with cheerful decision. &ldquo;But no&mdash;mamma&mdash;can't
+      you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us to do. You sent us
+      both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were
+      of no age at all&mdash;and when uncle's money came you sent us to
+      Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we behaved
+      ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason to
+      suppose that you would be&mdash;I won't say proud, but at least well
+      satisfied with us&mdash;and then it turned out that you didn't like us at
+      all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never said anything of the sort,&rdquo; the mother declared, with a touch of
+      animation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no&mdash;you never said it,&rdquo; Julia admitted, &ldquo;but what else can we
+      think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy
+      yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that&mdash;and
+      I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I did want you to go,&rdquo; Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, when I come back&mdash;when we come back, and tell you what
+      splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a
+      beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,&mdash;why, you
+      won't even come and look at the house!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't want to see it,&rdquo; the mother retorted; obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, you needn't!&rdquo; said Alfred, rising. &ldquo;Nobody will ask you
+      again.&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh yes they will,&rdquo; urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to
+      the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate
+      between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her earliest
+      childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney habit of
+      mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and
+      set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted
+      hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days of her grandfather Thorpe,
+      whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind
+      of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most
+      persistent and stormy bad temper. That old man with the scowling brows
+      bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody,
+      vehemently demanded his own will of everybody&mdash;and it was all to be
+      explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his disappearance from the scene&mdash;unlamented, to the best of
+      Julia's juvenile perceptions&mdash;there had been relatively peaceful
+      times in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always
+      a recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and
+      her father&mdash;a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with
+      a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as
+      an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of
+      unsubstantial memories&mdash;Julia and this father had stood upon one side
+      of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable
+      persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfred and his mother were Thorpes&mdash;that is to say, people who
+      necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none of the
+      excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their surface
+      temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath, however, ugly
+      currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential existence&mdash;and
+      it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that no wind of provocation
+      unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than these possibilities of
+      violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain
+      of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. A sort of passive
+      mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most
+      sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the Dabney patience. It
+      seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between
+      these jarring forces, that she had spent whole years of her life in
+      personal interventions of this sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes they will,&rdquo; she repeated, and warned her brother into the
+      background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. &ldquo;We are your
+      children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure
+      that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be absurd
+      to let anything come between you and us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could I help letting it come?&rdquo; demanded the mother, listlessly
+      argumentative. &ldquo;You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was
+      nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and
+      live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what I
+      was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into his
+      own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your education
+      and your ideas&mdash;and what more do you want? Why should you come
+      bothering me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How unjust you are, mamma!&rdquo; cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her
+      bright glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening herself,
+      looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually grave in
+      expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the fingers of
+      the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed restlessly against
+      one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse in her voice as she
+      spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you ever have children of your own,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and you slave your
+      life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your betters,
+      and they act accordingly&mdash;then you'll understand. But you don't
+      understand now&mdash;and there's no good our talking any more about it.
+      Come in whenever it's convenient&mdash;and you feel like it. I must go
+      back to my books now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter. Her
+      children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some
+      murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss
+      upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward
+      beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless,
+      ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the
+      glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with
+      increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner. At
+      last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet, and
+      striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring everything in!&rdquo; she called to the boy, and helped out his
+      apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets
+      from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from
+      without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the
+      oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you may go home now,&rdquo; she said to him, with the laconic
+      abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. &ldquo;You have a home, haven't
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made
+      about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job, he
+      could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion he
+      nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got a mother?&rdquo; she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you think yourself better than she is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious
+      perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he
+      grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the fell
+      acuteness of the Dials. &ldquo;I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't,&rdquo; he answered, in
+      swift, rasping accents. &ldquo;She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a fair
+      curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave&mdash;&rdquo; &ldquo;Go home!&rdquo; she bade him,
+      peremptorily&mdash;and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from
+      the shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book&mdash;the
+      wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history&mdash;but
+      loitered about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk,
+      altering the position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily
+      through others. Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the
+      rain-soaked street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the
+      iron shutters down for the night. If business in hats was over for the
+      day, how much more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with
+      shutters&mdash;for what reason she could not guess. The opened pages of
+      numerous volumes were displayed close against the window, but no one had
+      ever broken a pane to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires
+      in the criminal breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock
+      and bolt the door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of
+      nightfall forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she
+      bent to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise,
+      she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway,
+      preparatory to entering the shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing
+      face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There
+      was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm
+      round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder, she
+      surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. &ldquo;Do
+      mind what you're about!&rdquo; she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shut up the place!&rdquo; he answered, with lordly geniality. &ldquo;I've walked all
+      the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion&mdash;I couldn't
+      have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk.
+      God! What things I've got to tell you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't any fire down here,&rdquo; she said, apologetically, as they edged
+      their way through the restricted alley to the rear. &ldquo;The old fireplace
+      took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I have an
+      oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find it too cold&mdash;do
+      you?&mdash;with your coat on? Or would you rather come upstairs?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind the cold,&rdquo; he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before
+      the desk. &ldquo;I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've
+      done today?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did now,
+      sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light. His
+      strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace. It had
+      acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at her with a
+      clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour, she discerned
+      a new authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the
+      countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy expression
+      which had been their complement. He was all vigour, readiness, confidence,
+      now. She deemed him almost handsome, this curious, changeable brother of
+      hers, as he beat with his fist in a measured way upon the desk-top to
+      emphasize his words, and fastened his commanding gaze upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;This is
+      the twenty-eighth of February. A fortnight ago today was the first
+      settlement. I wasn't here, but Semple was&mdash;and the working of it is
+      all in his hands. He kept as still as a mouse that first day. They had to
+      deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make
+      any fuss. The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were
+      caught in a trap. We didn't even put the price up to par. They had to come
+      to Semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable just at
+      the moment, and what would he carry them over at? That means, to let them
+      postpone delivery for another fortnight. He was as smooth as sweet-oil
+      with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without any charge at
+      all. But today it was a little different. The price was up ten shillings
+      above par. That is to say, Semple arranged with a jobber, on the quiet,
+      d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound shares. That offer
+      fixed the making-up price. So then, when they were still without shares
+      to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had to pay ten shillings'
+      difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares, plus the difference
+      between par and the prices they'd sold at. That makes within a few
+      hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's haul. D'ye see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded at him, expressively. Through previous talks she had really
+      obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than
+      she would have cared to confess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets,&rdquo; he proceeded with
+      a steady glow in his eyes. &ldquo;A fortnight hence, that is March 14th, we ring
+      the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's office and
+      settle a second time. Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber makes the
+      price for Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have to pay us
+      in differences. It is for us to say what that price shall be. We'll decide
+      on that when the time comes. We most probably will just put it up another
+      ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds. It's best in
+      the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small rises like that, in order
+      not to frighten anybody. So Semple says, at any rate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why not frighten them?&rdquo; Louisa asked. &ldquo;I thought you wanted to
+      frighten them. You were full of that idea a while ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled genially. &ldquo;I've learned some new wrinkles since then. We'll
+      frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. But at the
+      start we just go easy. If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there
+      would be a dead scare among the jobbers. They'd be afraid to sell or name
+      a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares in hand. And there
+      are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. Presently, of course, we
+      shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some actual dealings.
+      Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to the general public
+      will come into the market too. But of course you see that all such shares
+      will simply go through one operation before they come back to us. Some one
+      of the fourteen men we are squeezing will snap them up and bring them
+      straight to Semple, to get free from the fortnightly tax we are levying on
+      them. In that way we shall eventually let out say half of these fourteen
+      'shorts,' or perhaps more than half.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want to do that for?&rdquo; The sister's grey eyes had caught a
+      metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. &ldquo;Why let anybody out? Why
+      can't you go on taking their money for ever?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded complacently. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;that's what I asked too. It seemed
+      to me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them
+      there. But when you come to reflect&mdash;you can't get more out of a man
+      than there is in him. If you press him too hard, he can always go bankrupt&mdash;and
+      then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose everything that you
+      counted on making out of him. So, after a certain point, each one of the
+      fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt with on a different
+      footing. We shall have to watch them all, and study their resources, as
+      tipsters watch horses in the paddock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds
+      better than others could lose ten thousand. All that we have to know. We
+      can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose his
+      place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. Well, our
+      business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start with.
+      Then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another, till we
+      see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. Then we'll let him out.
+      See?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's cruel, isn't it?&rdquo; she commented, calmly meditative, after a little
+      pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything in the City is cruel,&rdquo; he assured her with a light tone. &ldquo;All
+      speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I estimate in a
+      rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over to us, in
+      differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand pounds&mdash;maybe
+      eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever earned a single
+      sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of it from others, and
+      these others took it from others still, and so on almost indefinitely.
+      There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been through twenty hands, or
+      fifty for that matter, since the last man who had done some honest work
+      for it parted company with it. Well&mdash;money like that belongs to those
+      who are in possession of it, only so long as they are strong enough to
+      hold on to it. When someone stronger still comes along, he takes it away
+      from them. They don't complain: they don't cry and say it's cruel. They
+      know it's the rule of the game. They accept it&mdash;and begin at once
+      looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on.
+      That's the way the City goes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness.
+      As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on the
+      desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them in
+      different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky
+      hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the kind of hand,&rdquo; he began again, thoughtfully, &ldquo;that breaks the
+      Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used to
+      watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining them.
+      They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers are never
+      still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's feelers. But
+      there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most of the things
+      that are going, because they're eternally on the move. It's their hellish
+      industry and activity that gives them such a pull, and makes most people
+      afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes them by the throat&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick uncouth fingers and
+      massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful muscular tension&mdash;&ldquo;when
+      THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel that the grip means business&mdash;my
+      God! what good are they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with a
+      noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled
+      something to her mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a man in here asking about you today,&rdquo; she remarked, in a
+      casual fashion. &ldquo;Said he was an old friend of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,&rdquo; he observed with beaming
+      indifference. &ldquo;I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and
+      dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some
+      salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I couldn't
+      come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will write to
+      remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze really
+      begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll
+      simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the social pressure
+      they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous. But
+      I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? I dine
+      with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! Julia and
+      Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square&mdash;that'll be good enough
+      for me. By the way&mdash;you haven't been out to see us yet. We're all
+      settled now. You must come at once&mdash;why not with me, now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among some
+      loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the
+      lid and search about for something inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He left a card for you,&rdquo; she said, as she groped among the desk's
+      contents. &ldquo;I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, damn him, and his card too,&rdquo; Thorpe protested easily. &ldquo;I don't want
+      to see either of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He
+      seemed to act as if you'd want to see him&mdash;but I didn't know. I
+      didn't tell him your address.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest,
+      but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. He
+      sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up
+      at his sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was his name?&rdquo; he asked with abruptness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't in the least remember,&rdquo; she made answer, holding the desk-top up,
+      but temporarily suspending her search. &ldquo;He was a little man,
+      five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair&mdash;a kind of
+      Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he
+      remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got back
+      here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know what
+      you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether you
+      were in England or not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of green-bound
+      cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head. &ldquo;You must find
+      that card!&rdquo; he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice. &ldquo;I know
+      the name well enough, but I want to see what he's written. Was it his
+      address, do you remember? The name itself was Tavender, wasn't it? Good
+      God! Why is it a woman never knows where she's put anything? Even Julia
+      spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or something of that
+      sort, every day of her life! They've got nothing in the world to do except
+      know where things are, right under their nose, and yet that's just what
+      they don't know at all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I have a good few other things to do,&rdquo; she reminded him, as she
+      fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. &ldquo;I can put my hand on any
+      one of four thousand books in stock,&rdquo; she mildly boasted over her
+      shoulder, &ldquo;and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell if
+      a single book is missing&mdash;and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever
+      knew to do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh of course, you're an exception,&rdquo; he admitted, under a sense of
+      justice. &ldquo;But I wish you'd find the card.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know where it is,&rdquo; she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the
+      desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she
+      returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. &ldquo;I'd stuck
+      it in the little mirror over the washstand,&rdquo; she explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it
+      under the gas-light. &ldquo;Where is Montague Street?&rdquo; he asked, with rough
+      directness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Bloomsbury&mdash;alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street&mdash;I
+      don't know how many others there may be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;Bloomsbury,&rdquo;
+       he said hurriedly. &ldquo;That would be his form. And you say he knew nothing
+      about my movements or whereabouts&mdash;nothing about the Company, eh?&rdquo; He
+      looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence of this stranger
+      had excited him a good deal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she assured him, reflectively; &ldquo;no, I'm sure he didn't. From what he
+      said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere else,
+      for that matter, I should say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look. &ldquo;No&mdash;he's
+      a shade off in the upper story,&rdquo; he told her in a confidential tone.
+      &ldquo;Still, it's important that I should see him,&rdquo;&mdash;and with only a hasty
+      hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the
+      pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella for
+      a cab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got a spare room here, haven't we?&rdquo; Thorpe asked his niece, when
+      she came out to greet him in the hall of their new home in Ovington
+      Square. He spoke with palpable eagerness before even unbuttoning his damp
+      great-coat, or putting off his hat. &ldquo;I mean it's all in working order
+      ready for use?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why yes, uncle,&rdquo; Julia answered, after a moment's thought. &ldquo;Is someone
+      coming?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so,&rdquo; he replied, with a grunt of relief. He seemed increasingly
+      pleased with the project he had in mind, as she helped him off with his
+      things. The smile he gave her, when she playfully took his arm to lead him
+      into the adjoining library, was clearly but a part of the satisfied grin
+      with which he was considering some development in his own affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got into his slippers and into the easy-chair before the bright fire
+      and lit a cigar with a contented air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my little girl?&rdquo; he said, with genial inconsequence, and smiled
+      again at her, where she stood beside the mantel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be such a lark to play the hostess to a stranger!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+      &ldquo;When is he coming?&mdash;I suppose it is a 'he,'&rdquo; she added, less
+      buoyantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;that fellow,&rdquo; Thorpe said, as if he had been thinking of
+      something else. &ldquo;Well&mdash;I can't tell just when he will turn up. I only
+      learned he was in town&mdash;or in England&mdash;a couple of hours ago. I
+      haven't seen him yet at all. I drove round to his lodgings, near the
+      British Museum, but he wasn't there. He only comes there to sleep, but
+      they told me he turned in early&mdash;by nine o'clock or so. Then I went
+      round to a hotel and wrote a note for him, and took it back to his
+      lodgings, and left it for him. I told him to pack up his things as soon as
+      he got it, and drive here, and make this his home&mdash;for the time being
+      at least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it's some old friend of yours?&rdquo; said the girl. &ldquo;I know I shall like
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe laughed somewhat uneasily. &ldquo;Well&mdash;yes&mdash;he's a kind of a
+      friend of mine,&rdquo; he said, with a note of hesitation in his voice. &ldquo;I don't
+      know, though, that you'll think much of him. He aint what you'd call a
+      ladies' man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed again at some thought the words conjured up. &ldquo;He's a curious,
+      simple old party, who'd just like a comfortable corner somewhere by
+      himself, and wouldn't expect to be talked to or entertained at all. If he
+      does come, he'll keep to himself pretty well. He wouldn't be any company
+      for you. I mean,&mdash;for you or Alfred either. I think he's a Canadian
+      or West Indian,&mdash;British subject, at all events,&mdash;but he's lived
+      all his life in the West, and he wouldn't know what to do in a
+      drawing-room, or that sort of thing. You'd better just not pay any
+      attention to him. Pass the time of day, of course, but that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Julia's alert, small-featured face expressed some vague disappointment at
+      what she heard, but her words were cheerful enough. &ldquo;Oh of course&mdash;whatever
+      he likes best,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I will tell Potter to make everything ready. I
+      suppose there's no chance of his being here in time for dinner?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head, and then lifted his brows over some new perplexity.
+      &ldquo;I guess he'd want to eat his meals out, anyway,&rdquo; he said, after some
+      thought. &ldquo;I don't seem to remember much about him in that respect&mdash;of
+      course, everything was so different in camp out in Mexico&mdash;but I
+      daresay he wouldn't be much of an ornament at the table. However, that'll
+      be all right. He's as easy to manage as a rabbit. If I told him to eat on
+      the roof, he'd do it without a murmur. You see it's this way, Julia: he's
+      a scientific man&mdash;a kind of geologist, and mining expert and rubber
+      expert&mdash;and chemical expert and all sort of things. I suppose he must
+      have gone through college&mdash;very likely he'll turn out to have better
+      manners than I was giving him credit for. I've only seen him in the rough,
+      so to speak. We weren't at all intimate then,&mdash;but we had dealings
+      together, and there are certain important reasons why I should keep close
+      in touch with him while he's here in London. But I'll try and do that
+      without letting you be bothered.&rdquo; &ldquo;What an idea!&rdquo; cried Julia. &ldquo;As if that
+      wasn't what we had the house for&mdash;to see the people you want to see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her uncle smiled rather ruefully, and looked in a rather dubious way at
+      his cigar. &ldquo;Between you and me and the lamp-post, Jule,&rdquo; he said, with a
+      slow, whimsical drawl, &ldquo;there isn't a fellow in the world that I wanted to
+      see less than I did him. But since he's here&mdash;why, we've got to make
+      the best of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner, Thorpe suffered the youngsters to go up to the drawing-room
+      in the tacit understanding that he should probably not see them again that
+      night. He betook himself then once more to the library, as it was called&mdash;the
+      little, cozy, dark-panelled room off the hall, where the owner of the
+      house had left two locked bookcases, and where Thorpe himself had
+      installed a writing-desk and a diminutive safe for his papers. The chief
+      purpose of the small apartment, however, was indicated by the two big,
+      round, low-seated easy-chairs before the hearth, and by the cigar boxes
+      and spirit-stand and tumblers visible behind the glass of the cabinet
+      against the wall. Thorpe himself called the room his &ldquo;snuggery,&rdquo; and spent
+      many hours there in slippered comfort, smoking and gazing contentedly into
+      the fire. Sometimes Julia read to him, as he sat thus at his ease, but
+      then he almost invariably went to sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when he had poured out some whiskey and water and lit a cigar, the
+      lounging chairs somehow did not attract him. He moved about aimlessly in
+      the circumscribed space, his hands in his pockets, his burly shoulders
+      rounded, his face dulled and heavy as with a depression of doubt. The
+      sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to his ears. Often he
+      ascended to the drawing-room to hear Julia play&mdash;and more often
+      still, with all the doors open, he enjoyed the mellowed murmur of her
+      music here at his ease in the big chair. But tonight he had no joy in the
+      noise. More than once, as he slouched restlessly round the room, the
+      notion of asking her to stop suggested itself, but he forbore to put it
+      into action. Once he busied himself for a time in kneeling before his
+      safe, and scrutinizing in detail the papers in one of the bundles it
+      contained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last&mdash;it was after ten o'clock, and the music above had ceased&mdash;the
+      welcome sounds of cab-wheels without, and then of the door-bell, came to
+      dispel his fidgeting suspense. On the instant he straightened himself, and
+      his face rearranged its expression. He fastened upon the door of the room
+      the controlled, calm glance of one who is easily confident about what is
+      to happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quaker-looking&rdquo; was not an inapt phrase for the person whom the maid
+      ushered into the room through this door. He was a small, thin, elderly
+      man, bowed of figure and shuffling in gait. His coat and large,
+      low-crowned hat, though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an indefinable
+      sense of some theological standard, or pretence to such a standard. His
+      meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet meaningless lines, and
+      its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by the effort to discern
+      anything clearly, might have belonged to any old village priest grown
+      childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books. Even the blotches
+      of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not altogether unclerical in
+      their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the
+      electric light of the strange, warm apartment&mdash;a helpless, worn old
+      creature, inured through long years to bleak adverse winds, hoping now for
+      nothing better in this world than present shelter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do, Mr. Thorpe,&rdquo; he said, after a moment, with nervous
+      formality. &ldquo;This is unexpectedly kind of you, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why&mdash;not at all!&rdquo; said Thorpe, shaking him cordially by the hand.
+      &ldquo;What have we got houses for, but to put up our old friends? And how are
+      you, anyway? You've brought your belongings, have you? That's right!&rdquo; He
+      glanced into the hall, to make sure that they were being taken upstairs,
+      and then closed the door. &ldquo;I suppose you've dined. Take off your hat and
+      coat! Make yourself at home. That's it&mdash;take the big chair, there&mdash;so!
+      And now let's have a look at you. Well, Tavender, my man, you haven't
+      grown any younger. But I suppose none of us do. And what'll you have to
+      drink? I take plain water in mine, but there's soda if you prefer it. And
+      which shall it be&mdash;Irish or Scotch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Tavender's countenance revealed the extremity of his surprise and
+      confusion at the warmth of this welcome. It apparently awed him as well,
+      for though he shrank into a corner of the huge chair, he painstakingly
+      abstained from resting his head against its back. Uncovered, this head
+      gained a certain dignity of effect from the fashion in which the thin,
+      iron-grey hair, parted in the middle, fell away from the full,
+      intellectual temples, and curled in meek locks upon his collar. A vague
+      resemblance to the type of Wesley&mdash;or was it Froebel?&mdash;might
+      have hinted itself to the observer's mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's thoughts, however, were not upon types. &ldquo;Well&rdquo;&mdash;he said,
+      from the opposite chair, in his roundest, heartiest voice, when the other
+      had with diffidence suffered himself to be served, and had deferentially
+      lighted on one side the big cigar pressed upon him&mdash;&ldquo;Well&mdash;and
+      how's the world been using you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not very handsomely, Mr. Thorpe,&rdquo; the other responded, in a hushed,
+      constrained tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, chuck the Misters!&rdquo; Thorpe bade him. &ldquo;Aren't we old pals, man? You're
+      plain Tavender, and I'm plain Thorpe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're very kind,&rdquo; murmured Tavender, still abashed. For some minutes he
+      continued to reply dolefully, and with a kind of shamefaced reluctance, to
+      the questions piled upon him. He was in evil luck: nothing had gone well
+      with him; it had been with the greatest difficulty that he had scraped
+      together enough to get back to London on the chance of obtaining some
+      expert commission; practically he possessed nothing in the world beyond
+      the clothes on his back, and the contents of two old carpet-bags&mdash;these
+      admissions, by degrees, were wormed from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But have you parted with the concession, then, that you bought from me?&rdquo;
+       Thorpe suddenly asked him. &ldquo;Help yourself to some more whiskey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tavender sighed as he tipped the decanter. &ldquo;It isn't any good,&rdquo; he
+      answered, sadly. &ldquo;The Government repudiates it&mdash;that is, the Central
+      Government at Mexico. Of course, I never blamed you. I bought it with my
+      eyes open, and you sold it in perfect good faith. I never doubted that at
+      all. But it's not worth the paper it's written on&mdash;that's certain.
+      It's that that busted me&mdash;that, and some other things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;well!&rdquo; said Thorpe, blankly. His astonishment was obviously
+      genuine, and for a little it kept him silent, while he pondered the novel
+      aspects of the situation thus disclosed. Then his eyes brightened, as a
+      new path outlined itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you've got the papers?&mdash;the concession and my transfer to
+      you and all that?&rdquo; he asked, casually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; replied Tavender. He added, with a gleam of returning
+      self-command&mdash;&ldquo;That's all I have got.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let's see&mdash;what was it you paid me?&mdash;Three thousand eight
+      hundred pounds, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tavender made a calculation in mental arithmetic. &ldquo;Yes, something like
+      that. Just under nineteen thousand dollars,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; remarked Thorpe, with slow emphasis, &ldquo;I won't allow you to suffer
+      that way by me. I'll buy it back from you at the same price you paid for
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tavender, beginning to tremble, jerked himself upright in his chair, and
+      stared through his spectacles at his astounding host. &ldquo;You say&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      gasped&mdash;&ldquo;you say you'll buy it back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Thorpe. &ldquo;That's what I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I never heard of such a thing!&rdquo; the other faltered with
+      increasing agitation. &ldquo;No&mdash;you can't mean it. It isn't common sense!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's common decency,&rdquo; replied the big man, in his most commanding manner.
+      &ldquo;It's life and death to you&mdash;and it doesn't matter a flea-bite to me.
+      So, since you came to grief through me, why shouldn't I do the fair thing,
+      and put you back on your legs again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tavender, staring now at those shrunken legs of his, breathed heavily. The
+      thing overwhelmed him. Once or twice he lifted his head and essayed to
+      speak, but no speech came to his thin lips. He moistened them eventually
+      with a long deliberate pull at his glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This much ought to be understood, however,&rdquo; Thorpe resumed, reflecting
+      upon his words as he went along. &ldquo;If I'm to buy back a dead horse, like
+      that, it's only reasonable that there should be conditions. I suppose
+      you've seen by this time that even if this concession of ours was
+      recognized by the Government there wouldn't be any money in it to speak
+      of. I didn't realize that two years ago, any more than you did, but it's
+      plain enough now. The trade has proved it. A property of rubber trees has
+      no real value&mdash;so long as there's a wilderness of rubber trees all
+      round that's everybody's property. How can a man pay even the interest on
+      his purchase money, supposing he's bought a rubber plantation, when he has
+      to compete with people who've paid no purchase money at all, but just get
+      out as much as they like from the free forest? You must know that that is
+      so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tavender nodded eloquently. &ldquo;Oh yes, I know that is so. You can prove it
+      by me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe grinned a little. &ldquo;As it happens, that aint what I need to have you
+      prove,&rdquo; he said, dryly. &ldquo;Now WE know that a rubber property is no good&mdash;but
+      London doesn't know it. Everybody here thinks that it's a great business
+      to own rubber trees. Why, man alive, do you know&rdquo;&mdash;the audacity of
+      the example it had occurred to him to cite brought a gratified twinkle to
+      his eyes as he went on&mdash;&ldquo;do you know that a man here last year
+      actually sold a rubber plantation for four hundred thousand pounds&mdash;two
+      millions of dollars! Not in cash, of course, but in shares that he could
+      do something with&mdash;and before he's done with it, I'm told, he's going
+      to make twice that amount of money out of it. That'll show you what London
+      is like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I suppose they do those things,&rdquo; remarked Tavender, vaguely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;my point is that perhaps I can do something or other with this
+      concession of yours here. I may even be able to get my money back on it.
+      At any rate I'll take my chances on it&mdash;so that at least you shan't
+      lose anything by it. Of course, if you'd rather try and put it on the
+      market yourself, why go ahead!&rdquo; There was a wistful pathos in the way
+      Tavender shook his head. &ldquo;Big money doesn't mean anything to me any more,&rdquo;
+       he said, wearily. &ldquo;I'm too old and I'm too tired. Why&mdash;four&mdash;five&mdash;yes,
+      half a dozen times I've had enough money to last me comfortably all my
+      life&mdash;and every time I've used it as bait to catch bigger money with,
+      and lost it all. I don't do that any more! I've got something the matter
+      with me internally that takes the nerve all out of me. The doctors don't
+      agree about it, but whatever its name is I've got it for keeps. Probably I
+      shan't live very long&rdquo;&mdash;Thorpe recalled that the old man had always
+      taken a gloomy view of his health after the third glass&mdash;&ldquo;and if you
+      want to pay me the nineteen thousand dollars, or whatever it is, why I
+      shall say 'God bless you,' and be more than contented.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there's something more to it than that,&rdquo; observed Thorpe, with an
+      added element of business-like briskness in his tone. &ldquo;If I let you out in
+      this way&mdash;something, of course, you could never have dreamed would
+      happen&mdash;you must do some things for me. I should want you, for
+      example, to go back to Mexico at once. Of course, I'd pay your expenses
+      out. Or say, I'd give you a round four thousand pounds to cover that and
+      some other things too. You wouldn't object to that, would you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man who, two hours before, had confronted existence with the change of
+      his last five-pound note in his pocket, did not hesitate now. &ldquo;Oh no, that
+      would be all right,&rdquo; with reviving animation, he declared. He helped
+      himself again from the cut-glass decanter. &ldquo;What would you want me to do
+      there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, a report on the concession for a starter,&rdquo; Thorpe answered, with
+      careful indifference. &ldquo;I suppose they still know your name as an
+      authority. I could make that all right anyway. But one thing I ought to
+      speak of&mdash;it might be rather important&mdash;I wouldn't like to have
+      you mention to anybody that the concession has at any time been yours.
+      That might tend to weaken the value of your report, don't you see? Let it
+      be supposed that the concession has been my property from the start. You
+      catch my point, don't you? There never was any such thing as a transfer of
+      it to you. It's always been mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Tavender gave his benefactor a purblind sort of wink. &ldquo;Always belonged to
+      you? Why of course it did,&rdquo; he said cheerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other breathed a cautious prolonged sigh of relief &ldquo;You'd better light
+      a fresh one, hadn't you?&rdquo; he asked, observing with a kind of contemptuous
+      tolerance the old man's efforts to ignite a cigar which had more than once
+      unrolled like a carpenter's shaving in his unaccustomed fingers, and was
+      now shapelessly defiant of both draught and suction. Tavender laughed to
+      himself silently as he took a new cigar, and puffed at the match held by
+      his companion. The air of innocence and long-suffering meekness was
+      falling rapidly away from him. He put his shabby boots out confidently to
+      the fender and made gestures with his glass as he talked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mistake,&rdquo; he declared, in insistent tones, &ldquo;was in not turning down
+      science thirty years ago and going in bodily for business. Then I should
+      have made my pile as you seem to have done. But I tried to do something of
+      both. Half the year I was assaying crushings, or running a level, or
+      analyzing sugars, for a salary, and the other half I was trying to do a
+      gamble with that salary on the strength of what I'd learned. You can't
+      ring the bell that way. You've got to be either a pig or a pup. You can't
+      do both. Now, for instance, if I'd come to London when you did, and
+      brought my money with me instead of buying your concession with it&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, what good do you suppose you would have done?&rdquo; Thorpe interrupted
+      him with good-natured brusqueness. &ldquo;You'd have had it taken from you in a
+      fortnight! Why, man, do you know what London is? You'd have had no more
+      chance here than a naked nigger in a swamp-full of alligators.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to have hit it off,&rdquo; the other objected. &ldquo;This is as fine a
+      house as I was ever in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With me it's different,&rdquo; Thorpe replied, carelessly. &ldquo;I have the talent
+      for money-making. I'm a man in armour. The 'gators can't bite me, nor yet
+      the rattle-snakes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;men are made up differently,&rdquo; Tavender assented, with
+      philosophical gravity. Then he lurched gently in the over-large chair, and
+      fixed an intent gaze upon his host. &ldquo;What did you make your money in?&rdquo; he
+      demanded, not with entire distinctness of enunciation. &ldquo;It wasn't rubber,
+      was it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head. &ldquo;There's no money in rubber. I'm entirely in
+      finance&mdash;on the Stock Exchange&mdash;dealing in differences,&rdquo; he
+      replied, with a serious face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The explanation seemed wholly acceptable to Tavender. He mused upon it
+      placidly for a time, with his reverend head pillowed askew against the
+      corner of the chair. Then he let his cigar drop, and closed his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The master of the house bent forward, and noiselessly helped himself to
+      another glass of whiskey and water. Then, sinking back again, he eyed his
+      odd guest meditatively as he sipped the drink. He said to himself that in
+      all the miraculous run of luck which the year had brought him, this was
+      the most extraordinary manifestation of the lot. It had been so easy to
+      ignore the existence of this tiresome and fatuous old man, so long as he
+      was in remote Mexico, that he had practically forgotten him. But he should
+      not soon forget the frightened shock with which he had learned of his
+      presence in London, that afternoon. For a minute or two, there in his
+      sister's book-shop, it had seemed as if he were falling through the air&mdash;as
+      if the substantial earth had crumbled away from under him. But then his
+      nerve had returned to him, his resourceful brain had reasserted itself.
+      With ready shrewdness he had gone out, and met the emergency, and made it
+      the servant of his own purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could be glad now, unreservedly glad, that Tavender had come to London,
+      that things had turned out as they had. In truth, he stood now for the
+      first time on solid ground. When he thought of it, now, the risk he had
+      been running all these months gave him a little sinking of the heart. Upon
+      reflection, the performance of having sold the same property first to
+      Tavender in Mexico and then to the Rubber Consols Company in London might
+      be subject to injurious comment, or worse. The fact that it was not a real
+      property to begin with had no place in his thoughts. It was a concession&mdash;and
+      concessions were immemorially worth what they would fetch. But the other
+      thing might have been so awkward&mdash;and now it was all right!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour and more, till the fire burnt itself out and the guest's
+      snoring became too active a nuisance, Thorpe sat lost in this
+      congratulatory reverie. Then he rose, and sharply shaking Tavender into a
+      semblance of consciousness, led him upstairs and put him to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three days later he personally saw Tavender off at Waterloo station by the
+      steamer-train, en route for Southampton and New York. The old man was in
+      childlike good spirits, looking more ecclesiastical than ever in the new
+      clothes he had been enabled to buy. He visibly purred with content
+      whenever his dim eyes caught sight of the new valise and steamer trunk,
+      which belonged to him, on the busy platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've been very kind to me, Thorpe,&rdquo; he said more than once, as they
+      stood together beside the open door of the compartment. &ldquo;I was never so
+      hospitably treated before in my life. Your attention to me has been
+      wonderful. I call you a true friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's all right! Glad to do it,&rdquo; replied the other, lightly. In
+      truth he had not let Tavender stray once out of his sight during those
+      three days. He had dragged him tirelessly about London, showing him the
+      sights from South Kensington Museum to the Tower, shopping with him,
+      resting in old taverns with him, breakfasting, lunching, aud dining with
+      him&mdash;in the indefatigable resolution that he should strike up no
+      dangerous gossiping acquaintance with strangers. The task had been
+      tiresome in the extreme&mdash;but it had been very well worth while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One thing I'm rather sorry about,&rdquo; Tavender remarked, in apologetic
+      parenthesis&mdash;&ldquo;I ought to have gone down and seen that brother-in-law
+      of mine in Kent. He's been very good to me, and I'm not treating him very
+      well. I wrote to tell him I was coming&mdash;but since then I haven't had
+      a minute to myself. However, I can write to him and explain how it
+      happened. And probably I'll be over again sometime.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, of course,&rdquo; said Thorpe, absently. The allusion to the
+      brother-in-law in Kent had escaped his notice, so intent was he upon a new
+      congeries of projects taking vague shape in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of yourself as my man out there,&rdquo; he said now, slowly, following
+      the clue of his thoughts. &ldquo;There may be big things to do. Write to me as
+      often as you can. Tell me everything that's going on. Money will be no
+      object to me&mdash;you can have as much as you like&mdash;if things turn
+      up out there that are worth taking up. But mind you say nothing about me&mdash;or
+      any connection you've ever had with me. You'll get a letter from the
+      Secretary of a Company and the Chairman asking for a report on a certain
+      property, and naming a fee. You simply make a good report&mdash;on its
+      merits. You say nothing about anything else&mdash;about me, or the history
+      of the concession, or its validity, or anything. I mustn't be alluded to
+      in any way. You quite understand that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trust me!&rdquo; said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched the train draw out
+      of the station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy or
+      anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it serves as
+      the easy-going prelude&mdash;with but casual and inattentive visits
+      eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial
+      papers&mdash;to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the
+      City during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere&mdash;on
+      the moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant
+      German pine forests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the great mass of City people; this August in question began in a
+      normal enough fashion. To one little group of operators, however, and to
+      the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose
+      interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a
+      season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was
+      going on&mdash;a combat which threatened to develop into a massacre. Even
+      to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were principals in this
+      fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond
+      the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives. The
+      outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still less,
+      though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The &ldquo;press&rdquo; seemed to
+      know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's mouthpieces,
+      usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the other when a
+      duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing. The papers had
+      been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in itself was of
+      baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had been bribed to
+      ignore. It was an assassination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement
+      that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this
+      stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds for
+      one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not at
+      all. Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough to
+      possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the figures,
+      must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were coining money,
+      but very little happened to be printed as to the identity of these people.
+      Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal columns of the
+      afternoon papers about a &ldquo;Rubber King&rdquo; of the name of Thorpe, but the
+      modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so many &ldquo;kings&rdquo; that
+      the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the popular eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this
+      &ldquo;Rubber King.&rdquo; He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously
+      filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did
+      this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.
+      There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an
+      exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom,
+      so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters and
+      touts. They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits of his
+      Rubber corner could fill it. To know such a man, however, could not but be
+      useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin Friars on
+      their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other topics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was
+      apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the
+      possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed at
+      by those who did not turn away in cold silence. Of the fourteen men who
+      had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and Semple,
+      all the conspicuous ones belonged to the class of &ldquo;wreckers,&rdquo; a class
+      which does not endear itself to Capel Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men of
+      great wealth, but they had systematically amassed these fortunes by
+      strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and
+      toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they had
+      been given a legitimate chance to live. Their system was legal enough, in
+      the eyes alike of the law and of the Stock Exchange rules. They had an
+      undoubted right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and bring it down,
+      and feed to the bone upon it. But the exercise of this right did not make
+      them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their victims. When word
+      first went round, on the last day of February, that a lamb had
+      unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident wolves, and had
+      torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell into a &ldquo;corner,&rdquo;
+       it was received on all sides with a gratified smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once more tragic and more
+      satisfactory. Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others were in
+      the cul de sac guarded by this surprising and bloody-minded lamb. Most of
+      the names were well-known as those of &ldquo;wreckers.&rdquo; In this category
+      belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, Ascher, and Mendel, and if
+      Harding, Carpenter, and Vesey could not be so confidently classified, at
+      least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy. Two other names
+      mentioned, those of Norfell and Pinney, were practically unknown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some surprise, however, at the statement that the old and
+      respected and extremely conservative firm of Fromentin Bros. was entangled
+      in the thing. Egyptian bonds, minor Levantine loans, discounts in the
+      Arabian and Persian trades&mdash;these had been specialties of the
+      Fromentins for many years. Who could have expected to find them caught
+      among the &ldquo;shorts&rdquo; in Mexican rubber? It was Mexico, wasn't it, that these
+      Rubber Consols purported to be connected with?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's Company, upon its commercial merits, had not been considered at
+      all by the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, at the time of its flotation.
+      Men vaguely and with difficulty recalled the fact of its prospectus, when
+      the &ldquo;corner&rdquo; in its shares was first talked about. They looked it up in
+      their lists and files, later on, but its terms said nothing to them.
+      Nobody discussed the value of the assets owned by this Company, or the
+      probability of its paying a dividend&mdash;even when the price bid for its
+      shares was making the most sensational upward leaps. How Thorpe stood with
+      his shareholders, or whether he had any genuine shareholders behind him at
+      all, was seen by the keen eyes of Capel Court to be beside the question.
+      Very likely it was a queer affair, if the truth were known&mdash;but at
+      least it had substance enough in it to be giving the &ldquo;wreckers&rdquo; a lively
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the end of July it was understood that the fight was better worth
+      watching than anything that had been seen in a long time. The only trouble
+      was that there was so little to see. The papers said nothing. The
+      sufferers were the reverse of garrulous. The little red Scotchman, Semple,
+      who was the visible avenging sword of the &ldquo;corner,&rdquo; was more imperturbably
+      silent than anybody else. His fellow-members in the &ldquo;House&rdquo; watched him
+      now, however, with a new respect. They discovered unsuspected elements of
+      power in his thin, tight mouth, in the direct, cold glances of his
+      brown-grey eyes, in the very way he carried his head and wore his hat. He
+      came to be pointed out, and nodded about behind his back, more than anyone
+      else in the &ldquo;House,&rdquo; and important men sought his acquaintance, with an
+      awkward show of civility, who were notorious for their rude exclusiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might be, of course, that his &ldquo;corner&rdquo; would break under him at any
+      fortnightly settlement, but already he had carried it much further than
+      such things often went, and the planning of the coup had been beyond doubt
+      Napoleonic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had this small sandy Scot planned it, or was he merely the weapon in
+      Thorpe's hand? Both views had their supporters on the Exchange, but after
+      the wrench of August 1st, when with an abrupt eighty-shilling rise the
+      price of Rubber Consols stood at 15 pounds, and it was to be computed that
+      Semple had received on that single day nearly 75,000 pounds in differences
+      and &ldquo;backwardation,&rdquo; a story was set afloat which gave Thorpe the
+      undivided credit of the invention. It was related as coming from his own
+      lips that he had schemed it all out to be revenged upon a group of Jewish
+      operators, against whom he had a grievance. In confirmation of this tale,
+      it was pointed out that, of the seven men still held pinned in the fatal
+      &ldquo;corner,&rdquo; six were Jews&mdash;and this did, upon first glance, look
+      significant. But then it was objected, upon reflection, that Blaustein and
+      Ascher had both been permitted to make their escape, and this hardly
+      justified the theory of an implacable anti-Semitic vendetta. The objection
+      seemed reasonable, but it was met in turn by the point that Blaustein and
+      Ascher had been bled white, as Bismarck's phrase went, before they were
+      released, whereas the five Christians had been liberated with relatively
+      moderate fines. Upon the whole, a certain odour of the Judenhetze clung
+      thereafter about the &ldquo;corner&rdquo; in Rubber Consols.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On an afternoon of the following week, Mr. Stormont Thorpe was alone in
+      the Board Room of the offices in Austin Friars. He had risen from the
+      great roller-topped desk over between the windows, and walked now with a
+      lethargic, tired step to and fro before the empty fireplace, yawning more
+      than once, and stretching out his arms in the supreme gesture of fatigue.
+      After a dozen listless rounds, something occurred to him. He moved with a
+      certain directness of purpose to the cabinet in the corner, unlocked it,
+      and poured out for himself a tumbler of brandy and soda. He drank it
+      without a pause, then turned again, and began pacing up and down as
+      before, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent in thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intervening six months had effected visible changes in the outer man.
+      One noted most readily that the face had grown fuller in its lower parts,
+      and was far less browned than formerly. The large, heavy countenance, with
+      its square jaws masked now under increased flesh, its beginnings of a
+      double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect of pallor, was no longer
+      lacking in individual distinction. It was palpably the visage of a
+      dictator. The moustache had been cut down to military brevity, and the
+      line of mouth below it was eloquent of rough power. The steady grey eyes,
+      seemingly smaller yet more conspicuous than before, revealed in their
+      glance new elements of secretiveness, of strategy supported by abundant
+      and confident personal force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man himself seemed scarcely to have grown stouter. He held himself
+      more compactly, as it were; seemed more the master of all his physical
+      expressions. He was dressed like a magnate who was also a person of taste.
+      There was a flower in the lapel of his well-shaped frock-coat, and the
+      rustle of his starched and spotless white waistcoat murmured pleasantly of
+      refined toilets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Marquis of Chaldon&mdash;and a gentleman, with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The announcement, from a clerk who had noiselessly opened the door,
+      imposed itself with decorum upon Thorpe's reverie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is the gentleman with him?&rdquo; Thorpe began austerely to ask, after an
+      instant's hesitation. But this briefest of delays had brought the callers
+      into plain view behind the clerk, and with a slight gesture the master
+      assented to their entrance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This large apartment was no longer called the Board Room by anybody. By
+      tacit processes, it had become Mr. Thorpe's room. Not even the titular
+      Chairman of the Company, the renowned and eminent Lord Chaldon,
+      ex-Ambassador and ex-Viceroy, entered this chamber now with any assumption
+      of proprietorship in it. No hint of a recollection that there were such
+      things as the Company and the Board, or that he was nominally the head of
+      both, expressed itself in his Lordship's demeanour as he advanced, his
+      hand a little extended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noble Chairman was white of beard and hair, and extremely courteous of
+      manner&mdash;a small, carefully-clad, gracious old gentleman, whose mild
+      pink countenance had, with years of anxiety about ways and means, disposed
+      itself in lines which produced a chronic expression of solicitude. A
+      nervous affection of the eyelids lent to this look, at intervals, a
+      beseeching quality which embarrassed the beholder. All men had liked him,
+      and spoken well of him throughout his long and hard-worked career. Thorpe
+      was very fond of him indeed, and put a respectful cordiality into his
+      grasp of the proffered hand. Then he looked, with a certain thinly-veiled
+      bluntness of enquiry, past the Marquis to his companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were very kind to give me the appointment,&rdquo; said Lord Chaldon, with a
+      little purring gloss of affability upon the earnestness of his tone. &ldquo;I
+      wish very much to introduce to you my friend, my old friend I may say,
+      Monsieur Alexandre Fromentin. We slept together under the same tent, in
+      the Persian country beyond Bagdad&mdash;oh, it must have been quite forty
+      years ago. We were youngsters looking to win our first spurs then&mdash;I
+      in my line, he in his. And often since we have renewed that old friendship&mdash;at
+      many different places&mdash;India, and Constantinople, and Egypt. I wish
+      heartily to commend him to your&mdash;your kindness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had perfunctorily shaken hands with the stranger&mdash;a tall,
+      slender, sharp-faced, clean-shaven, narrow-shouldered man, who by these
+      accounts of his years ought not to have such excessively black hair. He
+      bowed in a foreign fashion, and uttered some words which Thorpe, though he
+      recognized them as English in intent, failed to follow. The voice was that
+      of an elderly man, and at a second glance there were plenty of proofs that
+      he might have been older than the Marquis, out there in Persia, forty
+      years ago. But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their hair, and he
+      offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the table toward his desk, with
+      a certain reserve of manner. Seating himself in the revolving chair at the
+      desk itself, he put the tips of his fingers together, and looked this
+      gentleman with the Continental name and experience in the face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there something you wish me to do?&rdquo; he asked, passively facilitating
+      the opening of conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, my God! 'Something'!&rdquo;&mdash;repeated the other, with a fluttering
+      gesture of his hands over his thin, pointed knees&mdash;&ldquo;everything, Mr.
+      Thorpe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a tolerably large order, isn't it?&rdquo; Thorpe asked, calmly, moving a
+      slow, inscrutable glance from one to the other of his callers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could ask for nothing that would be a greater personal favour&mdash;and
+      kindness&rdquo;&mdash;Lord Chaldon interposed. His tone bore the stress of
+      sincerity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means a great deal to me, as you know, my Lord,&rdquo; replied Thorpe,
+      &ldquo;but I don't in the least understand&mdash;what is it that your friend
+      wants?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only that I shall not be buried in a bankrupt's grave,&rdquo; the suppliant
+      answered, with a kind of embittered eagerness of utterance. &ldquo;That I shall
+      not see disgraced the honoured name that my father and his father
+      bequeathed to my care!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's large, composed countenance betrayed a certain perplexity. &ldquo;There
+      must be a mistake,&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;I don't even know this name of yours. I
+      never heard it before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other's mobile face twisted itself in a grimace of incredulity. He had
+      a conspicuously wide mouth, and its trick of sidelong extension at this
+      moment was very unpleasant. &ldquo;Ah, Herr Je! He never heard it,&rdquo; he
+      ejaculated, turning nervously to the Marquis. &ldquo;Would to the good God you
+      never had!&rdquo; he told Thorpe, with suppressed excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Chaldon, his own voice shaken a little, interposed with an
+      explanation. &ldquo;My friend is the head&mdash;the respected head&mdash;of the
+      firm of Fromentin Brothers. I think you have&mdash;have dealings with
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, after a furtive instant of bewilderment, opened his mouth. &ldquo;Oh! I
+      see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I know what you mean now. With the French pronunciation, I
+      didn't recognize the name. I've always heard it called 'Fromen'-tin' here
+      in London. Oh, yes, of course&mdash;Fromen'tin Brothers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips shut tight again at this. The listeners had caught no helpful
+      clue from the tone of his words. They exchanged a glance, and then M.
+      Fromentin spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thorpe,&rdquo; he began, slowly, with an obvious effort at self-repression.
+      &ldquo;It is a very simple story. Our house is an old one. My father's
+      grandfather organized the finance of the commissariat of General Bonaparte
+      in Egypt. He created the small beginnings of the carpet and rug
+      importation from Asia Minor. His son, and in turn his son, followed him.
+      They became bankers as well as importers. They helped very greatly to
+      develop the trade of the Levant. They were not avaricious men, or usurers.
+      It is not in our blood. Your Chairman, Lord Chaldon, who honours me so
+      highly by calling me his friend&mdash;he will assure you that we have a
+      good name in the East. Our banks have befriended the people, and never
+      oppressed or injured them. For that reason&mdash;I will say perhaps for
+      that reason&mdash;we have never become a very rich house. It is possible
+      to name bankers who have made large fortunes out of Egypt. It was
+      different with us. Lord Chaldon will tell you that of our own free will&mdash;my
+      two brothers and I&mdash;of our own choice we consented to lose a fifth of
+      all our possessions, rather than coin into gold by force the tears and
+      blood of the wretched fellaheen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I have never known a more honourable or humane action,&rdquo; put in
+      the Marquis, fervently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then my brothers die&mdash;Polydor, who lived mostly at Smyrna, and
+      whose estate was withdrawn from the business by his widow, and Augustin,
+      who lived here in London after 1870, and died&mdash;it is now six years
+      ago. He left a son, Robert, who is my nephew, and my partner. He is now of
+      an age&mdash;perhaps thirty years. He was a small child when he came to
+      London&mdash;he has become more English than the English themselves. His
+      activity and industry are very great; he forms plans of such magnitude and
+      numbers that they would compel his grandfather to turn in his coffin. I am
+      in indifferent health. I live much at Homburg and Marienbad and at Cairo.
+      Practically speaking, I have retired from business. There remain branches
+      of our house&mdash;in several places&mdash;but the London house has become
+      the centre of all things&mdash;and Robert has become the London house.
+      This I make plain to your mind, do I, Mr. Thorpe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other, with his chin sunk within the collar of his white waistcoat,
+      and scrutinizing the narrator with a steadfast though impassive glance,
+      made the faintest possible nod of assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had great confidence in Robert,&rdquo; the old man went on. His eyes were
+      dimming with tears, and his voice quavered uncertainly. &ldquo;His plans seemed
+      wise, even if they risked more than formerly. The conditions of business
+      are wholly altered since my youth&mdash;and it was best, I thought, to
+      make Robert free to act under these conditions, which he understood much
+      better than I could pretend to do. Thus it was that when he said it was
+      necessary for Fromentin Brothers to belong to the Stock Exchange, I did
+      not object. He was active and bold and clever, and he was in the thick of
+      the fight. Therefore he should be the judge in all things. And that is our
+      ruin. In the time of the South African excitement, he won a great deal of
+      money. Then he lost it all and more. Then gambling began, and his fortunes
+      went now up, now down, but always, as his books show to me now&mdash;sinking
+      a little on the average. He grew more adventurous&mdash;more careless. He
+      put many small counters upon different numbers on the table. You know what
+      I mean? And in an accursed moment, because other gamblers were doing the
+      same, he sold two thousand of your shares, without having them in his
+      hands. Voila! He wishes now to put a bullet through his brain. He proposes
+      that as the fitting end of Fromentin Freres.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, his chin on his breast, continued to regard the melancholy figure
+      opposite with a moody eye. It seemed a long minute before he broke the
+      tense silence by a sigh of discomfort. &ldquo;I do not discuss these things with
+      anybody,&rdquo; he said then, coldly. &ldquo;If I had known who you were, I don't
+      think you'd have got in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis of Chaldon intuitively straightened himself in his chair, and
+      turned toward the speaker a glance of distressed surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or no&mdash;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; Thorpe hastened to add, upon the instant
+      hint of this look&mdash;&ldquo;that doesn't convey my meaning. Of course, our
+      Chairman brings whom he pleases. His friends&mdash;as a matter of course&mdash;are
+      our friends. What I should have said was that if this had been mentioned
+      beforehand to me, I should have explained that it wasn't possible to
+      discuss that particular business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;pardon me&rdquo;&mdash;said Lord Chaldon, in a quiet, very gentle,
+      yet insistent voice, which seemed now to recall to its listeners the fact
+      that sovereigns and chancellors had in their day had attentive ears for
+      its tones&mdash;&ldquo;pardon me, but why should it not be possible?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe frowned doubtfully, and shifted his position in his chair. &ldquo;What
+      could I say, if it were discussed?&rdquo; he made vague retort. &ldquo;I'm merely one
+      of the Directors. You are our Chairman, but you see he hasn't found it of
+      any use to discuss it with you. There are hard and fast rules about these
+      things. They run their natural course. You are not a business man, my Lord&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I think I may be called a 'business man,'&rdquo; interposed the nobleman,
+      suavely. &ldquo;They would tell you so in Calcutta, I think, and in Cairo too.
+      When one considers it, I have transacted a great deal of business&mdash;on
+      the behalf of other people. And if you will permit me&mdash;I do not
+      impute indirection, of course&mdash;but your remark seems to require a
+      footnote. It is true that I am Chairman of the Board on which you are a
+      Director&mdash;but it is not quite the whole truth. I as Chairman know
+      absolutely nothing about this matter. As I understand the situation, it is
+      not in your capacity as a Director that you know anything about it either.
+      Yet&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, as if suddenly conscious of some impropriety in this domestic
+      frankness before a third party, and Thorpe pounced through his
+      well-mannered hesitation with the swiftness of a bird of prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me suggest,&rdquo; he said roundly, lifting his head and poising a hand to
+      hold attention, while he thought upon what it was he should suggest&mdash;&ldquo;this
+      is what I would say. It seems rather irregular, doesn't it? to debate the
+      matter in the presence of an outsider. You see it yourself. That is partly
+      what I meant. Now I have met Mr. Fromentin,&rdquo; he gave the name its English
+      vowels with an obstinate emphasis, &ldquo;and I have heard his statement. You
+      have heard it too. If he wishes to lay more facts before us, why, well and
+      good. But then I would suggest that he leave the matter in our hands, to
+      discuss and look into between ourselves. That seems to you the proper
+      course, doesn't it, Lord Chaldon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The French banker had been studying with strained acuteness the big
+      lymphatic mask of the Director, with sundry sharp glances aside at the
+      Chairman. The nervous changes on his alert, meagre old face showed how
+      intently he followed every phase of their talk. A certain sardonic
+      perception of evil in the air curled on his lip when he saw the Marquis
+      accede with a bow and wave of the hand to Thorpe's proposition. Then he
+      made his bow in turn, and put the best face possible upon the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally I consult your convenience&mdash;and the proprieties,&rdquo; he said,
+      with an effect of proud humility. &ldquo;There are but a few other facts to
+      submit. My nephew has already paid, in differences upon those accursed two
+      thousand shares, a sum of nearly 30,000 pounds. I have the figures in my
+      pocket&mdash;but they are fixed in my head as well. Twenty-eight thousand
+      five hundred, those differences already amount to, not to speak of
+      interest. At the last settlement, August 1st, the price per share was 15
+      pounds. That would make 30,000 pounds more, if we bought now&mdash;or a
+      total of practically 60,000 pounds. Eh bien! I beg for the privilege of
+      being allowed to buy these shares now. It is an unpleasant confession to
+      make, but the firm of Fromentin Freres will be made very poor by this loss
+      of 60,000 pounds. It was not always so, but it is so now. My nephew Robert
+      has brought it into that condition. You see my shame at this admission.
+      With all my own means, and with his sister's marriage portion, we can make
+      up this sum of 30,000 pounds, and still enable the firm to remain in
+      existence. I have gone over the books very painstakingly, since I arrived
+      in London. It can be kept afloat, and it can be brought back to safe and
+      moderately profitable courses&mdash;if nothing worse happens. With another
+      six weeks like the last, this will not be at all possible. We shall have
+      the cup of dishonour thrust between our teeth. That will be the end of
+      everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      M. Fromentin finished in tremulous, grave tones. After looking with
+      blurred eyes for a moment into Thorpe's face, he bowed his head, and
+      softly swayed the knees upon which his thin, dark hands maintained their
+      clutch. Not even the revelation of hair quite white at the roots, unduly
+      widening the track of parting on the top of his dyed head, could rob this
+      movement of its mournful dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, after a moment's pause, took a pencil and paper from the desk, and
+      made a calculation. He bit his lips and frowned at the sight of these
+      figures, and set down some others, which seemed to please him no more.
+      Then, with a sudden gesture as of impatience, he rose to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much is that sister's marriage portion you spoke of?&rdquo; he asked,
+      rather brusquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The French gentleman had also risen. He looked with an air of astonishment
+      at his questioner, and then hardened his face. &ldquo;I apologize for mentioning
+      it,&rdquo; he said, with brevity. &ldquo;One does not speak of family affairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked you how much it was,&rdquo; pursued Thorpe, in a masterful tone. &ldquo;A man
+      doesn't want to rob a girl of her marriage portion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I must not answer you,&rdquo; the other replied, hesitatingly. &ldquo;It was
+      the fault of my emotion to introduce the subject. Pray leave the young
+      lady out of account.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I've nothing more to say,&rdquo; Thorpe declared, and seated himself again
+      with superfluous energy. He scowled for a little at the disorder of his
+      desk, and then flung forth an angry explanation. &ldquo;If you evade fair
+      questions like that, how can you expect that I will go out of my way to
+      help you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, permit me, Mr. Thorpe&rdquo;&mdash;the Marquis intervened soothingly&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      think you misapprehend. My friend, I am sure, wished to evade nothing. He
+      had the idea that he was at fault in&mdash;in alluding to a purely
+      domestic matter as&mdash;as a&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;as a plea for
+      your consideration.&rdquo; He turned to the old banker. &ldquo;You will not refuse to
+      mention the sum to me, will you, my friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      M. Fromentin shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;It is ten thousand pounds,&rdquo; he
+      replied, almost curtly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe was seemingly mollified. &ldquo;Very well, then,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I will sell
+      you 2,000 shares at ten pounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The others exchanged a wondering look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; the banker stammered&mdash;&ldquo;I see your meaning. You will
+      forgive me&mdash;it is very well meant indeed by you&mdash;but it was not
+      my proposition. The market-price is fifteen pounds&mdash;and we were
+      prepared to pay it.&rdquo; Thorpe laughed in a peremptory, gusty way. &ldquo;But you
+      can't pay more than I ask!&rdquo; he told him, with rough geniality. &ldquo;Come, if I
+      let you and your nephew in out of the cold, what kind of men-folk would
+      you be to insist that your niece should be left outside? As I said, I
+      don't want her money. I don't want any woman's money. If I'm going to be
+      nice to the rest of the family, what's the objection to my being nice to
+      her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said the Frenchman, after an instant's reflection, &ldquo;I offer
+      none. I did not at the moment perceive the spirit of your words, but I
+      recognize now that it was delicacy itself. I tender you the most profound
+      thanks&mdash;for ALL the family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After some further conversation the elder Fromentin took his departure.
+      Lord Chaldon apparently proposed to accompany him, but Thorpe begged him
+      to remain, and he put aside his hat once more and resumed his seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe walked about a little, with his hands in his pockets, in a restless
+      way. &ldquo;If it isn't unpleasant to you, I think I'll light a cigar,&rdquo; he said
+      suddenly, and moved over to the cabinet. He poured out a drink of neat
+      brandy, as well, and furtively swallowed it. Then he came back, preceded
+      by a cloud of smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It went terribly against the grain,&rdquo; he said, with a rueful laugh. &ldquo;I'd
+      sworn to let no Jew off with an inch of hide left on him&mdash;and here
+      three of them have been wheedled out of my grip already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jews?&rdquo; exclaimed the Marquis, much puzzled. &ldquo;Did you&mdash;did you think
+      Fromentin was a Jew? God bless me! he's no more one than I am! Why, not
+      even so much, for there IS a Herschell in my pedigree. Why, dear man, they
+      were Crusaders!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe smiled somewhat sheepishly. &ldquo;I never noticed much,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It
+      was a foreign-looking name. I took it for granted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Chaldon bent his brows a little. &ldquo;Yes-s&rdquo;&mdash;he murmured,
+      meditatively. &ldquo;I've heard it mentioned that your enterprise was suspected
+      of an anti-Semitic twist. Do you mind my talking a little with you about
+      that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not at all,&rdquo; the other answered with languid acquiescence, as he
+      seated himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;mentioned with the authoritative ease of one who dined
+      with princes and prime ministers&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;no doubt it was all
+      very clever and wise, but Thorpe did not care for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord Chaldon,&rdquo; he said abruptly, &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I have not heard that my
+      shares are worth fifteen pounds,&rdquo; he said then, with a direct, meaning
+      little smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Thorpe laughed, leaning comfortably back in his chair. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Chaldon assented by an eloquent nod, at once resigned and hopeful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;that is contrary to all my expectations&mdash;and intentions,&rdquo;
+       Thorpe resumed. &ldquo;I don't want you to suffer by this unlooked-for change in
+      the shape of things. You hold two thousand shares&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very munificent,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A brief pause ensued, and was ended by another remark from the nobleman:
+      &ldquo;I thought for the moment of asking your advice&mdash;on this question of
+      selling,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;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&mdash;and you know so much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe put out his lips a trifle, and looked away for an instant in
+      frowning abstraction. &ldquo;If it were put in that way&mdash;I think I should
+      sell,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It's all right for me to take long chances&mdash;it's my
+      game&mdash;but there's no reason why you should risk things. But let me
+      put it in still another way,&rdquo; he added, with the passing gleam of a new
+      thought over the dull surface of his eye. &ldquo;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&mdash;here, now, if
+      you like&mdash;and that makes them mine again. The business is finished
+      and done with&mdash;inside this room. Neither of us is to say anything
+      about it to a soul. Does that meet your views?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The diplomat pondered the proposition&mdash;again with a lengthened
+      perturbation of the eyelids. &ldquo;It would be possible to suggest a variety of
+      objections, if one were of a sophistical turn of mind,&rdquo; he said at last,
+      smilingly reflective. &ldquo;Yet I see no really insuperable obstacle in the
+      path.&rdquo; He thought upon it further, and went on with an enquiring upward
+      glance directed suddenly at Thorpe: &ldquo;Is there likely to be any very
+      unpleasant hubbub in the press&mdash;when it is known that the annual
+      meeting has been postponed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head with confidence. &ldquo;No&mdash;you need have no fear of
+      that. The press is all right. It's the talk of the City, I'm told&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis considered these remarks with a puzzled air. Then he smiled
+      faintly. &ldquo;I'm afraid we're speaking of different things,&rdquo; he suggested.
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;but I should care a great deal about the other press&mdash;the
+      great public press.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what do they know about these things?&rdquo; said Thorpe, lightly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nevertheless,&rdquo; persisted his Lordship, blandly, &ldquo;I should greatly dislike
+      any public discussion of our Company's affairs. I hope it is quite clear
+      that that can be avoided.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely!&rdquo; Thorpe told him, with reassuring energy. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, that is a question which has occurred to me,&rdquo; said Lord Chaldon, &ldquo;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&mdash;because I was in that position myself until a few minutes
+      ago&mdash;and I don't mind confessing that I had brought myself to
+      contemplate the contingency of ultimately being compelled to&mdash;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&mdash;I
+      won't say to curse, but to&mdash;to criticize&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't care about them,&rdquo; said Thorpe, carelessly. &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo; he paused abruptly, and the two men tacitly
+      completed his sentence in the glance they exchanged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis of Chaldon rose, and took up his hat and stick. &ldquo;If you will
+      post it to me&mdash;in a registered letter&mdash;my town house&mdash;please,&rdquo;
+       he remarked, with a charmingly delicate hesitation over the phrases. Then
+      he put out his hand: &ldquo;I need not say how fully I appreciate your great
+      kindness to my old friend Fromentin. It was a noble action&mdash;one I
+      shall always reflect upon with admiration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you won't mention it, though,&rdquo; said Thorpe, as they shook hands;
+      &ldquo;either that or&mdash;or anything else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall preserve the most guarded&mdash;the most diplomatic secrecy,&rdquo; his
+      Lordship assured him, as they walked toward the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in!&rdquo; he said, haltingly. &ldquo;Where did you drop from? Glad to see you!
+      How are all your people?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't bothered you before,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;I knew you were awfully busy&mdash;and
+      I kept away as long as I could. But now&mdash;well, the truth is&mdash;I'm
+      in rather of a hole. I hope you don't mind my coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not at all,&rdquo; said Thorpe, laconically. After a momentary pause he
+      added: &ldquo;The Marquis has just been consulting me about the postponement of
+      the annual meeting. I suppose you agree with us&mdash;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah yes&mdash;how do things stand now?&rdquo; asked Lord Plowden, briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo;&mdash;Thorpe eyed his visitor with a moody blankness of gaze, his
+      chin once more buried in his collar&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;the
+      rent, the Directors' fees and clerk-hire and so on&mdash;out of my own
+      pocket. It comes, all told, to about 2,700 pounds&mdash;without counting
+      my extra 1,000 pounds as Managing Director. I don't propose to ask for a
+      penny of that, under the circumstances&mdash;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.&mdash;And are your mother and sister quite well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, very well indeed, thanks,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm in treaty for a house and a moor in the Highlands&rdquo;&mdash;Thorpe went
+      on, in a casual tone&mdash;&ldquo;in fact, I'm hesitating between three or four
+      places that all seem to be pretty good&mdash;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&mdash;and your brother too. I have a nephew about his age&mdash;a
+      fine young fellow&mdash;who'd be company for him. Why can't you say now
+      that you'll all come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden emerged from his brown study with the gleam of some new idea
+      on his face. &ldquo;I might bring my sister,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only saw her that once,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women are curious creatures,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added, with another little smile. He
+      continued to regard Thorpe's face, but there was an increasing uncertainty
+      in his glance. &ldquo;You've put on flesh, haven't you?&rdquo; he ventured, after a
+      brief pause. There was the implication in his voice and manner that he
+      observed changes which disconcerted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much, I guess,&rdquo; replied the other, carelessly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden stared at his friend. &ldquo;Are they back? Have they returned to
+      England?&rdquo; he asked, confusedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, didn't you know?&rdquo; Thorpe pursued, with an accession of amiability. He
+      visibly had pleasure in the disclosure of the other's ignorance. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He looked
+      Plowden straight in the eye, and added with an air of deliberation: &ldquo;I'm
+      rather anxious about her health.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nobleman frankly abandoned his efforts to maintain an undisturbed
+      front. &ldquo;You&mdash;are&mdash;anxious,&rdquo; he repeated, frowning in displeased
+      wonderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why yes&mdash;why not?&rdquo; 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? &ldquo;What is there so amazing
+      about that? Why shouldn't I be anxious?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Why not indeed!&rdquo; he said, as
+      lightly as he could. With hands on knees, he bent forward as if to rise.
+      &ldquo;But perhaps I'd better come in another day,&rdquo; he suggested, tentatively.
+      &ldquo;I'm interrupting you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;sit still,&rdquo; Thorpe bade him, and then, with chin settled more
+      determinedly than ever in his cravat, sat eyeing him in a long, dour
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure some other day would be better,&rdquo; he urged, with an open overture
+      to propitiation in his tone. &ldquo;You're not in the mood to be bothered with
+      my affairs today.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As much today as any other,&rdquo; Thorpe answered him, slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other sat suddenly upright&mdash;and then upon a moment's reflection
+      rose to his feet. &ldquo;I don't in the least know what to make of all this,&rdquo; he
+      said, with nervous precipitancy. &ldquo;If I've offended you in any way, say so,
+      and I will apologize at once. But treatment of this sort passes my
+      comprehension.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe in truth did not himself comprehend it much more clearly. Some
+      strange freak of wilfulness impelled him to pursue this unintelligible
+      persecution. &ldquo;I've said nothing about any offense,&rdquo; he declared, in a
+      hard, deliberate voice. &ldquo;It is your own word. All the same&mdash;I mention
+      the name of a lady&mdash;a lady, mind you, whom I met under your own roof&mdash;and
+      you strike attitudes and put on airs as if&mdash;as if I wasn't good
+      enough!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, upon my word, that's all rubbish!&rdquo; the other broke in. &ldquo;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&mdash;but that was
+      all. I give you my word that was all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then,&rdquo; Thorpe consented grudgingly to mutter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and
+      now he was such a crestfallen and wilted thing! Remembering their last
+      conversation together&mdash;remembering indeed how full of liking for this
+      young nobleman he had been when they last met&mdash;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&mdash;a hint which Thorpe discovered to
+      be rankling with a sudden new soreness in his mind. Was that why he hated
+      Plowden? No&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;but
+      still he could not tell why.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is all terribly important to me,&rdquo; the nobleman said, breaking the
+      unpleasant silence. His voice was surcharged with earnestness. &ldquo;Apparently
+      you are annoyed with something&mdash;what it may be I can't for the life
+      of me make out. All I can say is&rdquo;&mdash;and he broke off with a helpless
+      gesture which seemed to imply that he feared to say anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe put out his lips. &ldquo;I don't know what you mean,&rdquo; he said, brusquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I mean&rdquo;&mdash;the other echoed, with bewildered vagueness of glance.
+      &ldquo;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'&mdash;those were your own words. I urged
+      you at the time to go slowly&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, they are here ready for you,&rdquo; said Thorpe, with calculated
+      coldness. &ldquo;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!&mdash;you
+      come here and suggest to me that I made promises to you which I've
+      broken!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden looked hard at him, as he turned over in his mind the purport of
+      these words. &ldquo;I see what you are doing,&rdquo; he said then. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the hell do you mean?&rdquo; Thorpe broke in with explosive warmth,
+      lifting himself in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, come now, Thorpe,&rdquo; Plowden retorted, &ldquo;let's get this talk on an
+      intelligent, common-sense footing.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;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&mdash;but it was a joke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There seems to be a joke somewhere, sure enough,&rdquo; said Thorpe, in dryly
+      metallic tones&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;you seem to think you're
+      entitled to make a row. What do you mean by it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a little word&rdquo;&mdash;interposed Plowden, with strenuous calmness of
+      utterance&mdash;&ldquo;what you say may be true enough&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe rapped with his nails on the desk, to point the force of his
+      rejoinder: &ldquo;How do you account for the fact, my Lord&rdquo;&mdash;he gave his
+      words a chillingly scornful precision of utterance&mdash;&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I account for it in this way&rdquo;&mdash;said Plowden, after a moment's
+      baffled reflection: &ldquo;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!&mdash;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&mdash;and yourself too&mdash;by sticking to this quibble about
+      vendor's shares. You intended to be deuced good to me&mdash;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&mdash;I leave that
+      entirely to you. But after all that's been said and done&mdash;I put it to
+      you as one man to another&mdash;you are morally bound to help me out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean?&mdash;'all that's been said and done'?&rdquo; 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&mdash;but for the moment he wavered in his purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he began slowly, &ldquo;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&mdash;especially my sister&mdash;they
+      were wonderfully excited about it. You are quite the hero in their eyes.
+      And then&mdash;you remember that talk we had, in which you said I could
+      help you&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;a highly-cultivated and highly-bred young
+      lady of rank&mdash;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&mdash;I need scarcely say&mdash;I
+      mention this marriage only as something which may or may not attract you,&mdash;it
+      is quite open to you to prefer another,&mdash;but there is hardly anything
+      of that sort in which I and my connections could not be of use to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;it seemed curiously remote, like a dream-phantom from
+      some previous state of existence&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All that is talking in the air,&rdquo; he said, with abrupt decision. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He
+      looked at the other's darkling face for a moment, and then rose with
+      unwieldy deliberation. &ldquo;If you're so hard up though,&rdquo; he continued,
+      coldly, &ldquo;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&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then this is the end of things, is it?&rdquo; he asked, after an awkward
+      silence, in a voice he strove in vain to keep from shaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What things?&rdquo; said the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden shrugged his shoulders, framed his lips to utter something which
+      he decided not to say, and at last turned on his heel. &ldquo;Good day,&rdquo; he
+      called out over his shoulder, and left the room with a flagrant air of
+      hostility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;EDITH will be down in a very few moments,&rdquo; Miss Madden assured Thorpe
+      that evening, when he entered the drawing-room of the house she had taken
+      in Grafton Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Ah,
+      then she has told you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 &ldquo;Rubber King&rdquo; drank a
+      good deal, and was probably not wholly nice in his cups.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if his tongue instead of his eyes had uttered the exclamation&mdash;&ldquo;Ah,
+      then she has told you!&rdquo;&mdash;for Miss Madden took it as having been
+      spoken. &ldquo;I'm not disposed to pretend that I'm overjoyed about it, you
+      know,&rdquo; she said to him bluntly, as their hands dropped, and they stood
+      facing each other. &ldquo;If I said I congratulated you, it would be only the
+      emptiest form. And I hate empty forms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you think that I won't make a good husband?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that I specially doubt it,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I suppose any man
+      has in him the makings of what is called a good husband&mdash;if the
+      conditions are sufficiently propitious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then&mdash;what's the matter with the conditions?&rdquo; he demanded,
+      jocosely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I have no wish to be a kill-joy,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;I'm sure I hope all
+      manner of good results from the&mdash;the experiment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose that's what it comes to,&rdquo; he said, meditatively. &ldquo;It's all an
+      experiment. Every marriage in the world must be that&mdash;neither more
+      nor less.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With all the experience of the ages against its coming out right.&rdquo; She
+      had turned to move toward a chair, but looked now over her shoulder at
+      him. &ldquo;Have you ever seen what seemed to you an absolutely happy marriage
+      in your life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon reflection he shook his head. &ldquo;I don't recall one on the spur of the
+      minute,&rdquo; he confessed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there's a good deal to be said for the moonshine,&rdquo; she interrupted
+      him, as she sank upon the sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why certainly,&rdquo; he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her.
+      &ldquo;The more there is of it, the better&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a lover for you!&rdquo; Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision
+      mingled in her laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you worry about me,&rdquo; he told her. &ldquo;I'm a good enough lover, all
+      right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don't precisely
+      see what&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What business it is of mine?&rdquo; she finished the sentence for him. &ldquo;You're
+      entirely right. As you say, IF she's satisfied, no one else has anything
+      to do with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But have you got any right to assume that she isn't satisfied?&rdquo; he asked
+      her with swift directness&mdash;&ldquo;or any reason for supposing it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the
+      whimsical smile she gave him. &ldquo;None whatever,&rdquo; she said&mdash;and on the
+      instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;forces which dazzled and troubled his glance. The
+      thought that this exquisite being&mdash;this ineffable compound of feeling
+      and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have kept you waiting,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden laughed too. &ldquo;Oh, I surrender,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You drag
+      congratulations from me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm forever telling you what a strain the City is on a man in my
+      position,&rdquo; he said&mdash;&ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;I
+      apparently to find the money, and he the brains. One chap wanted me to
+      finance a theatrical syndicate&mdash;he had a bag full of photographs of
+      an actress all eyes and teeth and hair,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then there were three inventors&mdash;let's see, here they are&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there's twenty-seven people&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Miss Madden, contemplatively. &ldquo;A lady may have twice
+      that number of callers in an afternoon&mdash;quite as great strangers to
+      all intents and purposes&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edith smiled, pleasantly and yet a little wistfully, but said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate,&rdquo; Thorpe went on, with a kind of purpose gathering in his
+      eyes, &ldquo;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&mdash;an
+      utter stranger he was&mdash;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You speak of an 'absolute gratuity.' I know nothing of London City
+      methods&mdash;but isn't ten thousand pounds a gratuity on a rather large
+      scale?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe hesitated briefly, then smiled, and, with slow deliberation, drew
+      up a chair and seated himself before them. &ldquo;Perhaps I don't mind telling
+      you about it,&rdquo; he began, and paused again. &ldquo;I had a letter in my mail this
+      morning,&rdquo; he went on at last, giving a sentimental significance to both
+      tone and glance&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;and it's there now,
+      for that matter&rdquo;&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had it in my pocket,&rdquo; he resumed, with an accession of mellow emotion
+      in his voice, &ldquo;and none of the callers ever got my thoughts very far from
+      that letter. And one of these was an old man&mdash;a French banker who
+      must be seventy years old, but dyes his hair a kind of purple black&mdash;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&mdash;and the old man came to beg me to let him out at present
+      market figures. He got Lord Chaldon&mdash;he's my Chairman, you know&mdash;to
+      bring him, and introduce him as his friend, and plead for him&mdash;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&mdash;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Madden welcomed the diversion by rising with ostentatious vigour. &ldquo;I
+      will take myself out,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, when I get away&rdquo;&mdash;said Thorpe, fervently, &ldquo;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&mdash;why should I come back? I've been asking myself
+      the question&mdash;more today than ever before. Of course everything has
+      been different today. But if I'm to get any genuine good out of my&mdash;my
+      fortune&mdash;I must pull away from the City altogether sometime&mdash;and
+      why not now? Of course, some important things are still open&mdash;and
+      they have to be watched night and day&mdash;but after all, Semple&mdash;that's
+      my Broker&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and that's what I've always wanted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How unexpected you are!&rdquo; commented Miss Madden. &ldquo;You are almost the last
+      person I should have looked to for a sentiment about Tudor foundations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe put out his lips a trifle. &ldquo;Ah, you don't know me,&rdquo; he replied, in
+      a voice milder than his look had promised. &ldquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      paused, and sent a smile surcharged with meaning toward the silent member
+      of the trio&mdash;&ldquo;living proof that I'm the greatest judge of perfection
+      in beauty of my time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Oh, I think I do know you,&rdquo; said Celia Madden, calmly discursive.
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;at least that
+      is my reading&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, go on,&rdquo; Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost
+      excited interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;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&mdash;something
+      you must obey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man smiled and nodded approvingly: &ldquo;You've got me down fine,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I talk with a good deal of confidence,&rdquo; she went on, with a cheerless,
+      ruminative little laugh, &ldquo;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&mdash;my
+      own money, my own power&mdash;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&mdash;always of course on a small scale. Then a group
+      of things happened in a kind of climax&mdash;a very painful climax&mdash;and
+      it shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died&mdash;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&mdash;and stick to it. But with you&mdash;do
+      you see?&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, dear&mdash;dear!&rdquo; broke in Lady Cressage. &ldquo;What a distressing Mrs.
+      Gummidge-Cassandra you are, Celia! Pray stop it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;she's right enough,&rdquo; said Thorpe, gravely. &ldquo;That's the kind of
+      man I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me that's the only kind of man it's worth while to be,&rdquo; he
+      added at last, still speaking with thoughtful deliberation. &ldquo;There's
+      nothing else in the world so big as power&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a case of it today,&rdquo; he said, and then paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; put in Miss Madden. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's face beamed with repressed amusement. &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;and&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; he said, lightly. &ldquo;There wasn't much to it. The man annoyed
+      me, somehow&mdash;and he didn't get what he came for&mdash;that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he was entitled to get it?&rdquo; asked Celia Madden. Thorpe's lips pouted
+      over a reply. &ldquo;Well&mdash;no,&rdquo; he said, with a kind of reluctance. &ldquo;He got
+      strictly what he was entitled to&mdash;precisely what I had promised him&mdash;and
+      he wrung up his nose at that&mdash;and then I actually gave him 15,000
+      pounds he wasn't entitled to at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly see what it proves, then,&rdquo; Edith Cressage remarked, and the
+      subject was dropped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Edith Cressage rose at last, and took a few aimless steps, with her hands
+      at her hair. &ldquo;Well&mdash;I'm embarked&mdash;fairly under way!&rdquo; she said,
+      in clear-cut, almost provocative tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't at all know what to say,&rdquo; her companion replied, slowly. &ldquo;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&mdash;and a little
+      frightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am frightened too,&rdquo; said the other, but with eagerness rather than
+      trepidation in her voice. &ldquo;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?&mdash;that is one of the charms of the thing. There is an
+      excitement about it that exhilarates me. To get happiness through terror&mdash;you
+      can't understand that, can you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm trying. I think I'm beginning to understand,&rdquo; said Miss Madden,
+      vaguely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married
+      Bothwell?&rdquo; asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating
+      fixity. &ldquo;You have it all&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't a happy story&mdash;this parallel that you pick out,&rdquo; commented
+      Celia, absently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happy! Pah!&rdquo; retorted Edith, with spirit. &ldquo;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&mdash;they did it in her lifetime: they do it now&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig,&rdquo; put in Celia, looking up in her
+      turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;her
+      bosom friends&mdash;say Catherine Seton&mdash;and she had talked with me
+      about it&mdash;I think I should have confessed to some forebodings&mdash;some
+      little misgivings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you know what she would have said?&rdquo; Edith's swift question, put
+      with a glowing face and a confident voice, had in it the ring of assured
+      triumph. &ldquo;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&mdash;or what I think to be one&mdash;and
+      I'm given to understand that he is a pirate and a murderer and an
+      unspeakable ruffian generally&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I&rdquo;&mdash;said Celia, rising after a moment's pause, and putting her
+      hand upon Edith's arm&mdash;&ldquo;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.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      AUGUST wore itself out in parched tedium, and a September began which
+      seemed even more unbearable in town,&mdash;and still Thorpe did not get
+      away from London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance, and the receipt of
+      innumerable letters from a restless and fussy steward whom he had not yet
+      seen, went as evidence, he knew himself to be the tenant in possession of
+      a great shooting in Morayshire. He had several photographs of what was
+      called the lodge, but looked like something between a mansion and a
+      baronial castle, on the mantel of the Board Room. The reflection that this
+      sumptuous residence had been his for a month, and that it daily stood
+      waiting for him, furnished and swept and provisioned for his coming, did
+      nothing to help the passing of time in the hot, fagged City. More than
+      once he had said resolutely that, on the morrow, or at the worst the next
+      day, he would go&mdash;but in the event he had not gone. In the last week
+      of August he had proceeded to the length of sending his niece and nephew
+      Northward, and shutting up the house in Ovington Square, and betaking
+      himself to the Savoy Hotel. This had appeared at the time to be almost
+      equivalent to his getting away himself,&mdash;to be at least a first stage
+      in the progress of his own journey. But at the hotel he had stuck fast,&mdash;and
+      now, on the tenth of September, was no nearer the moors and the
+      deer-forest than he had been a month before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A novel sense of loneliness,&mdash;of the fatuity of present existence,&mdash;weighed
+      grievously upon him. The ladies of Grafton Street had left town upon a
+      comprehensive itinerary of visits which included the Malvern country, and
+      a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in Westmoreland. There was
+      nothing very definite about the date of their coming to him in Scotland.
+      The lady who had consented to marry him had, somehow, omitted to promise
+      that she would write to him. An arrangement existed, instead, by which she
+      and his niece Julia were to correspond, and to fix between themselves the
+      details of the visit to Morayshire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement. He was
+      conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and there was
+      nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive love-letters
+      seem unnatural. The absence of moonshine, at least during this preliminary
+      season, had been quite taken for granted between them, and he did not
+      complain even to himself. There was even a kind of proud satisfaction for
+      him in the thought that, though he had all but completed the purchase of
+      the noble Pellesley estate for Edith Cressage, he had never yet kissed
+      her. The reserve he imposed upon himself gave him a certain aristocratic
+      fineness in his own eyes. It was the means by which he could feel himself
+      to be most nearly her equal. But he remained very lonely in London, none
+      the less.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that a great deal of society was continually offered to him,
+      and even thrust upon him. In the popular phrase, London was empty, but
+      there seemed to be more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont Thorpe'
+      s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre or card or
+      river parties. He clung sullenly to his rule of going nowhere, but it was
+      not so simple a matter to evade the civilities and importunities of those
+      who were stopping at the hotel, or who came there to waylay him at the
+      entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant. He could not always
+      refuse to sit down at tables when attractively-dressed and vivacious women
+      made room for him, or to linger over cigars and wine with their husbands
+      and escorts later on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An incessant and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups
+      of interested people who were rarely at the pains to dissemble their aims.
+      He formed a manner for the reception of these advances, compounded of
+      joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality, which nobody, to his face at
+      least, resented. If women winced under his mocking rudenesses of speech
+      and smile, if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of his refusal
+      to let them inside his guard, they sedulously kept it from him. The
+      consciousness that everybody was afraid of him,&mdash;that everybody would
+      kneel to him, and meekly take insult and ignominy from him, if only hope
+      remained to them of getting something out of him,&mdash;hardened like a
+      crust upon his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible to get a sense of companionship from people who cringed
+      to him, and swallowed his affronts and cackled at his jokes with equal
+      docility. Sometimes he had a passing amusement in the rough pleasantries
+      and cruelties which they drew from him. There were two or three bright
+      Jewish women, more gayly clever and impudent, perhaps, than beautiful,
+      with whom he found it genuine fun to talk, and concerning whom he was
+      perpetually conceiving projects which could not have been discussed with
+      their husbands, and as perpetually doing nothing to test their
+      feasibility. But these diversions were in their essence unsubstantial.
+      There was not even the semblance of a real friendship among them,&mdash;and
+      loneliness became an increasing burden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister at the old book-shop exasperated him nowadays to a degree which
+      often provoked within him the resolution to have done with her. He had a
+      score of projects for her betterment, each capable of as many variations
+      and eager adaptations to suit her fancy, but to them all and sundry she
+      opposed a barrier of stupidly passive negation. There was nothing she
+      wanted done for her. She would not exchange the work she had been brought
+      up in for a life of idleness. She did not want, and would not know what to
+      do with, a bigger shop than she had. An augmentation of her capital would
+      be of no use, because there was no room in the crowded little shop for a
+      larger stock than it contained. She was entirely satisfied with the dingy
+      home overhead, and declined to think even of moving elsewhere. Over and
+      over again she met his propositions with a saying which he could recall
+      having particularly hated on their father's lips,&mdash;&ldquo;It's ill teaching
+      an old dog new tricks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to have them taught you with a stick,&rdquo; he had told her roundly,
+      on the last occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had merely shrugged her gaunt shoulders at him. &ldquo;You think you can
+      bully everybody and make them crawl to you,&mdash;but there's no good your
+      trying it on with me,&rdquo; she had told him, and he had pushed his way out of
+      the shop almost stamping his feet. It was clear to him at that moment that
+      he would never darken her door again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet now, on this afternoon of the tenth, as he lounged with a cigar and a
+      City paper in his apartment at the hotel after luncheon, wondering whether
+      it were too hot to issue forth for a walk to the Park, the irrelevant idea
+      of going round to see his sister kept coming into his mind. He seated
+      himself and fastened his attention upon the paper,&mdash;but off it
+      slipped again to the old book-shop, and to that curious, cross-grained
+      figure, its mistress. He abandoned himself to thinking about her&mdash;and
+      discovered that a certain unique quality in her challenged his admiration.
+      She was the only absolutely disinterested person he knew&mdash;the only
+      creature in the world, apparently, who did not desire to make something
+      out of him. She was not at all well-off,&mdash;was indeed rather poor than
+      otherwise,&mdash;and here was her only brother a millionaire, and in her
+      dumb way she had a sisterly affection for him, and yet she could not be
+      argued or cajoled into touching a penny of his money. Surely there could
+      be no other woman like her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe realized that it was a distinction to have such a sister,&mdash;and
+      behind this thought rose obscurely the suggestion that there must be
+      wonderful blood in a race which had produced such a daughter. And for that
+      matter, such a son too! He lifted his head, and looked abstractedly before
+      him, as if he were gazing at some apotheosis of himself in a mirror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He beheld all at once something concrete and personal, obtruded into the
+      heart of his reverie, the sight of which dimly astounded him. For the
+      moment, with opened lips he stared at it,&mdash;then slowly brought
+      himself to comprehend what had happened. An old man had by some oversight
+      of the hotel servants been allowed to enter the room unannounced. He had
+      wandered in noiselessly, and had moved in a purblind fashion to the centre
+      of the apartment. The vagueness of the expression on his face and of his
+      movements hinted at a vacant mind or too much drink,&mdash;but Thorpe gave
+      no thought to either hypothesis. The face itself&mdash;no&mdash;yes&mdash;it
+      was the face of old Tavender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the name of God! What are you doing here?&rdquo; Thorpe gasped at this
+      extraordinary apparition. Still staring, he began to push back his chair
+      and put his weight upon his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;Thorpe&rdquo;&mdash;the other began, thrusting forward his head to
+      look through his spectacles&mdash;&ldquo;so it is you, after all. I didn't know
+      whether I was going to find you or not. This place has got so many turns
+      and twists to it&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But good heavens!&rdquo; interposed the bewildered Thorpe. He had risen to his
+      feet. He mechanically took the hand which the other had extended to him.
+      &ldquo;What in hell&rdquo;&mdash;he began, and broke off again. The aroma of alcohol
+      on the air caught his sense, and his mind stopped at the perception that
+      Tavender was more or less drunk. He strove to spur it forward, to compel
+      it to encompass the meanings of this new crisis, but almost in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thought I'd look you up,&rdquo; said the old man, buoyantly. &ldquo;Nobody in London
+      I'd rather see than you. How are you, anyway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you come over for? When did you get here?&rdquo; Thorpe put the
+      questions automatically. His self-control was returning to him; his
+      capable brain pushed forward now under something like disciplined
+      direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why I guess I owe it all to you,&rdquo; replied Tavender. Traces of the old
+      Quaker effect which had been so characteristic of him still hung about his
+      garb and mien, but there shone a new assurance on his benignant, rubicund
+      face. Prosperity had visibly liberalized and enheartened him. He shook
+      Thorpe's hand again. &ldquo;Yes, sir&mdash;it must have been all through you!&rdquo;
+       he repeated. &ldquo;I got my cable three weeks ago&mdash;'Hasten to London,
+      urgent business, expenses and liberal fee guaranteed, Rubber Consols'&mdash;that's
+      what the cable said, that is, the first one and of course you're the man
+      that introduced me to those rubber people. And so don't you see I owe it
+      all to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His insistence upon his obligation was suddenly almost tearful. Thorpe
+      thought hard as he replied: &ldquo;Oh&mdash;that's all right. I'm very glad
+      indeed to have helped you along. And so you came over for the Rubber
+      Consols people, eh? Well&mdash;that's good. Seen 'em yet? You haven't told
+      me when you landed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Came up from Southampton this morning. My brother-in-law was down there
+      to meet me. We came up to London together.&rdquo; &ldquo;Your brother-in-law,&rdquo;
+       observed Thorpe, meditatively. Some shadowy, remote impression of having
+      forgotten something troubled his mind for an instant. &ldquo;Is your
+      brother-in-law in the rubber business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Extraor'nary thing,&rdquo; explained Tavender, beamingly, &ldquo;he don't know no
+      more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon. I asked him today&mdash;but
+      he couldn't tell me anything about the business&mdash;what it was I'd been
+      sent for, or anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he&mdash;he knew you'd been sent for,&rdquo; Thorpe commented upon brief
+      reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, he sent the second cable himself&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What second cable?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why it was the next day,&mdash;or maybe it was sent that same night, and
+      not delivered till morning,&mdash;I got another cable, this time from my
+      brother-in-law, telling me to cable him what ship I sailed on and when. So
+      of course he knew all about it&mdash;but now he says he don't. He's a
+      curious sort of fellow, anyway.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how is he mixed up in it?&rdquo; demanded Thorpe, impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, as nearly as I can figure it out, he works for one of the men
+      that's at the head of this rubber company. It appears that he happened to
+      show this man&mdash;he's a man of title, by the way&mdash;a letter I wrote
+      to him last spring, when I got back to Mexico&mdash;and so in that way
+      this man, when he wanted me to come over, just told Gafferson to cable to
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gafferson,&rdquo; Thorpe repeated, very slowly, and with almost an effect of
+      listlessness. He was conscious of no surprise; it was as if he had divined
+      all along the sinister shadows of Lord Plowden and Lord Plowden's
+      gardener, lurking in the obscurity behind this egregious old ass of a
+      Tavender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a tremendous horticultural sharp,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;Probably you've
+      heard tell of him. He's taken medals for new flowers and things till you
+      can't rest. He's over at&mdash;what do you call it?&mdash;the Royal
+      Aquarium, now, to see the Dahlia Show. I went over there with him, but it
+      didn't seem to be my kind of a show, and so I left him there, and I'm to
+      look in again for him at 5:30. I'm going down to his place in the country
+      with him tonight, to meet his boss&mdash;the nobleman I spoke of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's nice,&rdquo; Thorpe commented, slowly. &ldquo;I envy anybody who can get into
+      the country these days. But how did you know I was here?&rdquo; &ldquo;The woman in
+      the book-store told me&mdash;I went there the first thing. You might be
+      sure I'd look you up. Nobody was ever a better friend than you've been to
+      me, Thorpe. And do you know what I want you to do? I want you to come
+      right bang out, now, and have a drink with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of something of the sort myself,&rdquo; the big man replied.
+      &ldquo;I'll get my hat, and be with you in a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the next room he relinquished his countenance to a frown of fierce
+      perplexity. More than a minute passed in this scowling preoccupation. Then
+      his face lightened with the relief of an idea, and he stepped confidently
+      back into the parlour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along,&rdquo; he said, jovially. &ldquo;We'll have a drink downstairs, and then
+      we'll drive up to Hanover Square and see if we can't find a friend of mine
+      at his club.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the office below he stopped long enough to secure a considerable roll
+      of bank-notes in exchange for a cheque. A little later, a hansom deposited
+      the couple at the door of the Asian Club, and Thorpe, in the outer hallway
+      of this institution, clicked his teeth in satisfaction at the news that
+      General Kervick was on the premises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The General, having been found by a boy and brought down, extended to his
+      guests a hospitality which was none the less urbane for the evidences of
+      surprise with which it was seasoned. He concealed so indifferently his
+      inability to account for Tavender, that the anxious Thorpe grew annoyed
+      with him, but happily Tavender's perceptions were less subtle. He gazed
+      about him in his dim-eyed way with childlike interest, and babbled
+      cheerfully over his liquor. He had not been inside a London club before,
+      and his glimpse of the reading-room, where, isolated, purple-faced,
+      retired old Empire-makers sat snorting in the silence, their gouty feet
+      propped up on foot-rests, their white brows scowling over the pages of
+      French novels, particularly impressed him. It was a new and halcyon vision
+      of the way to spend one's declining years. And the big smoking-room&mdash;where
+      the leather cushions were so low and so soft, and the connection between
+      the bells and the waiters was so efficient&mdash;that was even better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe presently made an excuse for taking Kervick apart. &ldquo;I brought this
+      old jackass here for a purpose,&rdquo; he said in low, gravely mandatory tones.
+      &ldquo;He thinks he's got an appointment at 5:30 this afternoon&mdash;but he's
+      wrong. He hasn't. He's not going to have any appointment at all&mdash;for
+      a long time yet. I want you to get him drunk, there where he sits, and
+      then take him away with you, and get him drunker still, and then take a
+      train with him somewhere&mdash;any station but Charing Cross or that line&mdash;and
+      I don't care where you land with him&mdash;Scotland or Ireland or France&mdash;whatever
+      you like. Here's some money for you&mdash;and you can write to me for
+      more. I don't care what you say to him&mdash;make up any yarn you like&mdash;only
+      keep him pacified, and keep him away from London, and don't let a living
+      soul talk to him&mdash;till I give you the word. You'll let me know where
+      you are. I'll get away now&mdash;and mind, General, a good deal depends on
+      the way you please me in this thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The soldier's richly-florid face and intent, bulging blue eyes expressed
+      vivid comprehension. He nodded with eloquence as he slipped the notes into
+      his trousers pocket. &ldquo;Absolutely,&rdquo; he murmured with martial brevity, from
+      under his white, tight moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With only a vague word or two of meaningless explanation to Tavender,
+      Thorpe took his departure, and walked back to the hotel. From what he had
+      learned and surmised, it was not difficult to put the pieces of the puzzle
+      together. This ridiculous old fool, he remembered now, had reproached
+      himself, when he was in England before, for his uncivil neglect of his
+      brother-in-law. By some absurd chance, this damned brother-in-law happened
+      to be Gafferson. It was clear enough that, when he returned to Mexico,
+      Tavender had written to Gafferson, explaining the unexpected pressure of
+      business which had taken up all his time in England. Probably he had been
+      idiot enough to relate what he of course regarded as the most wonderful
+      piece of good news&mdash;how the worthless concession he had been deluded
+      into buying had been bought back from him. As likely as not he had even
+      identified the concession, and given Thorpe's name as that of the man who
+      had first impoverished and then mysteriously enriched him. At all events,
+      he had clearly mentioned that he had a commission to report upon the
+      Rubber Consols property, and had said enough else to create the impression
+      that there were criminal secrets connected with its sale to the London
+      Company. The rest was easy. Gafferson, knowing Lord Plowden's relation to
+      the Company, had shown him Tavender's letter. Lord Plowden, meditating
+      upon it, had seen a way to be nasty&mdash;and had vindictively plunged
+      into it. He had brought Tavender from Mexico to London, to use him as a
+      weapon. All this was as obvious as the nose on one's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a weapon for what? Thorpe, as this question put itself in his mind,
+      halted before a shop-window full of soft-hued silk fabrics, to muse upon
+      an answer. The delicate tints and surfaces of what was before his eyes
+      seemed somehow to connect themselves with the subject. Plowden himself was
+      delicately-tinted and refined of texture. Vindictiveness was too plain and
+      coarse an emotion to sway such a complicated and polished organism. He
+      reasoned it out, as he stood with lack-lustre gaze before the plate-glass
+      front, aloof among a throng of eager and talkative women who pressed
+      around him&mdash;that Plowden would not have spent his money on a mere
+      impulse of mischief-making. He would be counting upon something more
+      tangible than revenge&mdash;something that could be counted and weighed
+      and converted into a bank-balance. He smiled when he reached this
+      conclusion&mdash;greatly surprising and confusing a matronly lady into
+      whose correct face he chanced to be looking at the instant&mdash;and
+      turning slowly, continued his walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the office of the hotel, he much regretted not having driven instead,
+      for he learned that Semple had twice telephoned from the City for him. It
+      was late in the afternoon&mdash;he noted with satisfaction that the clock
+      showed it to be already past the hour of the Tavender-Gafferson
+      appointment,&mdash;but he had Semple's office called up, upon the chance
+      that someone might be there. The clerk had not consumed more than ten
+      minutes in the preliminaries of finding out that no one was there&mdash;Thorpe
+      meanwhile passing savage comments to the other clerks about the British
+      official conception of the telephone as an instrument of discipline and
+      humiliation&mdash;when Semple himself appeared in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Broker gave an exclamation of relief at seeing Thorpe, and then,
+      apparently indifferent to the display of excitement he was exhibiting,
+      drew him aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come somewhere where we can talk,&rdquo; he whispered nervously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had never seen the little Scotchman in such a flurry. &ldquo;We'll go up
+      to my rooms,&rdquo; he said, and led the way to the lift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upstairs, Semple bolted the door of the sitting-room behind them, and
+      satisfied himself that there was no one in the adjoining bedroom. Then,
+      unburdening himself with another sigh, he tossed aside his hat, and looked
+      keenly up at the big man. &ldquo;There's the devil to pay,&rdquo; he said briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had a fleeting pride in the lethargic, composed front he was able
+      to present. &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said with forced placidity. &ldquo;If he's got to be
+      paid, we'll pay him.&rdquo; He continued to smile a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nah joke,&rdquo; the other hastened to warn him. &ldquo;I have it from two
+      different quarters. An application has been made to the Stock Exchange
+      Committee, this afternoon, to intervene and stop our business, on the
+      ground of fraud. It comes verra straight to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe regarded his Broker contemplatively. The news fitted with precision
+      into what he had previously known; it was rendered altogether harmless by
+      the precautions he had already taken. &ldquo;Well, keep your hair on,&rdquo; he said,
+      quietly. &ldquo;If there were fifty applications, they wouldn't matter the worth
+      of that soda-water cork. Won't you have a drink?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple, upon reflection, said he would. The unmoved equipoise of the big
+      man visibly reassured him. He sipped at his bubbling tumbler and smacked
+      his thin lips. &ldquo;Man, I've had an awful fright,&rdquo; he said at last, in the
+      tone of one whose ease of mind is returning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gave you credit for more nerve,&rdquo; observed the other, eyeing him in not
+      unkindly fashion over his glass. &ldquo;You've been so plumb full of sand all
+      the while&mdash;I didn't think you'd weaken now. Why, we're within two
+      days of home, now&mdash;and for you to get rattled at this late hour&mdash;you
+      ought to be ashamed of yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Scotchman looked into the bottom of his glass, as he turned it
+      thoughtfully round. &ldquo;I'm relieved to see the way you take it,&rdquo; he said,
+      after a pause. With increased hesitation he went dryly on: &ldquo;I've never
+      enquired minutely into the circumstances of the flotation. It has not
+      seemed to be my business to do so, and upon advice I may say that the
+      Committee would not hold that such was my business. My position is quite
+      clear, upon that point.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, perfectly,&rdquo; Thorpe assented. &ldquo;It couldn't possibly be any of your
+      business&mdash;either then, or now.&rdquo; He gave a significant touch of
+      emphasis to these last two words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Semple, with a glance of swift comprehension. &ldquo;You must
+      not think I am asking any intrusive questions. If you tell me that&mdash;that
+      there is no ground for uneasiness&mdash;I am verra pleased indeed to
+      accept the assurance. That is ample information for my purposes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can take it from me,&rdquo; Thorpe told him. He picked up a red book from a
+      side table, and turned over its pages with his thick thumb. &ldquo;This is what
+      Rule 59 says,&rdquo; he went on: &ldquo;'NO APPLICATION WHICH HAS FOR ITS OBJECT TO
+      ANNUL ANY BARGAIN IN THE STOCK EXCHANGE SHALL BE ENTERTAINED BY THE
+      COMMITTEE, UNLESS UPON A SPECIFIC ALLEGATION OF FRAUD OR WILFUL
+      MISREPRESENTATION.' Shall be entertained, d'ye see? They can't even
+      consider anything of the sort, because it says 'specific,' and I tell you
+      plainly that anything 'specific' is entirely out of the question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Broker lifted his sandy brows in momentary apprehension. &ldquo;If it turns
+      upon the precise definition of a word,&rdquo; he remarked, doubtingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes,&mdash;but it doesn't,&rdquo; Thorpe reassured him. &ldquo;See here&mdash;I'll
+      tell you something. You're not asking any questions. That's as it should
+      be. And I'm not forcing information upon you which you don't need in your
+      business. That's as it should be, too. But in between these two, there's a
+      certain margin of facts that there's no harm in your knowing. A scheme to
+      blackmail me is on foot. It's rather a fool-scheme, if you ask me, but it
+      might have been a nuisance if it had been sprung on us unawares. It
+      happened, however, that I twigged this scheme about two hours ago. It was
+      the damnedest bit of luck you ever heard of&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't have luck,&rdquo; put in Semple, appreciatively. &ldquo;Other men have
+      luck. You have something else&mdash;I don't give it a name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe smiled upon him, and went on. &ldquo;I twigged it, anyway. I went out,
+      and I drove the biggest kind of spike through that fool-scheme&mdash;plumb
+      through its heart. Tomorrow a certain man will come to me&mdash;oh, I
+      could almost tell you the kind of neck-tie he'll wear&mdash;and he'll put
+      up his bluff to me, and I'll hear him out&mdash;and then&mdash;then I'll
+      let the floor drop out from under him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye!&rdquo; said Semple, with relish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay and dine with me tonight,&rdquo; Thorpe impulsively suggested, &ldquo;and we'll
+      go to some Music Hall afterward. There's a knock-about pantomime outfit at
+      the Canterbury&mdash;Martinetti I think the name is&mdash;that's damned
+      good. You get plenty of laugh, and no tiresome blab to listen to. The
+      older I get, the more I think of people that keep their mouths shut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; observed Semple again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN the Board Room, next day, Thorpe awaited the coming of Lord Plowden
+      with the serene confidence of a prophet who not only knows that he is
+      inspired, but has had an illicit glimpse into the workings of the
+      machinery of events.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat motionless at his desk, like a big spider for who time has no
+      meaning. Before him lay two newspapers, folded so as to expose paragraphs
+      heavily indicated by blue pencil-marks. They were not financial journals,
+      and for that reason it was improbable that he would have seen these
+      paragraphs, if the Secretary of the Company had not marked them, and
+      brought them to him. That official had been vastly more fluttered by them
+      than he found it possible to be. In slightly-varying language, these two
+      items embedded in so-called money articles reported the rumour that a
+      charge of fraud had arisen in connection with the Rubber Consols corner,
+      and that sensational disclosures were believed to be impending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe looked with a dulled, abstracted eye at these papers, lying on the
+      desk, and especially at the blue pencil-lines upon them, as he pondered
+      many things. Their statement, thus scattered broadcast to the public,
+      seemed at once to introduce a new element into the situation, and to leave
+      it unchanged. That influence of some sort had been exerted to get this
+      story into these papers, it did not occur to him for an instant to doubt.
+      To his view, all things that were put into papers were put there for a
+      purpose&mdash;it would express his notion more clearly, perhaps, to say
+      for a price. Of the methods of Fleet Street, he was profoundly ignorant,
+      but his impressions of them were all cynical. Upon reflection, however, it
+      seemed unlikely to him that Lord Plowden had secured the insertion of
+      these rumours. So far as Thorpe could fathom that nobleman's game, its
+      aims would not be served by premature publicity of this kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually, the outlines of a more probable combination took shape in his
+      thoughts. There were left in the grip of the &ldquo;corner&rdquo; now only two
+      victims,&mdash;Rostocker and Aronson. They owed this invidious
+      differentiation to a number of causes: they had been the chief sellers of
+      stock, being between them responsible for the delivery of 8,500 Rubber
+      Consols shares, which they could not get; they were men of larger fortune
+      than the other &ldquo;shorts,&rdquo; and therefore could with safety be squeezed
+      longest; what was fortunate for him under the circumstances, they were the
+      two men against whom Thorpe's personal grudge seemed able to maintain
+      itself most easily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For these reasons, they had already been mulcted in differences to the
+      extent of, in round numbers, 165,000 pounds. On the morrow, the twelfth of
+      September, it was Thorpe's plan to allow them to buy in the shares they
+      needed, at 22 or 23 pounds per share&mdash;which would take from them
+      nearly 200,000 pounds more. He had satisfied himself that they could, and
+      would if necessary, pay this enormous ransom for their final escape from
+      the &ldquo;corner.&rdquo; Partly because it was not so certain that they could pay
+      more, partly because he was satiated with spoils and tired of the strain
+      of the business, he had decided to permit this escape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He realized now, however, that they on their side had planned to escape
+      without paying any final ransom at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was clearly the meaning of these paragraphs, and of the
+      representations which had yesterday been made to the Stock Exchange
+      Committee. He had additional knowledge today of the character of these
+      representations. Nothing definite had been alleged, but some of the
+      members of the Committee had been informally notified, so Semple had this
+      morning learned, that a specific charge of fraud, supported by
+      unanswerable proof, was to be brought against the Rubber Consols
+      management on the morrow. Thorpe reasoned out now, step by step, what that
+      meant. Lord Plowden had sought out Rostocker and Aronson, and had told
+      them that he had it in his power ignominiously to break the &ldquo;corner.&rdquo; He
+      could hardly have told them the exact nature of his power, because until
+      he should have seen Tavender he did not himself know what it was. But he
+      had given them to understand that he could prove fraud, and they, scenting
+      in this the chance of saving 200,000 pounds, and seeing that time was so
+      terribly short, had hastened to the Committeemen with this vague
+      declaration that, on the morrow, they could prove&mdash;they did not
+      precisely know what. Yes&mdash;plainly enough&mdash;that was what had
+      happened. And it would be these two Jew &ldquo;wreckers,&rdquo; eager to invest their
+      speculative notification to the Committee with as much of an air of
+      formality as possible, who had caused the allusions to it to be published
+      in these papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's lustreless eye suddenly twinkled with mirth as he reached this
+      conclusion; his heavy face brightened into a grin of delight. A vision of
+      Lord Plowden's absurd predicament rose vividly before him, and he chuckled
+      aloud at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed only the most natural thing in the world that, at this instant,
+      a clerk should open the door and nod with meaning to the master. The
+      visitor whom he had warned the people in the outer office he expected, had
+      arrived. Thorpe was still laughing to himself when Lord Plowden entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo! How d'ye do!&rdquo; he called out to him from where he sat at his desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hilarity of the manner into which he had been betrayed, upon the
+      instant surprised and rather confused him. He had not been altogether
+      clear as to how he should receive Plowden, but certainly a warm joviality
+      had not occurred to him as appropriate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nobleman was even more taken aback. He stared momentarily at the big
+      man's beaming mask, and then, with nervous awkwardness, executed a series
+      of changes in his own facial expression and demeanour. He flushed red,
+      opened his lips to say &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; and then twisted them into a doubting and
+      seemingly painful smile. He looked with very bright-eyed intentness at
+      Thorpe, as he advanced, and somewhat spasmodically put out his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to Thorpe not to see this hand. &ldquo;How are you!&rdquo; he repeated in
+      a more mechanical voice, and withdrew his smile. Lord Plowden fidgeted on
+      his feet for a brief, embarrassed interval before the desk, and then
+      dropped into a chair at its side. With a deliberate effort at nonchalance,
+      he crossed his legs, and caressed the ankle on his knee with a careless
+      hand. &ldquo;Anything new?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe lolled back in his arm-chair. &ldquo;I'm going to be able to get away in
+      a few days' time,&rdquo; he said, indifferently. &ldquo;I expect to finally wind up
+      the business on the Stock Exchange tomorrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah&mdash;yes,&rdquo; commented Plowden, vacantly. He seemed to be searching
+      after thoughts which had wandered astray. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;of course,&rdquo; Thorpe said after him, with a latent touch of
+      significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other looked up quickly, then glanced away again. &ldquo;It's all going as
+      you expected, is it?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better than I expected,&rdquo; Thorpe told him, energetically. &ldquo;Much better
+      than anybody expected.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hah!&rdquo; said Plowden. After a moment's reflection he went on hesitatingly:
+      &ldquo;I didn't know. I saw something in one of the papers this morning,&mdash;one
+      of the money articles,&mdash;which spoke as if there were some doubt about
+      the result. That's why I called.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;it's damned good of you to come round, and show such a
+      friendly interest.&rdquo; Thorpe's voice seemed candid enough, but there was an
+      enigmatic something in his glance which aroused the other's distrust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid you don't take very much stock in the 'friendly interest,'&rdquo; he
+      said, with a constrained little laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not taking stock in anything new just now,&rdquo; replied Thorpe, lending
+      himself lazily to the other's metaphor. &ldquo;I'm loaded up to the gunnels
+      already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A minute of rather oppressive silence ensued. Then Plowden ventured upon
+      an opening. &ldquo;All the same, it WAS with an idea of,&mdash;perhaps being of
+      use to you,&mdash;that I came here,&rdquo; he affirmed. &ldquo;In what way?&rdquo; Thorpe
+      put the query almost listlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden turned his hands and let his dark eyes sparkle in a gesture
+      of amiable uncertainty. &ldquo;That depended upon what was needed. I got the
+      impression that you were in trouble&mdash;the paper spoke as if there were
+      no doubt of it&mdash;and I imagined that quite probably you would be glad
+      to talk with me about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite right,&rdquo; said Thorpe. &ldquo;So I should.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This comprehensive assurance seemed not, however, to facilitate
+      conversation. The nobleman looked at the pattern of the sock on the ankle
+      he was nursing, and knitted his brows in perplexity. &ldquo;What if the
+      Committee of the Stock Exchange decide to interfere?&rdquo; he asked at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that would knock me sky-high,&rdquo; Thorpe admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Approximately, how much may one take 'sky-high' to mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe appeared to calculate. &ldquo;Almost anything up to a quarter of a
+      million,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hah!&rdquo; said Lord Plowden again. &ldquo;Well&mdash;I understand&mdash;I'm given
+      to understand&mdash;that very likely that is what the Committee will
+      decide.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it say that in the papers?&rdquo; asked Thorpe. He essayed an effect of
+      concern. &ldquo;Where did you see that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't see it,&rdquo; the other explained. &ldquo;It&mdash;it came to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God!&rdquo; said Thorpe. &ldquo;That'll be awful! But are you really in earnest? Is
+      that what you hear? And does it come at all straight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden nodded portentously. &ldquo;Absolutely straight,&rdquo; he said, with
+      gravity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, after a momentary stare of what looked like bewilderment, was seen
+      to clutch at a straw. &ldquo;But what was it you were saying?&rdquo; he demanded, with
+      eagerness. &ldquo;You talked about help&mdash;a minute ago. Did you mean it?
+      Have you got a plan? Is there something that you can do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Plowden weighed his words. &ldquo;It would be necessary to have a very complete
+      understanding,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever you like,&rdquo; exclaimed the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me&mdash;it would have to be a good deal more definite than that,&rdquo;
+       Plowden declared. &ldquo;A 'burnt child'&mdash;you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The big man tapped musingly with his finger-nails on the desk. &ldquo;We won't
+      quarrel about that,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But what I'd like to know first,&mdash;you
+      needn't give anything away that you don't want to,&mdash;but what's your
+      plan? You say that they've got me in a hole, and that you can get me out.&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;In effect&mdash;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how do you know that I can't get myself out? What do you know about
+      the whole thing anyway? Supposing I tell you that I laugh at it&mdash;that
+      there's no more ground for raising the suspicion of fraud than there is
+      for&mdash;for suspecting that you've got wings and can fly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I don't think you'll tell me that,&rdquo; said Plowden, placidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then, supposing I don't tell you that,&rdquo; the other resumed,
+      argumentatively. &ldquo;Supposing I say instead that it can't be proved. If the
+      Committee doesn't have proof NOW,&mdash;within twenty-one or twenty-two
+      hours,&mdash;they can't do anything at all. Tomorrow is settling day. All
+      along, I've said I would wind up the thing tomorrow. The market-price has
+      been made for me by the jobbers yesterday and today. I'm all ready to end
+      the whole business tomorrow&mdash;close it all out. And after that's done,
+      what do I care about the Stock Exchange Committee? They can investigate
+      and be damned! What could they do to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think a man can always be arrested and indicted, and sent to penal
+      servitude,&rdquo; said Lord Plowden, with a certain solemnity of tone. &ldquo;There
+      are even well-known instances of extradition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe buried his chin deep in his collar, and regarded his companion with
+      a fixed gaze, in which the latter detected signs of trepidation. &ldquo;But
+      about the Committee&mdash;and tomorrow,&rdquo; he said slowly. &ldquo;What do you say
+      about that? How can they act in that lightning fashion? And even if proofs
+      could be got, how do you suppose they are to be got on the drop of the
+      hat, at a minute's notice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The case is of sufficient importance to warrant a special meeting
+      tomorrow morning,&rdquo; the other rejoined. &ldquo;One hour's notice, posted in the
+      House, is sufficient, I believe. Any three members of the Committee can
+      call such a meeting, and I understand that seven make a quorum. You will
+      see that a meeting could be held at noon tomorrow, and within half an hour
+      could make you a ruined man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know&mdash;would you call it quite ruined?&rdquo; commented Thorpe. &ldquo;I
+      should still have a few sovereigns to go on with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A criminal prosecution would be practically inevitable&mdash;after such a
+      disclosure,&rdquo; Plowden reminded him, with augmented severity of tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't mix the two things up,&rdquo; the other urged. There seemed to the
+      listener to be supplication in the voice. &ldquo;It's the action of the
+      Committee that you said you could influence. That's what we were talking
+      about. You say there will be a special meeting at noon tomorrow&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said there could be one,&rdquo; Plowden corrected him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. There CAN be one. And do you say that there can be proof,&mdash;proof
+      against me of fraud,&mdash;produced at that meeting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I say that,&rdquo; the nobleman affirmed, quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And further still&mdash;do you say that it rests with you whether that
+      proof shall be produced or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden looked into the impassive, deep-eyed gaze which covered him,
+      and looked away from it again. &ldquo;I haven't put it in just that form,&rdquo; he
+      said, hesitatingly. &ldquo;But in essentials&mdash;yes, that may be taken as
+      true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is your figure? How much do you want for holding this proof of
+      yours back, and letting me finish scooping the money of your Hebrew
+      friends Aronson and Rostocker?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peer raised his head, and shot a keenly enquiring glance at the other.
+      &ldquo;Are they my friends?&rdquo; he asked, with challenging insolence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm bound to assume that you have been dealing with them, just as you are
+      dealing with me.&rdquo; Thorpe explained his meaning dispassionately, as if the
+      transaction were entirely commonplace. &ldquo;You tell them that you're in a
+      position to produce proof against me, and ask them what they'll give for
+      it. Then naturally enough you come to me, and ask what I'll be willing to
+      pay to have the proof suppressed. I quite understand that I must bid
+      against these men&mdash;and of course I take it for granted that, since
+      you know their figure, you've arranged in your mind what mine is to be. I
+      quite understand, too, that I am to pay more than they have offered. That
+      is on account of 'friendly interest.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since you allude to it,&rdquo; Lord Plowden observed, with a certain calm
+      loftiness of tone, &ldquo;there is no harm in saying that you WILL pay something
+      on that old score. Once you thrust the promise of something like a hundred
+      thousand pounds positively upon me. You insisted on my believing it, and I
+      did so, like a fool. I came to you to redeem the promise, and you laughed
+      in my face. Very well. It is my turn now. I hold the whip-hand, and I
+      should be an ass not to remember things. I shall want that entire one
+      hundred thousand pounds from you, and fifty thousand added to it 'on
+      account of the 'friendly interest,' as you so intelligently expressed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe's chin burrowed still deeper upon his breast. &ldquo;It's an outrage,&rdquo; he
+      said with feeling. Then he added, in tones of dejected resignation: &ldquo;When
+      will you want it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the moment when the payments of Rostocker and Aronson are made to you,
+      or to your bankers or agents,&rdquo; Lord Plowden replied, with prepared
+      facility. He had evidently given much thought to this part of the
+      proceedings. &ldquo;And of course I shall expect you to draw up now an agreement
+      to that effect. I happen to have a stamped paper with me this time. And if
+      you don't mind, we will have it properly witnessed&mdash;this time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe looked at him with a disconcertingly leaden stare, the while he
+      thought over what had been proposed. &ldquo;That's right enough,&rdquo; he announced
+      at last, &ldquo;but I shall expect you to do some writing too. Since we're
+      dealing on this basis, there must be no doubt about the guarantee that you
+      will perform your part of the contract.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The performance itself, since payment is conditional upon it&mdash;&rdquo;
+       began Plowden, but the other interrupted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I want something better than that. Here&mdash;give me your stamped
+      paper.&rdquo; He took the bluish sheet, and, without hesitation, wrote several
+      lines rapidly. &ldquo;Here&mdash;this is my promise,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to pay you
+      150,000 pounds, upon your satisfactory performance of a certain
+      undertaking to be separately nominated in a document called 'A,' which we
+      will jointly draw up and agree to and sign, and deposit wherever you like&mdash;for
+      safe keeping. Now, if you'll sit here, and write out for me a similar
+      thing&mdash;that in consideration of my promise of 150,000 pounds, you
+      covenant to perform the undertaking to be nominated in the document 'A'&mdash;and
+      so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden treated as a matter of course the ready and business-like
+      suggestion of the other. Taking his place at the desk in turn, he wrote
+      out what had been suggested. Thorpe touched a bell, and the clerk who came
+      in perfunctorily attested the signatures upon both papers. Each principal
+      folded and pocketed the pledge of the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Thorpe, when he had seated himself again at the desk, &ldquo;we are
+      all right so far as protection against each other goes. If you don't mind,
+      I will draw up a suggestion of what the separate document 'A' should set
+      forth. If you don't like it, you can write one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took more time to this task, frowning laboriously over the fresh sheet
+      of foolscap, and screening from observation with his hand what he was
+      writing. Finally, the task seemed finished to his mind. He took up the
+      paper, glanced through it once more, and handed it in silence to the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In silence also, and with an expression of arrested attention, Lord
+      Plowden read these lines:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The undertaking referred to in the two documents of even date, signed
+      respectively by Lord Plowden and Stormont Thorpe, is to the effect that at
+      some hour between eleven A.M. and three P.M. of September 12th, instant,
+      Lord Plowden shall produce before a special meeting of the Committee of
+      the Stock Exchange, the person of one Jerome P. Tavender, to explain to
+      said Committee his share in the blackmailing scheme of which Lord Plowden,
+      over his own signature, has furnished documentary evidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nobleman continued to look down at the paper, after the power to hold
+      it without shaking had left his hand. There came into his face, mingling
+      with and vitiating its rich natural hues of health, a kind of grey shadow.
+      It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint. He did not
+      lift his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation of his trick with
+      boisterous and scornful mirth. Even while the victim was deciphering the
+      fatal paper, he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst out
+      into bitter laughter. But now there was something in the aspect of
+      Plowden's collapse which seemed to forbid triumphant derision. He was
+      taking his blow so like a gentleman,&mdash;ashen-pale and quivering, but
+      clinging to a high-bred dignity of silence,&mdash;that the impulse to
+      exhibit equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;you see how little business you've got, setting yourself to
+      buck against a grown-up man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He offered the observation in the tone of the school-teacher, affectedly
+      philosophical but secretly jubilant, who harangues a defeated and
+      humiliated urchin upon his folly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, chuck it!&rdquo; growled Lord Plowden, staring still at the calamitous
+      paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence was after all
+      most decorous. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and tipping
+      back his chair, surveyed the discomfited Viscount impassively. He forbore
+      even to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!&rdquo; Lord Plowden had found
+      words at last. As he spoke, he lifted his face, and made a show of looking
+      the other in the eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even, that you haven't
+      an inkling of,&rdquo; Thorpe told him, lightly. &ldquo;I've been watching every move
+      you've made, seeing further ahead in your own game than you did. Why, it
+      was too easy! It was like playing draughts with a girl. I knew you would
+      come today, for example. I told the people out there that I expected you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes-s,&rdquo; said the other, with rueful bewilderment. &ldquo;You seem to have been
+      rather on the spot&mdash;I confess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the spot? All over the place!&rdquo; Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his
+      chair, and put more animation into his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the mistake you people make!&rdquo; he declared oracularly. &ldquo;You think
+      that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great
+      combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the
+      smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em, and
+      make for himself a big fortune&mdash;and still be a fool! You imagine that
+      a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked by amateurs like
+      yourself. It's too ridiculous!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun
+      to spread through Plowden's consciousness. It was almost more surprising
+      to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed himself
+      to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept back into his
+      glance. He breathed more easily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are right!&rdquo; he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of
+      fervid conviction to the tone of his words. The big brute's pride in his
+      own brains and power was still his weakest point. &ldquo;You are right! I did
+      play the fool. And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first man
+      in London to recognize the immense forces in you. I said to you at the
+      very outset, 'You are going to go far. You are going to be a great man.'
+      You remember that, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I remember it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket,
+      and extracted a match. &ldquo;Do you mind?&rdquo; he asked, and scarcely waiting for a
+      token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied it
+      to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. The two men watched it
+      curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate, without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of the
+      situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it became
+      almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his
+      feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me,&rdquo; he said, in an
+      altered, harsh tone, &ldquo;but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old bum of a
+      Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and he's a
+      worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what one of
+      these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and spend
+      your money,&mdash;money I gave you, by the way,&mdash;in bringing Tavender
+      over here. You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using him
+      against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for a
+      still bigger profit. You see it's all at my fingers' ends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then&mdash;Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to
+      meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've set out to fight one of the
+      smartest and strongest men in England, and I've got to keep every atom of
+      wits about me, and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every point
+      of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it! You snooze in
+      bed, and you send Gafferson&mdash;Gafferson!&mdash;the mud-head of the
+      earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and bring
+      him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My God! You've only
+      got two clear days left to do the whole thing in&mdash;and you don't even
+      come up to town to get ready for them! You send Gafferson&mdash;and he
+      goes off to see a flower-show&mdash;Mother of Moses! think of it! a
+      FLOWER-show!&mdash;and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll
+      together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so on,
+      to our hearts' content. Really, it's too easy! You make me tired!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nobleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile. &ldquo;I confess to a
+      certain degree of weariness myself,&rdquo; he said, humbly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion for a little. &ldquo;I
+      may tell you that if you HAD got hold of Tavender,&rdquo; he decided to tell
+      him, &ldquo;he shouldn't have been of the faintest use to you. I know what it
+      was that he wrote to Gafferson,&mdash;I couldn't understand it when he
+      first told me, but afterwards I saw through it,&mdash;and it was merely a
+      maudlin misapprehension of his. He'd got three or four things all mixed up
+      together. You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd enjoy
+      him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred yards off. What little
+      brain he's got left is soaked in it. The first time I was ever camping
+      with him, I had to lick him for drinking the methylated spirits we were
+      using with our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evidently,&rdquo; said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, &ldquo;it was all a most
+      unfortunate and&mdash;ah&mdash;most deplorable mistake.&rdquo; With inspiration,
+      he made bold to add: &ldquo;The most amazing thing, though&mdash;to my mind&mdash;is
+      that you don't seem&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;particularly enraged
+      with me about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;that surprises me, too,&rdquo; Thorpe meditatively admitted. &ldquo;I was
+      entitled to kill you&mdash;crush you to jelly. Any other man I would. But
+      you,&mdash;I don't know,&mdash;I do funny things with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would give me a drink, now&mdash;as one of them,&rdquo; Plowden
+      ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved across the room. He
+      set out upon the big official table in the middle, that mockingly
+      pretentious reminder of a Board which never met, a decanter and two
+      glasses and some recumbent, round-bottomed bottles. He handed one of these
+      last to Plowden, as the latter strolled toward the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know how to open these, don't you?&rdquo; he said, languidly. &ldquo;Somehow I
+      never could manage it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nobleman submissively took the bottle, and picked with awkwardness at
+      its wire and cork, and all at once achieved a premature and not
+      over-successful explosion. He wiped his dripping cuff in silence, when the
+      tumblers were supplied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;here's better luck to you next time,&rdquo; Thorpe said, lifting his
+      glass. The audacious irony of his words filled Plowden with an instant
+      purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth did you round on me in that way for, Thorpe&mdash;when I
+      was here last?&rdquo; He put the question with bravery enough, but at sight of
+      the other's unresponsive face grew suddenly timorous aud explanatory. &ldquo;No
+      man was ever more astounded in the world than I was. To this day I'm as
+      unable to account for it as a babe unborn. What conceivable thing had I
+      done to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe slowly thought of something that had not occurred to him before,
+      and seized upon it with a certain satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That day that you took me shooting,&rdquo; he said, with the tone of one
+      finally exposing a long-nursed grievance, &ldquo;you stayed in bed for hours
+      after you knew I was up and waiting for you&mdash;and when we went out,
+      you had a servant to carry a chair for you, but I&mdash;by God!&mdash;I
+      had to stand up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens above!&rdquo; ejaculated Plowden, in unfeigned amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are little things&mdash;mere trifles,&rdquo; continued Thorpe,
+      dogmatically, &ldquo;but with men of my temper and make-up those are just the
+      things that aggravate and rankle and hurt. Maybe it's foolish, but that's
+      the kind of man I am. You ought to have had the intelligence to see that&mdash;and
+      not let these stupid little things happen to annoy me. Why just think what
+      you did. I was going to do God knows what for you&mdash;make your fortune
+      and everything else,&mdash;and you didn't show consideration enough for me
+      to get out of bed at a decent hour&mdash;much less see to it that I had a
+      chair if you were going to have one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon my word, I can't tell how ashamed and sorry I am,&rdquo; Lord Plowden
+      assured him, with fervent contrition in his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, those are the things to guard against,&rdquo; said Thorpe, approaching a
+      dismissal of the subject. &ldquo;People who show consideration for me; people
+      who take pains to do the little pleasant things for me, and see that I'm
+      not annoyed and worried by trifles&mdash;they're the people that I, on my
+      side, do the big things for. I can be the best friend in the world, but
+      only to those who show that they care for me, and do what they know I'll
+      like. I don't want toadies about me, but I do want people who feel bound
+      to me, and are as keen about me and my feelings and interests as they are
+      about their own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is delightfully feudal&mdash;all this,&rdquo; commented the nobleman,
+      smilingly addressing the remark to nobody in particular. Then he looked at
+      Thorpe. &ldquo;Let me be one of them&mdash;one of the people you speak of,&rdquo; he
+      said, with directness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe returned his look with the good-natured beginnings of a grin. &ldquo;But
+      what would you be good for?&rdquo; he queried, in a bantering tone. &ldquo;People I
+      have about me have to be of some use. They require to have heads on their
+      shoulders. Why&mdash;just think what you've done. I don't mean so much
+      about your letting Tavender slip through your fingers&mdash;although that
+      was about the worst I ever heard of. But here in this room, at that desk
+      there, you allowed me to bounce you into writing and signing a paper which
+      you ought to have had your hand cut off rather than write, much less sign.
+      You come here trying to work the most difficult and dangerous kind of a
+      bluff,&mdash;knowing all the while that the witness you depended entirely
+      upon had disappeared, you hadn't the remotest idea where,&mdash;and you
+      actually let me lead you into giving me your signature to your own
+      declaration that you are blackmailing me! Thinking it all over&mdash;you
+      know&mdash;I can't see that you would be of much help to me in the City.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden joined perforce in the laughter with which the big man
+      enjoyed his own pleasantry. His mirth had some superficial signs of
+      shamefacedness, but it was hopeful underneath. &ldquo;The City!&rdquo; he echoed, with
+      meaning. &ldquo;That's the curse of it. What do I know about the City? What
+      business have I in the City? As you said, I'm the amateur. A strong man
+      like you can make me seem any kind of a ridiculous fool he likes, with the
+      turn of his hand. I see that right enough. But what am I to do? I have to
+      make a shot at something. I'm so rotten poor!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe had retired again behind the barrier of dull-eyed abstraction. He
+      seemed not to have heard this appealing explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other preserved silence in turn, and even made a pretence of looking
+      at some pamphlets on the table, as a token of his boundless deference to
+      the master's mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. I'll see,&rdquo; the big man muttered at last, doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Plowden felt warranted in taking an optimistic view of these vague
+      words. &ldquo;It's awfully good of you&rdquo;&mdash;he began, lamely, and then paused.
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo;&mdash;he took up a new thought with a more solicitous tone,&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      wonder if you would mind returning to me that idiotic paper I signed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head. &ldquo;Not just now, at any rate,&rdquo; he said, still
+      musingly. With his head bowed, he took a few restless steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are going to&mdash;to help me!&rdquo; the other remarked, with an air
+      of confidence. He had taken up his hat, in response to the tacit warning
+      of his companion's manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe looked at him curiously, and hesitated over his answer. It was a
+      surprising and almost unaccountable conclusion for the interview to have
+      reached. He was in some vague way ashamed of himself, but he was
+      explicitly and contemptuously ashamed for Plowden, and the impulse to say
+      so was strong within him. This handsome young gentleman of title ought not
+      to be escaping with this restored buoyancy of mien, and this complacency
+      of spirit. He had deserved to be punished with a heavy hand, and here he
+      was blithely making certain of new benefits instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know&mdash;I'll see,&rdquo; Thorpe moodily repeated&mdash;and there was
+      no more to be said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN the noon hour of the following day was enacted the brief final scene in
+      the drama of the &ldquo;Rubber Consols corner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For long weeks, Mr. Stormont Thorpe had given much thought to this
+      approaching climax of his great adventure&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;but the early
+      mornings remained as torturing as ever. In the twilight he awoke oppressed
+      and sick at heart with gloom&mdash;and then dozed at intervals through
+      fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was decently
+      possible to get up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 &ldquo;corner,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and they bought their way
+      out of the tragic &ldquo;corner&rdquo; at precisely the price he had nominated in his
+      mind. But hardly anything else went as he had dimly prefigured it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the man with the fair hair and little curly flaxen beard who spoke:
+      &ldquo;How do you do! I understand that we can buy eight thousand five hundred
+      Rubber Consols from you at 'twenty-three.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;twenty-five,&rdquo; replied Thorpe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dark man spoke: &ldquo;The jobbers' price is twenty-three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To carry over&mdash;yes,&rdquo; Thorpe answered. &ldquo;But to buy it is
+      twenty-five.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two sons of the race which invented mental arithmetic exchanged an
+      alert glance, and looked at the floor for an engrossed instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't mind telling you,&rdquo; Thorpe interposed upon their silence, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We didn't get up any story,&rdquo; said Rostocker, curtly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You tried to plant it on us,&rdquo; Aronson declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One of your own Directors put it about. I thought it was a fake at the
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Well&mdash;it is twenty-five, anyway,&rdquo; he told them,
+      with firmness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Twenty-four,&rdquo; suggested Aronson, after another momentary pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a shilling less than twenty-five,&rdquo; Thorpe insisted, with quiet
+      doggedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can always pay our creditors and let you whistle,&rdquo; Rostocker reminded
+      him, laconically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can do anything you like,&rdquo; was the reply, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Upon the spur of a sudden thought he drew out his watch. &ldquo;In
+      just two minutes' time to a tick, the price will be thirty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let's be 'hammered' then!&rdquo; said Aronson to his companion, with simulated
+      impulsiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rostocker was the older and stronger man, and when at last he spoke it was
+      with the decision of one in authority. &ldquo;It is your game,&rdquo; he said, with
+      grave imperturbability. &ldquo;Eight thousand five hundred at twenty-five. Will
+      you deliver at the Credit Lyonnais in half an hour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded, impassively. Then a roving idea of genial impertinence
+      brought a gleam to his eye. &ldquo;If you should happen to want more Rubber
+      Consols at any time,&rdquo; he said, with a tentative chuckle, &ldquo;I could probably
+      let you have them at a reduced price.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Perhaps we may make a deal with you,&rdquo; and
+      apparently meant it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe stood waiting near the door, and held out his hand with a
+      dramatically significant gesture when the little Scotchman entered. &ldquo;Put
+      her there!&rdquo; he exclaimed heartily, with an exuberant reversion to the
+      slang of remote transatlantic bonhomie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yeh've done it, then!&rdquo; said Semple, his sharp face softening with
+      pleasure at the news. &ldquo;Yeh've pulled it off at twenty-three!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other's big countenance yielded itself to a boyish grin.
+      &ldquo;Twenty-FIVE!&rdquo; he said, and laughed aloud. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God above!&rdquo; Semple ejaculated, with a satisfaction through which signs of
+      an earlier fright were visible. &ldquo;It was touch-and-go if you didn't lose it
+      all by doing that! You risked everything, man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe ponderously shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Well&mdash;I did it, anyhow,
+      and it came off,&rdquo; was his comment. Then, straightening himself, he drew a
+      long, long breath, and beamed down at the little man. &ldquo;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!&rdquo; His finger was hovering over the bell, when
+      the Broker's dissuading voice arrested it. &ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; Semple urged. &ldquo;I
+      wouldn't touch it. It's no fit drink for the daytime&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, to hell with the City!&rdquo; cried Thorpe, joyously. &ldquo;I'm never going to
+      set foot in it again. Think of that! I mean it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the ruin of many a strong man,&rdquo; he moralized, looking rather
+      pointedly at Thorpe over his glass. &ldquo;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&mdash;but he can
+      always drink! In one sense, I'm not sorry to think that you're leaving the
+      City.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it never hurts me,&rdquo; Thorpe said, indifferently accepting the
+      direction of the homily. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Broker was thinking of something else. &ldquo;What is to be the precise
+      position of the Company, in the immediate future?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Company? What Company?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple smiled grimly. &ldquo;Have you already forgotten that there is such a
+      thing?&rdquo; he queried, with irony. &ldquo;Why, man, this Company that paid for this
+      verra fine Board-table,&rdquo; he explained, with his knuckles on its red baize
+      centre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe laughed amusedly. &ldquo;I paid for that out of my own pocket,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;For that matter everything about the Company has come out of my pocket&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or gone into it,&rdquo; suggested the other, and they chuckled together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no&mdash;you're right,&rdquo; Thorpe declared. &ldquo;Some thing ought to be
+      settled about the Company, I suppose. Of course I wash my hands of it&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you had any explanations with the other Directors?&rdquo; the Broker
+      asked, thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Explanations&mdash;no,&rdquo; Thorpe told him. &ldquo;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&mdash;Kervick is entirely my man. That leaves
+      Watkin and Davidson&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And about the property,&mdash;the rubber plantation,&mdash;that the
+      Company was formed to acquire and develop. I suppose there really is such
+      a plantation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, it's all there right enough,&rdquo; Thorpe said, briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's no good, though, is it?&rdquo; the Broker asked, with affable directness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Between ourselves, it isn't worth a damn,&rdquo; the other blithely assured
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Scotchman mused with bent brows. &ldquo;There ought still to be money in
+      it,&rdquo; he said, with an air of conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the way,&rdquo; it occurred to Thorpe to mention, &ldquo;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&mdash;and
+      he seemed to take it seriously. He did for a fact. Said perhaps he could
+      make a deal with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hm-m!&rdquo; said Semple, reflectively. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;I'll have the boy bring in some sandwiches,&rdquo; Thorpe decided. &ldquo;I
+      want my next meal west of Temple Bar when I get round to it. I've soured
+      on the City for keeps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't say that it had been so bad to you, either,&rdquo; Semple smilingly
+      suggested, as he turned to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe grinned in satisfied comment. &ldquo;Hurry back as soon as you've finally
+      settled with Rostocker and the other fellow,&rdquo; he called after him, and
+      began pacing the floor again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Semple,&rdquo; Thorpe began, after that significant little pause, &ldquo;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,&mdash;I owe it as much to
+      you as I do to myself,&mdash;and if you don't think you've got enough even
+      now, I want you to say so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had spoken in tones of sincere liking, and the other answered him in
+      kind. &ldquo;I have more than I ever dreamed of making in a lifetime when I came
+      to London,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded his appreciation. &ldquo;I'm going to ask a favour of you,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;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&mdash;whatever
+      you think is right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will arrange itself easily enough,&rdquo; said Semple. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't need any assurance on that score,&rdquo; Thorpe declared, cordially.
+      &ldquo;You're the one sterling, honest man I've known in the City.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Broker's turn to make a little acknowledging bow. His eyes
+      gleamed frank satisfaction at being so well understood. &ldquo;I think I see the
+      way that more money can be made out of the Company,&rdquo; he said, abruptly
+      changing the subject. &ldquo;I've had but a few words with Rostocker about it&mdash;but
+      it's clear to me that he has a plan. He will be coming to you with a
+      proposition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he won't find me, then,&rdquo; interposed Thorpe, with a comfortable
+      smile. &ldquo;I leave all that to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suspect that his plan,&rdquo; continued Semple, &ldquo;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&mdash;you in turn giving me a free hand with all your
+      shares, and your influence with the Directors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll do better still,&rdquo; Thorpe told him, upon brief reflection.
+      &ldquo;Reconstitute the Board and make Lord Plowden Chairman,&mdash;I don't
+      imagine the Marquis would have the nerve to go on with it,&mdash;and I'll
+      make a free gift of my shares to you two&mdash;half and half. You'll find
+      him all right to work with,&mdash;if you can only get him up in the
+      morning,&mdash;and I've kind o' promised him something of the sort. Does
+      that suit you?&rdquo; Semple's countenance was thoughtful rather than
+      enthusiastic. &ldquo;I'm more skeptical about Lords than you are,&rdquo; he observed,
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, absolutely!&rdquo; said Thorpe, with confidence. &ldquo;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;whatever
+      you damned please. When I trust a man, I trust him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;but
+      there was an odd inability to feel about it as he knew he ought to feel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very clear to him now that he desired to have children of his own,&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A beatific vision of himself took form in his mind&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Newcastle-on-Tyne, September 12. Our friend died at Edinboro this
+      morning. See you at hotel this evening.&mdash;Kervick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and to that end poor
+      simple, silly old Tavender was a dead man. Thorpe could see him,&mdash;an
+      embarrassing cadaver eyed by strangers who did not know what to do with
+      it,&mdash;fatuous even in death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden rage at Kervick flamed up. He clearly had played the fool&mdash;clumsily
+      over-plying the simpleton with drink till he had killed him. The shadow of
+      murder indubitably hung over the thing. And then&mdash;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&mdash;it was incredible that
+      this should escape the eye of the authorities. Any minute might bring a
+      detective through that door there&mdash;following into the Board Room with
+      his implacable scent the clue of blood. Thorpe's fancy pictured this
+      detective as a momentarily actual presence&mdash;tall, lean, cold-eyed,
+      mysteriously calm and fatally wise, the omniscient terror of the magazine
+      short-stories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and the Government's smart
+      lawyers would ferret out the rest. The death of Tavender&mdash;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 &ldquo;Penal Servitude&mdash;fourteen
+      years.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had over half a million&mdash;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&mdash;never,
+      never!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;lovingly and still more admiringly
+      than before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;it seemed
+      safest to drop family names altogether, and call it merely the Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It stood proudly upon what was rather a notable elevation for those flat
+      parts&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;leagues away to the south. The modern
+      clearance and tillage, however, which separated it now from Epping had
+      served as a curiously effective barrier&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;of this placid, inductive nature were all the added
+      proofs of human occupation that the landscape offered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Stormont Thorpe, on an afternoon of early October, yawned in the face
+      of this landscape&mdash;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
+      &ldquo;hustlers&rdquo;; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and halted
+      abruptly. It occurred to him that he wanted to travel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and in this as
+      in most other things he agreed with her. As she said, they wanted nothing
+      of Buckingham Palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;carriage-people&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He used the word &ldquo;seemed&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;as
+      arranged and borne along by the wise and tactful experts who wore the
+      livery of High Thorpe&mdash;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 &ldquo;master&rdquo; in their minds, and watching to see how, in
+      the smallest details of deportment, a &ldquo;master&rdquo; 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&mdash;and oddly enough, Thorpe found in their study and
+      observance a congenial occupation. Whether he was reading in the library&mdash;where
+      there was an admirable collection of books of worth&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and said to himself that it was the finest view in England&mdash;and
+      then, to his own surprise, caught himself in the act of yawning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say to going off somewhere&mdash;tomorrow if you like&mdash;travelling
+      abroad?&rdquo; he called out, as she approached him. The idea, only a moment old
+      in his mind, had grown to great proportions. &ldquo;How can we?&rdquo; she asked, upon
+      the briefest thought. &ldquo;THEY are coming at the end of the week. This is
+      Monday, and they arrive on the 12th&mdash;that's this Saturday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So soon as that!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;I thought it was later. H-m! I don't
+      know&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;I can't think of anything in London that would be
+      tolerable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave a vague little laugh. &ldquo;I shall probably hate it myself when I get
+      there,&rdquo; he speculated. &ldquo;There isn't anybody I want to see&mdash;there
+      isn't anything I want to do. I don' t know&mdash;perhaps it might liven me
+      up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face took on a look of enquiring gravity. &ldquo;Are you getting tired of
+      it, then?&rdquo; She put the question gently, almost cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected a little. &ldquo;Why&mdash;no,&rdquo; he answered, as if reasoning to
+      himself. &ldquo;Of course I'm not. This is what I've always wanted. It's my idea
+      of life to a 't.' Only&mdash;I suppose everything needs a break in it now
+      and then&mdash;if only for the comfort of getting back into the old rut
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rut&mdash;yes,&rdquo; she commented, musingly. &ldquo;Apparently there's always a
+      rut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; she said, with a confused half-smile at the novelty of her
+      mood for elucidation, &ldquo;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&mdash;and
+      conventional grooves. I thought you&mdash;as Carlyle puts it&mdash;I
+      thought you were a man who had swallowed all the formulas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe looked down at his stomach doubtfully. &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; he
+      said at last, but in a tone without any note of conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt it,&rdquo; she told him, with light readiness&mdash;&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden comprehension of what was slipping away from his grasp aroused
+      him. &ldquo;No&mdash;no,&rdquo; he urged her, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She received the
+      reproach with a mildly incredulous smile in her eyes. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I know&mdash;who
+      was it used to scold me about that? Oh&rdquo;&mdash;she seemed suddenly reminded
+      of something&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put out his lips a trifle. &ldquo;That's all right,&rdquo; he objected, &ldquo;but what
+      has it got to do with what we were talking about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talking about?&rdquo; she queried, with a momentarily blank countenance. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like her too,&rdquo; Thorpe was impelled to say, with a kind of solemnity.
+      &ldquo;She reminds me of some of the happiest hours in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife, after a brief glance into his face, laughed pleasantly, if with
+      a trace of flippancy. &ldquo;You say nice things,&rdquo; she observed, slightly
+      inclining her head. &ldquo;But now that Celia is coming, it would be as well to
+      have another man. It's such dreadfully short notice, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay your father could come, all right,&rdquo; Thorpe suggested. &ldquo;I'd
+      rather have him than almost anyone else. Would you mind asking him&mdash;or
+      shall I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you really wish it,&rdquo; Edith said at last, coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that's what I don't understand,&rdquo; Thorpe urged upon her with some
+      vigour. &ldquo;If I like him, I don't see why his own daughter&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, need we discuss it?&rdquo; she broke in, impatiently. &ldquo;If I'm an unnatural
+      child, why then I am one, and may it not be allowed to pass at that?&rdquo; A
+      stormy kind of smile played upon her beautifully-cut lips as she added:
+      &ldquo;Surely one's filial emotions are things to be taken for granted&mdash;relieved
+      from the necessity of explanation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe grinned faintly at the hint of pleasantry, but he did not
+      relinquish his point. &ldquo;Well&mdash;unless you really veto the thing&mdash;I
+      think I'd like to tell him to come,&rdquo; he said, with composed obstinacy.
+      Upon an afterthought he added: &ldquo;There's no reason why he shouldn't meet
+      the Duke, is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No specific reason,&rdquo; she returned, with calm coolness of tone and manner.
+      &ldquo;And certainly I do not see myself in the part of Madame Veto.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right then&mdash;I'll send him a wire,&rdquo; said Thorpe. His victory made
+      him uneasy, yet he saw no way of abandoning it with decorum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who on earth is that?&rdquo; asked Thorpe, wonderingly. The man was obviously
+      of the lower class, yet there seemed something about him which invited
+      recognition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presumably it's the new head-gardener,&rdquo; she replied with brevity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Why, I didn't know you had a new man coming,&rdquo; he said, turning to
+      her with an overture of smiling interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered, and then, as if weighing the proffered propitiation
+      and rejecting it, turned slowly and went into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people had made
+      themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so
+      little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but he
+      had slept very badly in it, none the less. The room was luxuriously
+      furnished, as was the entire suite, but it was all strange and
+      uncomfortable to his senses. The operation of shaving and dressing in
+      solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. He regretted not having
+      brought his man with him for this reason, and then, upon meditation, for
+      other reasons. A person of his position ought always to have a servant
+      with him. The hotel people must have been surprised at his travelling
+      unattended&mdash;and the people at High Thorpe must also have thought it
+      strange. It flashed across his mind that no doubt his wife had most of all
+      thought it strange. How would she explain to herself his sudden,
+      precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite naturally put an
+      unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to remember
+      that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much worse to
+      be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over his
+      mysterious absence in her mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt signs
+      of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and made his
+      way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his in the old
+      days&mdash;but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It seemed a
+      dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with his former
+      impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a hard quality
+      of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost the
+      dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and from the
+      mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the discoloured
+      stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his unaccustomed
+      nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east, and ever and
+      again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway, and flung it in
+      his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose, and with no
+      very definite reflections. It occurred to him that if his wife did impute
+      to him some unworthy motive in stealing off to London, and made herself
+      unhappy in doing so&mdash;that would at least provide the compensation of
+      showing that she cared. The thought, however, upon examination, contained
+      very meagre elements of solace. He could not in the least be sure about
+      any of the workings of her mind. There might be more or less annoyance
+      mixed up this morning with the secret thoughts she had concerning him&mdash;or
+      she might not be bothering her head about him at all. This latter
+      contingency had never presented itself so frankly to him before. He looked
+      hard at it, and saw more semblances of probability about it than he liked.
+      It might very well be that she was not thinking about him one way or the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need think about him
+      pervaded his soul. Who cared what he said or did or felt? The City had
+      forgotten his very existence. In the West End, only here and there some
+      person might chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder who
+      had married Lady Cressage. Nowhere else in England, save one dull strip of
+      agricultural blankness in a backward home county, was there a human being
+      who knew anything whatever about him. And this was his career! It was for
+      this that he had planned that memorable campaign, and waged that amazing
+      series of fortnightly battles, never missing victory, never failing at any
+      point of the complicated strategy, and crowning it all with a culminating
+      triumph which had been the wonder and admiration of the whole financial
+      world! A few score of menials or interested inferiors bowed to him; he
+      drove some good horses, and was attentively waited upon, and had a
+      never-failing abundance of good things to eat and drink aud smoke. Hardly
+      anything more than that, when you came to think of it&mdash;and the
+      passing usufruct of all these things could be enjoyed by any fool who had
+      a ten-pound note in his pocket!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had achieved power&mdash;and
+      where was that power? What had he done with it? What COULD he do with it?
+      He had an excess of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it command
+      an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox, as he dimly
+      perceived. There existed only a narrow margin of advantage in favour of
+      the rich man. He could eat and drink a little more and a little better
+      than the poor man; he could have better clothes, and lie abed later in the
+      morning, and take life easier all round&mdash;but only within hard and
+      fast bounds. There was an ascertained limit beyond which the millionaire
+      could no more stuff himself with food and wine than could the beggar. It
+      might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in bed in the morning, but
+      to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So it ran indefinitely&mdash;this
+      thin selvedge of advantage which money could buy&mdash;with deprivation on
+      the one side, and surfeit on the other. Candidly, was it not true that
+      more happiness lay in winning the way out of deprivation, than in
+      inventing safeguards against satiety? The poor man succeeding in making
+      himself rich&mdash;at numerous stages of the operation there might be made
+      a moral snap-shot of the truly happy man. But not after he had reached the
+      top. Then disintegration began at once. The contrast between what he
+      supposed he could do, and what he finds it possible to do, is too vast to
+      be accepted with equanimity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be said that after breakfast&mdash;a meal which he found in an
+      Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension, and
+      ate with an almost novel relish&mdash;Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy
+      views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into warehouse
+      and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite unknown to him,
+      and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his meditations. He
+      established in his mind the proposition that since an excess of enjoyment
+      was impossible&mdash;since one could not derive a great block of happiness
+      from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, but at the most could
+      only gather a little from each&mdash;the desirable thing was to multiply
+      as much as might be those tastes and whims and fancies which passed for
+      appetites, and thus expand the area of possible gratification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply itself to his
+      individual needs with much facility. What did he want to do that he had
+      not done? It was difficult for him to say. Perhaps it was chandlers' signs
+      and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring preoccupation
+      suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets, which raised the question of
+      a yacht in his mind. Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once
+      dwelt with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it would still be
+      full of attractions for him. He liked the water, and the water liked him&mdash;and
+      he was better able now than formerly to understand how luxurious existence
+      can be made in modern private ships. He decided that he would have a yacht&mdash;and
+      then perceived that the decision brought no exhilaration. He was no
+      happier than before. He could decide that he would have anything he chose
+      to name&mdash;and it would in no whit lighten his mood. The yacht might be
+      as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively as spacious and well ordered, but
+      would he not grow as tired of the one as he had of the other?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something he had never
+      admitted to himself. Was he indeed tired of High Thorpe? He had assured
+      his wife to the contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his own
+      mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself. He carried a
+      weariness about with him, which looked at everything with apathetic eyes,
+      and cared for nothing. Some nameless paralysis had settled upon his
+      capacity for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it. He had had the
+      power to expand his life to the farthest boundaries of rich experience and
+      sensation, and he had deliberately shrunk into a sort of herbaceous
+      nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had London at
+      his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might mean to a
+      millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than that it
+      should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes
+      and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently
+      came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him. He
+      walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign
+      fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting
+      recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped, to
+      look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the left,
+      and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian
+      buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of
+      the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and
+      the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the
+      picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied
+      smugness&mdash;of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing
+      could be more commonplace to the eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels of
+      power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within those
+      doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct the
+      movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and their
+      cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between them
+      wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth. They
+      could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole people, or
+      decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of their little
+      family council. He remembered now how he had stood on this same spot, and
+      stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull houses, and
+      pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild&mdash;and that was
+      only a little over a year ago!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found
+      himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the little
+      knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the doorway.
+      It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding within. One
+      of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for aught he knew;
+      at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were on the premises. He
+      had heard it said that the very head of the house listened to quotations
+      from the tape while he ate his luncheon, and interrupted his conversations
+      with the most important of non-commercial callers, to make or refuse
+      bargains in shares offered by brokers who came in. What impulse lay behind
+      this extraordinary devotion to labour? Toward what conceivable goal could
+      it be striving?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To work hard and risk great things for the possession of a fortune, in
+      order to enjoy it afterward&mdash;he could understand how that attracted
+      men. But to possess already the biggest of human fortunes, and still work&mdash;that
+      baffled him. He wished he knew some of those men in there, especially if
+      they belonged to the place. It would be wonderfully interesting to get at
+      the inner point of view of New Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little later, in Colin Semple's office, he sat down to await the coming
+      of that gentleman. &ldquo;Then he doesn't get here so early nowadays?&rdquo; he
+      suggested to the head-clerk who, with instant recognition and exaggerated
+      deference, had ushered him into this furthermost private room. It pleased
+      him to assume that prosperity had relaxed the Scotchman's vigilance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, sir,&rdquo; the clerk replied. &ldquo;A bit earlier if anything, as a rule.
+      But I think he is stopping at his solicitors on his way to the City. I
+      hope you are very well, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;I'm very fit&mdash;thanks,&rdquo; Thorpe said, listlessly, and the
+      other left him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Semple, when at last he arrived, bustled into the room with unaffected
+      gratification at the news he had heard without. &ldquo;Well, well, Thorpe man!&rdquo;
+       he cried, and shook hands cordially. &ldquo;This is fine! If I'd only known you
+      were in town! Why wouldn't you have told me you were coming? I'd never
+      have kept you waiting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe laughed wearily. &ldquo;I hardly knew I was in town myself. I only ran up
+      last night. I thought it would amuse me to have a look round&mdash;but
+      things seem as dull as ditchwater.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no,&rdquo; said Semple, &ldquo;the autumn is opening verra well indeed. There are
+      more new companies, and a better public subscription all round, than for
+      any first week of October I remember. Westralians appear bad on the face
+      of things, it's true&mdash;but don't believe all you hear of them. There's
+      more than the suspicion of a 'rig' there. Besides, you haven't a penny in
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't thinking of that,&rdquo; Thorpe told him, with comprehensive
+      vagueness. &ldquo;Well, I suppose you're still coining money,&rdquo; he observed,
+      after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keeping along&mdash;keeping along,&rdquo; the broker replied, cheerfully. &ldquo;I
+      canna complain.&rdquo; Thorpe looked at him with a meditative frown. &ldquo;Well, what
+      are you going to do with it, after you've got it?&rdquo; he demanded, almost
+      with sharpness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Scotchman, after a surprised instant, smiled. &ldquo;Oh, I'll just keep my
+      hands on it,&rdquo; he assured him, lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That isn't what I mean,&rdquo; Thorpe said, groping after what he did mean,
+      with sullen tenacity, among his thoughts. His large, heavy face exhibited
+      a depressed gravity which attracted the other's attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter?&rdquo; Semple asked quickly. &ldquo;Has anything gone wrong with
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe slowly shook his head. &ldquo;What better off do you think you'll be with
+      six figures than you are with five?&rdquo; he pursued, with dogmatic insistence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have grown much brighter and
+      gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. Apparently he was somewhat
+      stouter, and certainly there was a mellowed softening of his sharp glance
+      and shrewd smile. It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat
+      nonplussed him, but his good-humour was unflagging.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the way we're taught at school,&rdquo; he hazarded, genially. &ldquo;In all the
+      arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're wrong,&rdquo; Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a
+      grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement.
+      &ldquo;What I mean is&mdash;what's the good of piling up money, while you can't
+      pile up the enjoyments it will buy? What will a million give you, that the
+      fifth of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. &ldquo;So
+      you've come to that frame of mind, have you? Why does a man go on and
+      shoot five hundred pheasants, when he can eat only one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing more to say,&rdquo;
+       Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. &ldquo;I've always thought of you
+      as a man like myself, who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Scotchman laughed joyously. &ldquo;Enjoy myself! Like you!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Man,
+      you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's funeral! What's come over you? I
+      know what it is. You go and take a course of German waters&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that be damned!&rdquo; Thorpe objected, gloomily. &ldquo;I tell you I'm all
+      right. Only&mdash;only&mdash;God! I've a great notion to go and get
+      drunk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic expression. &ldquo;I'm
+      sorry you're so hipped,&rdquo; he said, in gentle tones. &ldquo;It can't be more than
+      some passing whimsy. You're in no real trouble, are you?&mdash;no family
+      trouble?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head. &ldquo;The whole thing is rot!&rdquo; he affirmed,
+      enigmatically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What whole thing?&rdquo; The broker perched on the edge of his desk, and with
+      patient philosophy took him up. &ldquo;Do you mean eighty thousand a year is
+      rot? That depends upon the man who has it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know that well enough,&rdquo; broke in the other, heavily. &ldquo;That's what I'm
+      kicking about. I'm no good!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips in reflection.
+      &ldquo;That's not the case,&rdquo; he observed with argumentative calmness. &ldquo;You're a
+      great deal of good. I'm not so sure that what you've been trying to do is
+      any good, though. Come!&mdash;I read you like large print. You've set out
+      to live the life of a rich country squire&mdash;and it hasn't come off. It
+      couldn't come off! I never believed it would. You haven't the taste for it
+      inbred in your bones. You haven't the thousand little habits and interests
+      that they take in with their mother's milk, and that make such a life
+      possible. When you look at a hedge, you don't think of it as something to
+      worry live animals out of. When you see one of your labourers, you don't
+      care who his father was, or which dairymaid his uncle ought to have
+      married, if he had wanted to get a certain cottage. You don't want to know
+      the name of everybody whose roof you can see; much less could you remember
+      them, and talk about them, and listen to gossip about them, year after
+      year. It isn't a passion in your blood to ride to hounds, and to shoot,
+      and all that. It doesn't come to you by tradition&mdash;and you haven't
+      the vacancy of mind which might be a substitute for tradition. What are
+      you doing in the country, then? Just eating too much, and sitting about,
+      and getting fat and stupid. If you want the truth, there it is for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon reflection to the
+      view that this was the truth. &ldquo;That's all right, as far as it goes,&rdquo; he
+      assented, with hesitation. &ldquo;But what the hell else is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis to drop it
+      in an incomplete state. &ldquo;A year ago,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;you had won your
+      victories like a veritable Napoleon. You had everything in your own hands;
+      Napoleon himself was not more the master of what he saw about him than you
+      were. And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired yourself to your
+      Elba. It wasn't that you were beaten and driven there by others; you went
+      of your own accord. Have you ever thought, Thorpe, of this? Napoleon was
+      the greatest man of his age&mdash;one of the greatest men of all ages&mdash;not
+      only in war but in a hundred other ways. He spent the last six years of
+      his life at St. Helena&mdash;in excellent health and with companions that
+      he talked freely to&mdash;and in all the extraordinarily copious reports
+      of his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence worth
+      repeating. If you read it, you'll see he talked like a dull, ordinary
+      body. The greatness had entirely evaporated from him, the moment he was
+      put on an island where he had nothing to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes-s,&rdquo; said Thorpe, thoughtfully. He accepted the application without
+      any qualms about the splendour of the comparison it rested upon. He had
+      done the great things, just as Semple said, and there was no room for
+      false modesty about them in his mind. &ldquo;The trouble is,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;that I
+      did what I had always thought I wanted to do most. I was quite certain in
+      my mind that that was what I wanted. And if we say now that I was wrong&mdash;if
+      we admit that that wasn't what I really wanted&mdash;why then, God knows
+      what it is I DO want. I'll be hanged if I do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back to the City,&rdquo; Semple told him. &ldquo;That's where you belong.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;no!&rdquo; Thorpe spoke with emphasis. &ldquo;That's where you're all off. I
+      don't belong in the City at all. I hate the whole outfit. What the devil
+      amusement would it be to me to take other men's money away from them? I'd
+      be wanting all the while to give it back to them. And certainly I wouldn't
+      get any fun out of their taking my money away from me. Besides, it doesn't
+      entertain me. I've no taste at all for it. I never look at a financial
+      paper now. I could no more interest myself in all that stuff again than I
+      could fly. That's the hell of it&mdash;to be interested in anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go in for politics,&rdquo; the other suggested, with less warmth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; Thorpe commented, with a lingering tone. &ldquo;Perhaps I ought
+      to think more about that. By the way, what's Plowden doing? I've lost all
+      track of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Abroad somewhere, I fancy,&rdquo; Semple replied. His manner exhibited a
+      profound indifference. &ldquo;When his mother died he came into something&mdash;I
+      don't know how much. I don't think I've seen him since&mdash;and that must
+      have been six months and more ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I heard about it at the time,&rdquo; the other said. &ldquo;It must be about
+      that. His sister and brother&mdash;the young Plowdens&mdash;they're coming
+      to us at the end of the week, I believe. You didn't hit it off
+      particularly with Plowden, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Semple emitted a contemptuous little laugh. &ldquo;I did not quarrel with him&mdash;if
+      you mean that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but even to please you, Thorpe, I couldn't bring
+      myself to put my back into the job of making money for him. He was treated
+      fairly&mdash;even generously, d'ye mind. I should think, all told, he had
+      some thirty thousand pounds for his shares, and that's a hundred times as
+      much as I had a pleasure in seeing him get. Each man can wear his own
+      parasites, but it's a task for him to stand another man's. I shook your
+      Lord Plowden off, when the chance came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THAT'S all right,&rdquo; Thorpe assured him, easily. &ldquo;I never told you that he
+      was any good. I merely felt like giving him a leg up&mdash;because really
+      at the start he was of use to me. I did owe him something....It was at his
+      house that I met my wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who had
+      walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could think of
+      no one else in the City whom he desired to see. A call upon his bankers
+      would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant courtesy by
+      those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely worth the
+      trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch of
+      the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when the whim
+      seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were like.
+      After luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from St. Giles,
+      through avenues which had not existed in the London of his boyhood, to the
+      neighbourhood of the Dials. Here also the landmarks seemed all changed,
+      but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and disorder to identify
+      the district. He observed it and its inhabitants with a certain new
+      curiosity. A notable alteration for the better had come over his spirits.
+      It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it might be the mere operation
+      of a frank talk with Semple, that had dissipated his gloom. At all events
+      it was gone&mdash;and he strolled along in quite placid contentment,
+      taking in the panorama of London's more intimate life with the interest of
+      a Londoner who has obtained a fresh country eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the spectacle,
+      found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had not supposed
+      it possible to do. He surrendered himself to the experience with a novel
+      sense of having found something worth while&mdash;and found it, moreover,
+      under his very nose. In some dull, meaningless fashion he had always known
+      this part of London, and been familiar with its external aspects. Now
+      suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of seeing it all in a
+      different way. The objects he beheld, inanimate and otherwise, had
+      specific new meanings for him. His mind was stirred pleasurably by the
+      things they said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the barrows
+      of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at the
+      coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their shawls
+      and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or about the
+      thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy, shuffling
+      figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background of the
+      public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown
+      theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts,
+      sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some
+      survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly,
+      their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through
+      the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse; at the
+      faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to him&mdash;faces
+      blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding, faces worn into masks
+      by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow
+      with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were, into the pulsing heart
+      of something which had scarcely seemed alive to him before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's
+      book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and
+      stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident
+      that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship. It
+      pleased Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and pretend
+      to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. He had almost the
+      temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and see what the lad
+      would do. It was remarkable, he reflected with satisfaction&mdash;this new
+      capacity within him to find drama in trifles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he
+      had had with his sister about the sign overhead. He stepped back a few
+      paces and looked up at it. There were the old words&mdash;&ldquo;Thorpe,
+      Bookseller&rdquo;&mdash;right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a
+      novel prominence. Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been
+      repainted. At this he laughed aloud. The details of the episode came back
+      to him now. For some reason, or no reason at all&mdash;he could not now
+      imagine what on earth could have prompted him&mdash;he had last spring
+      caused his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney,
+      should be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. It was to Julia that
+      he had confided this mission, and it was Julia who, in a round-about way,
+      had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do nothing
+      of the sort. He laughed again at the added defiance that this refurbishing
+      of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly as he entered
+      the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he could
+      remember her&mdash;tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling as
+      it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. Her long, mannish
+      countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence, when she
+      recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was pleased or
+      otherwise. In their infrequent latter-day encounters he had dropped the
+      habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in her manner of
+      expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now&mdash;but upon a sudden
+      impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt waist,
+      smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his
+      embrace, was plain enough. &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; she exclaimed vaguely, and then looked
+      at him. &ldquo;You're getting fatter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No I'm not,&rdquo; he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an important
+      topic. &ldquo;People think I am&mdash;but it's merely the looseness of these
+      clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this last
+      visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. &ldquo;Let's see&mdash;that
+      was just before Christmas, wasn't it?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something like that,&rdquo; she responded. &ldquo;You were going to get married in a
+      week or two, I remember, and THAT was in January, wasn't it? I was taking
+      stock, I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his marriage
+      merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday, and held
+      herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic life, annoyed
+      him afresh. &ldquo;You're an awful goat, not to come near us,&rdquo; he felt impelled,
+      in brotherly frankness, to tell her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which it
+      flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. &ldquo;I thought
+      that was all settled and done with long ago,&rdquo; she said, moodily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou,&rdquo; he observed, with reassuring
+      kindness of tone. &ldquo;I never felt so much like being nice to you in my
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new
+      fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Julia and Alfred all right?&rdquo; he queried, cheerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay,&rdquo; she made brief answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they write to you, don't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SHE does&mdash;sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well,
+      from what she says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,&rdquo; he told her, in tones
+      of confidential reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say,&rdquo; she
+      answered, as if the explanation were ample.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf, where
+      Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental
+      student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable pretext
+      of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and occupation
+      of a home of her own. They had taken a house for the summer and autumn,
+      and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for the winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I would really have liked,&rdquo; Thorpe confided to his sister now, &ldquo;was
+      to have had them both live with me. They would have been as welcome as the
+      day is long. I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if he's set on
+      being an artist, he ought to study abroad. Even the best English artists,
+      he says, do that at the beginning. So it was all right for him to go. But
+      Julia&mdash;it was different with her&mdash;I was rather keen about her
+      staying. My wife was just as keen as I was. She took the greatest fancy to
+      Julia from the very start&mdash;and so far as I could see, Julia liked her
+      all right. In fact, I thought Julia would want to stay&mdash;but somehow
+      she didn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She always spoke very highly of your wife,&rdquo; Mrs. Dabney affirmed with
+      judicial fairness. &ldquo;I think she does like her very much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those Dutchmen for,
+      when one of the best houses in England was open to her?&rdquo; Thorpe demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't ask me,&rdquo; her mother responded. Her tone seemed to carry the
+      suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's
+      interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe you know any more about it than I do,&rdquo; was his impulsive
+      comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I daresay not,&rdquo; she replied, with indifference. &ldquo;Probably she didn't
+      fancy living in so big a house&mdash;although heaven knows her ideas are
+      big enough about most things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she say so?&rdquo; Thorpe asked abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. &ldquo;She didn't say
+      anything to me about it, one way or the other. I formed my own impressions&mdash;that's
+      all. It's a free country. Everybody can form their impressions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you'd tell me what you really think,&rdquo; Thorpe urged her, mildly
+      persuasive. &ldquo;You know how fond I am of Julia, and how little I want to do
+      her an injustice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way,&rdquo; Louisa observed, vaguely. &ldquo;If you ask me
+      plain, I think it was dull for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Thorpe, upon reflection, &ldquo;I shouldn't be surprised if it was.
+      I hadn't thought of that. But still&mdash;why she and my wife could be
+      company for each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,&rdquo; she told him, in
+      an unexpected flight of metaphor. &ldquo;Two women cooped up in a lonesome
+      country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself
+      would be&mdash;but not much. It's none of my business&mdash;but how your
+      wife must hate it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed easily. &ldquo;Ah, that's where you're wrong,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She doesn't
+      care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy about it.
+      We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants,
+      than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating apparatus
+      wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do you think of
+      six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the amaryllises&mdash;and
+      if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. Well, that's her
+      passion. That's what she really loves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,&rdquo;
+       Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother
+      she went on. &ldquo;Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four
+      customers&mdash;ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title,
+      too&mdash;and they order gardening books and other books through me, and
+      when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk
+      to me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her
+      heart doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner
+      all day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own
+      way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to
+      occupy themselves with&mdash;and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd
+      even do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank God I
+      don't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's because you don't know anything about the country,&rdquo; he told her,
+      but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in his
+      own ears. &ldquo;All you know outside of London is Margate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer,&rdquo; she informed him,
+      crushingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. &ldquo;I know what you mean, Lou,&rdquo; he
+      said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. &ldquo;I suppose there's a good
+      deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you have too
+      much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never occurred to
+      me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is there to do? We
+      tried a house in London, during the Season&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I saw in the papers you were here,&rdquo; she said impassively, in comment
+      upon his embarrassed pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see me&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      explained with a certain awkwardness&mdash;&ldquo;but bye-gones are all
+      bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one endless
+      procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties; we got
+      awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well there you
+      are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfordshire, and it's stupid here. Of
+      course one can travel abroad, but that's no good for more than a few
+      months. Of course it would be different if I had something to do. I tell
+      you God's truth, Lou&mdash;sometimes I feel as if I was really happier
+      when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot&mdash;I really wasn't&mdash;but
+      sometimes it SEEMS as if I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. &ldquo;Didn't it ever occur to
+      you to do some good with your money?&rdquo; she said, with slow bluntness. Then,
+      as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: &ldquo;I don't
+      mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes; we'd
+      always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while we were
+      doing it&mdash;but I mean outside, in the world at large.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't make it; I'm not
+      responsible for it.&rdquo; He muttered the phrases lightly enough, but a certain
+      fatuity in them seemed to attract his attention when he heard their sound.
+      &ldquo;I've given between five and six thousand pounds to London hospitals
+      within the present year,&rdquo; he added, straightening himself. &ldquo;I wonder you
+      didn't see it. It was in all the papers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hospitals!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her voice imported into
+      the word. He looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and then took in the
+      impression that she was upon a subject which exceptionally interested her.
+      Certainly the display of something approaching animation in her glance and
+      manner was abnormal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'&rdquo; she reminded him, still with a
+      vibration of feeling in her tone. &ldquo;You must live in the country, if you
+      think London hospitals are deserving objects. They couldn't fool Londoners
+      on that point, not if they had got the Prince to go on his hands and
+      knees. And you give a few big cheques to them,&rdquo; she went on, meditatively,
+      &ldquo;and you never ask how they're managed, or what rings are running them for
+      their own benefit, or how your money is spent&mdash;and you think you've
+      done a noble, philanthropic thing! Oh no&mdash;I wasn't talking about
+      humbug charity. I was talking about doing some genuine good in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat back with a smile.
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said, genially. &ldquo;What do you propose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't propose anything,&rdquo; she told him, after a moment's hesitation.
+      &ldquo;You must work that out for yourself. What might seem important to me
+      might not interest you at all&mdash;and if you weren't interested you
+      wouldn't do anything. But this I do say to you, Joel&mdash;and I've said
+      it to myself every day for this last year or more, and had you in mind all
+      the time, too&mdash;if I had made a great fortune, and I sat about in
+      purple and fine linen doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and
+      selfishness, letting my riches accumulate and multiply themselves without
+      being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look my fellow-creatures
+      in the face! You were born here. You know what London slums are like. You
+      know what Clare Market was like&mdash;it's bad enough still&mdash;and what
+      the Seven Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places round here are
+      like to this day. That's only within a stone's throw. Have you seen
+      Charles Booth's figures about the London poor? Of course you haven't&mdash;and
+      it doesn't matter. You KNOW what they are like. But you don't care. The
+      misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two or three hundred
+      thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your money-bags and
+      smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for a brother!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm damned!&rdquo; was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this
+      outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. &ldquo;Since when
+      have you been taken this way?&rdquo; he asked at last, mechanically jocular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right,&rdquo; she declared with defensive inconsequence. &ldquo;It's the
+      way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for
+      demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked about
+      in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was to utter
+      something which he could trace to no mental process of which he had been
+      conscious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too&mdash;from the
+      beginning?&rdquo; he demanded of her, almost with truculence. &ldquo;You say I sit on
+      my money-bags and smile&mdash;you abuse me with doing no good with my
+      money&mdash;how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this
+      while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did
+      believe in me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sniffed at him. &ldquo;I don't believe in you now, at all events,&rdquo; she said,
+      bluntly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. &ldquo;Why, this very day&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to
+      his tongue, which were quite strangers to his brain&mdash;&ldquo;this whole day
+      I've been going inch by inch over the very ground you mention; I've been
+      on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and alleys of that whole
+      district for myself, watching the people and the things they buy and the
+      way they live&mdash;and thinking out my plans for doing something. I don't
+      claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more than what a man in my
+      position ought to do. But I own that to come in, actually tired out from a
+      tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's own sister for selfishness and
+      heartlessness and miserliness and all the rest of it&mdash;I must say,
+      that's a bit rum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected
+      to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown with
+      which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after some
+      consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to avoid
+      offense. &ldquo;It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if you're
+      really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. You're too used to it
+      for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his assurances than this&mdash;but
+      after all, one did not look to Louisa for enthusiasms. The depth of
+      feeling she had disclosed on this subject of London's poor still
+      astonished him, but principally now because of its unlikely source. If she
+      had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed disposition, he
+      could have understood it. But she had been always the hard, dry,
+      unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself to be a volatile
+      and even sentimental person. If she had such views as these, it became
+      clear to him that his own views were even much advanced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a tremendous subject,&rdquo; he said, with loose largeness of manner.
+      &ldquo;Only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. The
+      only way is to start with the understanding that something is going to be
+      done. No matter how many difficulties there are in the way, SOMETHING'S
+      GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out with that, why then he can
+      fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or bend them to
+      suit his purpose, and accomplish something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with&mdash;yet
+      somehow remained, if not skeptical, then passively unconvinced. &ldquo;What are
+      your plans?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything,&rdquo; he told her, with prepared
+      readiness. &ldquo;It isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked
+      theories and limited information. Great results, permanent results, are
+      never obtained that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, nothing like it in the least,&rdquo; he assured her, and made a mental note
+      to find out what it was she had referred to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;but it seems
+      to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this immense
+      number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their pocket. That's
+      where the real mischief lies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then
+      something occurred to him. &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you're as keen about
+      all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and devote your
+      time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into shape?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to
+      her. &ldquo;It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?&rdquo;
+       she observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;you've got to promise me now,&rdquo; he told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well that I won't!&rdquo; she answered, roundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd see the whole&mdash;the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      scolded at her&mdash;&ldquo;rather than abate a jot of your confounded
+      mulishness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining
+      through the stolidity of her mien. &ldquo;I knew you were humbugging! If you'd
+      meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because
+      I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm always a goose
+      when I believe what you tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. &ldquo;No you're not,
+      Lou,&rdquo; he replied, coaxingly. &ldquo;I really mean it all&mdash;every word of it&mdash;and
+      more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you helped.
+      Can't you understand how I should feel that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of sincerity,
+      but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. &ldquo;I don't believe in
+      crossing a bridge till I get to it,&rdquo; she declared, when, on the point of
+      his departure, he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that.
+      He took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel, and told him
+      to read. She had spoken so confidently of their illuminating value, that
+      he found himself quite committed to their perusal&mdash;and almost to
+      their endorsement. He had thought during the day of running down to
+      Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow, and someone
+      had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time he reached his hotel,
+      however, an entirely new project had possessed his mind. He packed his
+      bag, and took the next train for home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I DIDN'T ask your father, after all,&rdquo; was one of the things that Thorpe
+      said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing a
+      concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark with
+      a scant, silent nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the
+      terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day, with
+      the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had
+      glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at
+      random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight before
+      him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and yellows
+      under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of the books,
+      but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits of this placid,
+      abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to induce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About your father,&rdquo; he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak
+      with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: &ldquo;I'm afraid I
+      annoyed you the other day by what I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no recollection of it,&rdquo; she told him, with tranquil politeness,
+      over her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this
+      topic. &ldquo;But I want you to recollect,&rdquo; he said, as he rose to his feet.
+      There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her
+      attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched
+      herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant
+      against the parapet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought of it a good deal,&rdquo; he went on, in halting explanation. His
+      purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which to
+      define it. &ldquo;I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't want me
+      to do&mdash;something that was a good deal more your affair than mine&mdash;and
+      I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for an
+      appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly embarrassed
+      as well. &ldquo;I'm sure you always wish to be nice,&rdquo; she said at last. The
+      words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere a
+      perfunctory note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;nice!&rdquo; he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the
+      word. &ldquo;Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something
+      ten thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I withdraw the word immediately&mdash;unreservedly,&rdquo; she put in, with a
+      smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You laugh at me&mdash;whenever I try to talk seriously,&rdquo; he objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I laugh?&rdquo; she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated
+      amazement. &ldquo;Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, now we get to it!&rdquo; he broke out, with energy. &ldquo;You're really feeling
+      about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're doing&mdash;with
+      the life we're leading&mdash;any more than I am. I see that, plain enough,
+      now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea that you were
+      enjoying it immensely&mdash;the greenhouses and gardens and all that sort
+      of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right&mdash;that told me
+      you hated it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don't let us talk of him!&rdquo; Edith exclaimed, swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe laughed. &ldquo;You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him. No&mdash;it
+      was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew enough to
+      give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were happy here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How clever of her!&rdquo; A certain bantering smile accompanied the words, but
+      on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity. &ldquo;I'm
+      sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real sort of
+      person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live with&mdash;I
+      daresay all genuine characters are&mdash;but she's very real. Although,
+      apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy talking
+      with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean?&rdquo; Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I often go to her shop&mdash;or did when I was in town. I went almost
+      immediately after our&mdash;our return to England. I was half afraid she
+      would recognize me&mdash;the portraits in the papers, you know&mdash;but
+      apparently she didn't. And it's splendid&mdash;the way she says absolutely
+      nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks
+      books are bad she says so. Fancy that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. &ldquo;You never mentioned
+      to me that you had gone there,&rdquo; he told her, as if in reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, it was complicated,&rdquo; Edith explained. &ldquo;She objects to knowing me&mdash;I
+      think secretly I respect her a great deal for that&mdash;and therefore
+      there is something clandestine about my getting to know her&mdash;and I
+      could not be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest
+      not to mention it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't that alone,&rdquo; he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer
+      voice. &ldquo;Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the
+      difference in the world to me, if&mdash;if you were really&mdash;actually
+      my other half!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to
+      impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked
+      dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean&rdquo;&mdash;all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency
+      as he progressed&mdash;&ldquo;I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh,
+      I'm not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the
+      start&mdash;you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than
+      that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no,&rdquo; she interposed, gently. &ldquo;It is not the fact that it has made me
+      unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;discontented, then,&rdquo; he resumed, without pause. &ldquo;Here we are.
+      We do the thing we want to do&mdash;we make the kind of home for ourselves
+      that we've agreed we would like&mdash;and then it turns out that somehow
+      it doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the
+      truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look
+      at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of us.
+      It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and
+      examine frankly in all its bearings&mdash;in order to see if we can't
+      better it&mdash;but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked
+      about between us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You use the word again,&rdquo; she reminded him, a wan smile softening her
+      protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her glance
+      with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you tell me that you are happy?&rdquo; he asked, with sober directness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. &ldquo;You
+      consider only the extremes,&rdquo; she told him. &ldquo;Between black and white there
+      are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum, in
+      fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the true
+      black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications. People are
+      always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that can be said
+      of me is that I may be in the blues&mdash;in the light-blues&mdash;but it
+      is fair to remember that they photograph white.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling, he
+      resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. &ldquo;That is to say&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      began hesitatingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The
+      intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could tell myself,&rdquo; she answered him, after an instant's thought,
+      &ldquo;pray believe that I would tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily.
+      &ldquo;I want to get nearer to you,&rdquo; he said, with gloom, &ldquo;and I don't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to her to remark: &ldquo;You take exception to my phraseology when I
+      say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean.&rdquo; She
+      offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he gazed
+      moodily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me,&rdquo; he was
+      suddenly inspired to say. &ldquo;I can't imagine your applying that word to me
+      then in your mind. God knows what it was you did say to yourself about me,
+      but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would have
+      fitted me then&mdash;and now it's the only one you can think of.&rdquo; The hint
+      that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries enveloping him
+      rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke. The year had wrought a
+      baffling difference in him. He lacked something now that then he had
+      possessed, but he was powerless to define it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm to
+      keep her where she lightly rested beside him. &ldquo;Will you tell me,&rdquo; he said,
+      with a kind of sombre gentleness, &ldquo;what the word is that you would have
+      used then? I know you wouldn't&mdash;couldn't&mdash;have called me 'nice.'
+      What would you have called me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and stood
+      erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his
+      fingers. &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; she said, musingly&mdash;&ldquo;I suppose I should have
+      said 'powerful' or 'strong.'&rdquo; Then she released her arm, and in turn moved
+      to the parapet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I am weak now&mdash;I am 'nice,'&rdquo; he reflected, mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon,
+      there was something pensive, even sad. She did not speak at once, and as
+      he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering. A
+      new sense of her great beauty came to him&mdash;and with it a hint that
+      for the instant at least her guard was down. He sprang to his feet, and
+      stood beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ARE going to be open with me&mdash;Edith!&rdquo; he pleaded, softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation.
+      &ldquo;Oh, what is there to say?&rdquo; she demanded, in a tone which was almost a
+      wail. &ldquo;It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WHAT is not my fault?&rdquo; he persisted with patient gentleness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon her
+      lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. &ldquo;It is a mistake&mdash;a
+      blunder,&rdquo; she began, hurriedly. &ldquo;I take it all upon my own shoulders. I
+      was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment&mdash;more good
+      sense!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not telling me, are you,&rdquo; he asked with gravity, &ldquo;that you are
+      sorry you married me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is either of us glad?&rdquo; she retorted, breathlessly. &ldquo;What is there to be
+      glad about? You are bored to death&mdash;you confess it. And I&mdash;well,
+      it is not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you keep saying that,&rdquo; he observed, with gloomy slowness of
+      utterance. &ldquo;But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as
+      well have it out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his with
+      a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. &ldquo;I married one man
+      because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another because
+      he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am. There is
+      bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am his
+      daughter; that explains everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect upon him.
+      He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new personage was
+      being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced cynicism, of
+      amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a woman of flesh
+      and blood beneath it, after all&mdash;a woman to whom he could talk on
+      terms of intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rubbish!&rdquo; he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal
+      smile. &ldquo;You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply
+      came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would have
+      been the same if I hadn't had sixpence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of
+      answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action
+      too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The trouble has been,&rdquo; he declared, &ldquo;that I've been too much afraid of
+      you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am,
+      that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right enough
+      now. You ARE finer than I am&mdash;God knows there's no dispute about that&mdash;but
+      that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands off!' all
+      around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the cheek to capture
+      you and carry you off&mdash;and I ought to have had the pluck to make you
+      love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm going to do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to gaze
+      with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread below
+      them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and then with
+      assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say that there was
+      any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm to himself with
+      new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small head at his
+      shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn softly over the temples,
+      and its glimpse of the matchless profile inclined beneath&mdash;that it
+      was all right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience, for her to speak. The
+      mere fact that she stood beneath his engirdling arm, and gave no thought
+      to the potential servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present
+      happiness. He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his terrace
+      with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest view in England&mdash;and
+      something much more than that beside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud&mdash;a silvery, amused little laugh
+      under her breath. &ldquo;How comedy and tragedy tread forever on each other's
+      heels!&rdquo; she remarked. Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon
+      reflection he did not wholly like her words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There wasn't any tragedy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and there isn't any comedy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed again. &ldquo;Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal to your sense
+      of humour!&rdquo; she urged, with mock fervour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this, that she seemed
+      touched by his mood. Without stirring from his hold, she lifted her face.
+      &ldquo;Don't think I'm hateful,&rdquo; she bade him, and her eyes were very kind.
+      &ldquo;There's more truth in what you've been saying than even you imagine. It
+      really wasn't the money&mdash;or I mean it might easily have been the same
+      if there had been no money. But how shall I explain it? I am attracted by
+      a big, bold, strong pirate, let us say, but as soon as he has carried me
+      off&mdash;that is the phrase for it&mdash;then he straightway renounces
+      crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. My buccaneer transforms
+      himself, under my very eyes, into an alderman! Do you say there is no
+      comedy in that&mdash;and tragedy too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, put it that way and it's all right,&rdquo; he declared, after a moment's
+      consideration. &ldquo;I've got as much fun in me as anybody else,&rdquo; he went on,
+      &ldquo;only your jokes have a way of raising blisters on me, somehow. But that's
+      all done with now. That's because I didn't know you&mdash;was frightened
+      of you. But I aint scared any more. Everything is different!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a certain graciousness of lingering movement, she withdrew herself
+      from his clasp, and faced him with a doubtful smile. &ldquo;Ah, don't be too
+      sure,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything is different!&rdquo; he repeated, with confident emphasis. &ldquo;Don't
+      you see yourself it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say it is,&rdquo; she replied, hesitatingly, &ldquo;but that alone doesn't make
+      it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that,&rdquo; he broke in
+      triumphantly. &ldquo;We've been standing off with one another. We've been of no
+      help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over everything
+      together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do, and then
+      I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. &ldquo;Don't count
+      on me for too much wisdom or invention,&rdquo; she warned him. &ldquo;If things are to
+      be done, you are still the one who will have to do them. But undoubtedly
+      you are at your best when you are doing things. This really has been no
+      sort of life for you, here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gathered her arm into his. &ldquo;Come and show me your greenhouses,&rdquo; he
+      said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. &ldquo;It'll turn out to
+      have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here,&rdquo; he continued,
+      as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness of new
+      intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his tone with
+      buoyancy. &ldquo;I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and getting myself
+      into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In every way I'm a
+      better man than I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached now a
+      long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft colour&mdash;whites,
+      yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds&mdash;were dimly
+      perceptible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year,&rdquo; Edith observed, as they
+      drew near to the door of this house. &ldquo;Collins did them very badly&mdash;as
+      he did most other things. But next year it will be very different.
+      Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is he in there
+      now, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions stirred
+      by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gafferson?&rdquo; he asked her, with a blank countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My new head-gardener,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;He was at Hadlow, and after poor
+      old Lady Plowden died&mdash;why, surely you remember him there. You spoke
+      about him&mdash;you'd known him somewhere&mdash;in the West Indies, wasn't
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied. &ldquo;Did I?&rdquo; he
+      mumbled automatically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. &ldquo;I've got a kind
+      of headache coming on,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you don't mind, we won't go inside
+      among the flowers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts of the great
+      gardens, as the first shadows of evening began to dull the daylight. For a
+      long time he moved aimlessly about, sick at heart and benumbed of mind, in
+      the stupid oppression of a bad dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There ran through all his confused thoughts the exasperating consciousness
+      that it was nonsense to be frightened, or even disturbed; that, in truth,
+      nothing whatever had happened. But he could not lay hold of it to any
+      comforting purpose. Some perverse force within him insisted on raising new
+      phantoms in his path, and directing his reluctant gaze to their unpleasant
+      shapes. Forgotten terrors pushed themselves upon his recollection. It was
+      as if he stood again in the Board Room, with the telegram telling of old
+      Tavender's death in his hands, waiting to hear the knock of Scotland Yard
+      upon the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The coming of Gafferson took on a kind of supernatural aspect, when Thorpe
+      recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which had made
+      this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour
+      of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid
+      picture of that approach&mdash;of the old ramshackle village trap, and the
+      boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded,
+      plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of
+      something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now that he had at the
+      time discerned a certain fateful quality in the apparition. And he and his
+      wife had actually been talking of old Kervick at the moment! It was their
+      disagreement over him which had prevented her explaining about the new
+      head-gardener. There was an effect of the uncanny in all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what did Gafferson want? How much did he know? The idea that perhaps
+      old Kervick had found him out, and patched up with him a scheme of
+      blackmail, occurred to him, and in the unreal atmosphere of his mood,
+      became a thing of substance. With blackmail, however, one could always
+      deal; it was almost a relief to see the complication assume that guise.
+      But if Gafferson was intent upon revenge and exposure instead? With such a
+      slug-like, patient, tenacious fool, was that not more likely?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reasonable arguments presented themselves to his mind ever and again: his
+      wife had known of Gafferson's work, and thought highly of it, and had been
+      in a position to learn of his leaving Hadlow. What more natural than that
+      she should hasten to employ him? And what was it, after all, that
+      Gafferson could possibly know or prove? His brother-in-law had gone off,
+      and got too drunk to live, and had died. What in the name of all that was
+      sensible had this to do with Thorpe? Why should it even be supposed that
+      Gafferson associated Thorpe with any phase of the business? And if he had
+      any notion of a hostile movement, why should he have delayed action so
+      long? Why indeed!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reassurance did not come to him, but at last an impulse to definite action
+      turned his footsteps toward the cluster of greenhouses in the deepening
+      shadow of the mansion. He would find Gafferson, and probe this business to
+      the uttermost. If there was discoverable in the man's manner or glance the
+      least evidence of a malevolent intention&mdash;he would know what to do.
+      Ah, what was it that he would do? He could not say, beyond that it would
+      be bad for Gafferson. He instinctively clenched the fists in the pockets
+      of his jacket as he quickened his pace. Inside the congeries of glazed
+      houses he was somewhat at sea. It was still light enough to make one's way
+      about in the passages between the stagings, but he had no idea of the
+      general plan of the buildings, and it seemed to him that he frequently got
+      back to places he had traversed before. There were two or three
+      subordinate gardeners in or about the houses, but upon reflection he
+      forbore to question them. He tried to assume an idly indifferent air as he
+      sauntered past, nodding almost imperceptible acknowledgment of the
+      forefingers they jerked upward in salutation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came at last upon a locked door, the key of which had been removed. The
+      fact vaguely surprised him, and he looked with awakened interest through
+      the panes of this door. The air inside seemed slightly thickened&mdash;and
+      then his eye caught the flicker of a flame, straight ahead. It was nothing
+      but the fumigation of a house; the burning spirits in the lamp underneath
+      the brazier were filling the structure with vapours fatal to all insect
+      life. In two or three hours the men would come and open the doors and
+      windows and ventilate the place. The operation was quite familiar to him;
+      it had indeed interested him more when he first saw it done than had
+      anything else connected with the greenhouses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His abstracted gaze happened to take note of the fact that the door-key
+      was hanging on a nail overhead, and then suddenly this seemed to be
+      related to something else in his thoughts&mdash;some obscure impression or
+      memory which evaded him. Continuing to look at the key, a certain
+      recollection all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it came
+      to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they were using warned
+      people against exposing themselves to its fumes more than was absolutely
+      necessary. That meant, of course, that their full force would kill a human
+      being. It was very interesting. He looked through the glass again, but
+      could not see that the air was any thicker. The lamp still burned
+      brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron, at the further
+      end of the palm-house he was in, doing something to a plant. Thorpe noted
+      the fact that he felt no surprise in seeing that it was Gafferson. Somehow
+      the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading flame inside the locked
+      door, seemed to have prepared him for the spectacle of Gafferson close at
+      hand. He moved forward slowly toward the head-gardener, and luminous plans
+      rose in his mind, ready-made at each step. He could strangle this annoying
+      fool, or smother him, into non-resisting insensibility, and then put him
+      inside that death-house, and let it be supposed that he had been
+      asphyxiated by accident. The men when they came back would find him there.
+      But ah! they would know that they had not left him there; they would have
+      seen him outside, no doubt, after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key
+      could be left in the unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had
+      rashly entered, and been overcome by the vapours. He approached the man
+      silently, his brain arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost
+      exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was to
+      be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his wife
+      talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have a
+      suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of conversation.
+      Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole household into
+      confusion. And its effect upon his wife!&mdash;the progress of his
+      thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the shock
+      such a catastrophe might involve to her&mdash;or at the best, of the gross
+      unpleasantness she would find in it&mdash;flashed over his mind, and then
+      yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this meant to
+      him. It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. A profoundly
+      tender desire for her happiness was in complete possession. Already the
+      notion of doing anything to wound or grieve her appeared incredible to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Gafferson,&rdquo; he heard himself saying, in one of the more reserved
+      tones of his patriarchal manner. He had halted close to the inattentive
+      man, and stood looking down upon him. His glance was at once tolerant and
+      watchful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gafferson slowly rose from his slouching posture, surveyed the other while
+      his faculties in leisurely fashion worked out the problem of recognition,
+      aud then raised his finger to his cap-brim. &ldquo;Good-evening, sir,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This gesture of deference was eloquently convincing. Thorpe, after an
+      instant's alert scrutiny, smiled upon him. &ldquo;I was glad to hear that you
+      had come to us,&rdquo; he said with benevolent affability. &ldquo;We shall expect
+      great things of a man of your reputation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It'll be a fair comfort, sir,&rdquo; the other replied, &ldquo;to be in a place where
+      what one does is appreciated. What use is it to succeed in hybridizing a
+      Hippeastrum procera with a Pancratium Amancaes, after over six hundred
+      attempts in ten years, and then spend three years a-hand-nursing the
+      seedlings, and then your master won't take enough interest in the thing to
+      pay your fare up to London to the exhibition with 'em? That's what 'ud
+      break any man's heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite true,&rdquo; Thorpe assented, with patrician kindliness. &ldquo;You need fear
+      nothing of that sort here, Gafferson. We give you a free hand. Whatever
+      you want, you have only to let us know. And you can't do things too well
+      to please us.&rdquo; &ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; said Gafferson, and really, as Thorpe
+      thought about it, the interview seemed at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The master turned upon his heel, with a brief, oblique nod over his
+      shoulder, and made his way out into the open air. Here, as he walked, he
+      drew a succession of long consolatory breaths. It was almost as if he had
+      emerged from the lethal presence of the fumigator itself. He took the
+      largest cigar from his case, lighted it, and sighed smoke-laden new relief
+      as he strolled back toward the terrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a few minutes before he had been struggling helplessly in the coils of
+      an evil nightmare. These terrors seemed infinitely far behind him now. He
+      gave an indifferent parting glance backward at them, as one might over his
+      after-breakfast cigar at the confused alarms of an early awakening hours
+      before. There was nothing worth remembering&mdash;only the shapeless and
+      foolish burden of a bad dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The assurance rose within him that he was not to have any more such
+      trouble. With a singular clearness of mental vision he perceived that the
+      part of him which brought bad dreams had been sloughed off, like a
+      serpent's skin. There had been two Thorpes, and one of them&mdash;the
+      Thorpe who had always been willing to profit by knavery, and at last in a
+      splendid coup as a master thief had stolen nearly a million, and would
+      have shrunk not at all from adding murder to the rest, to protect that
+      plunder&mdash;this vicious Thorpe had gone away altogether. There was no
+      longer a place for him in life; he would never be seen again by mortal
+      eye....There remained only the good Thorpe, the pleasant, well-intentioned
+      opulent gentleman; the excellent citizen; the beneficent master, to whom,
+      even Gafferson like the others, touched a respectful forelock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It passed in the procession of his reverie as a kind of triumph of virtue
+      that the good Thorpe retained the fortune which the bad Thorpe had stolen.
+      It was in all senses a fortunate fact, because now it would be put to
+      worthy uses. Considering that he had but dimly drifted about heretofore on
+      the outskirts of the altruistic impulse, it was surprisingly plain to him
+      now that he intended to be a philanthropist. Even as he mentioned the word
+      to himself, the possibilities suggested by it expanded in his thoughts.
+      His old dormant, formless lust for power stirred again in his pulses. What
+      other phase of power carried with it such rewards, such gratitudes, such
+      humble subservience on all sides as far as the eye could reach&mdash;as
+      that exercised by the intelligently munificent philanthropist?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intelligence! that was the note of it all. Many rich people dabbled at the
+      giving of money, but they did it so stupidly, in such a slip-shod fashion,
+      that they got no credit for it. Even millionaires more or less in public
+      life, great newspaper-owners, great brewer-peers, and the like, men who
+      should know how to do things well, gave huge sums in bulk for public
+      charities, such as the housing of the poor, and yet contrived somehow to
+      let the kudos that should have been theirs evaporate. He would make no
+      such mistake as that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was easy enough to see wherein they erred. They gave superciliously,
+      handing down their alms from a top lofty altitude of Tory superiority, and
+      the Radicals down below sniffed or growled even while they grudgingly took
+      these gifts&mdash;that was all nonsense. These aristocratic or
+      tuft-hunting philanthropists were the veriest duffers. They laid out
+      millions of pounds in the vain attempt to secure what might easily be had
+      for mere thousands, if they went sensibly to work. Their vast benefactions
+      yielded them at the most bare thanks, or more often no thanks at all,
+      because they lacked the wit to lay aside certain little trivial but
+      annoying pretensions, and waive a few empty prejudices. They went on, year
+      after year, tossing their fortunes into a sink of contemptuous
+      ingratitude, wondering feebly why they were not beloved in return. It was
+      because they were fools. They could not, or they would not, understand the
+      people they sought to manipulate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What could not a man of real brain, of real breadth and energy and force
+      of character, do in London with two hundred thousand pounds? Why, he could
+      make himself master of the town! He could break into fragments the
+      political ascendency of the snob, &ldquo;semi-detached&rdquo; villa classes, in half
+      the Parliamentary divisions they now controlled. He could reverse the
+      partisan complexion of the Metropolitan delegation, and lead to
+      Westminster a party of his own, a solid phalanx of disciplined men,
+      standing for the implacable Democracy of reawakened London. With such a
+      backing, he could coerce ministries at will, and remake the politics of
+      England. The role of Great Oliver himself was not too hopelessly beyond
+      the scope of such a vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe threw his cigar-end aside, and then noted that it was almost dark.
+      He strode up to the terrace two steps at a time, and swung along its
+      length with a vigour and exhilaration of movement he had not known, it
+      seemed to him, for years. He felt the excitement of a new incentive
+      bubbling in his veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her Ladyship is in her sitting-room, sir,&rdquo; a domestic replied to his
+      enquiry in the hall. The title arrested his attention from some fresh
+      point of view, and he pondered it, as he made his way along the corridor,
+      and knocked at a door. At the sound of a voice he pushed open the door,
+      and went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Cressage, looking up, noted, with aroused interest, a marked change
+      in his carriage. He stood aggressively erect, his big shoulders squared,
+      and his head held high. On his massive face there was the smile, at once
+      buoyant and contained, of a strong man satisfied with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something impelled her to rise, and to put a certain wistfulness of
+      enquiry into her answering smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your headache is better then?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;yes,&rdquo; he
+      answered. Advancing, he caught her suddenly, almost vehemently, in his
+      arms, aud covered the face that was perforce upturned with kisses. When
+      she was released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting and
+      flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes, in which mystification
+      was mellowed by the gleam of not-displeased curiosity, he preferred a
+      request which completed her bewilderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Thorpe,&rdquo; he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with
+      his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words&mdash;&ldquo;would you mind
+      if we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little
+      breakfast-room&mdash;or here, for that matter&mdash;instead of the big
+      place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, not at all, if you wish it,&rdquo; she answered readily enough, but
+      viewing him still with a puzzled glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm full of new ideas,&rdquo; he explained, impulsively impatient of the
+      necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. &ldquo;I see great things
+      ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if
+      I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time
+      and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. You don't
+      know what it means to me to have something to do. It makes another man of
+      me, just to think about it. Another man?&mdash;yes, twenty men! It's a
+      thing that can be done, and by God! I'm going to do it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the man's
+      native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through the mask of
+      torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large features were
+      somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance as rough bold
+      headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a conqueror&mdash;of a
+      man gathering within himself, to expend upon his fellows, the appetites,
+      energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast of prey. Her glance
+      fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the frank barbarism of
+      power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to her that something
+      more was to be read in this look; there was in it a reservation of
+      magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for her special
+      self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces and devour
+      others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love with all his
+      strength. An involuntary trembling thrill ran through her&mdash;and then
+      she smiled up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you're going to do?&rdquo; she asked him, mechanically. Her mind
+      roved far afield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rule England!&rdquo; he told her with gravity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in the
+      statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his
+      refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what
+      would be impossible to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of
+      good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before. &ldquo;Delightful,&rdquo;
+       she said gayly. &ldquo;But I'm not sure that I quite understand the&mdash;the
+      precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room with the
+      project.&rdquo; He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in which she took
+      him. &ldquo;Just a whim,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;The things I've got in mind don't fit
+      at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and men standing about.
+      What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug little evening with
+      you alone, where I can talk to you and&mdash;and we can be together by
+      ourselves. You'd like it, wouldn't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarrassment in her
+      mantling colour and down-spread lashes. It had always to his eyes been,
+      from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the world&mdash;exquisitely
+      matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene yet sensitive grace.
+      But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that there could come to it,
+      this crowning added loveliness of feminine confusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would like it, wouldn't you?&rdquo; he repeated in a lower, more strenuous
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his
+      shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming. She
+      swayed rather than stepped toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; she answered, in a musing murmur,&mdash;&ldquo;I think I shall like&mdash;everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THORPE found the Duke of Glastonbury a much more interesting person to
+      watch and to talk with, both during the dinner Saturday evening and later,
+      than he had anticipated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature, but
+      he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had a
+      distinction of its own. His face, with its little black moustache and
+      large dark eyes, was fine upon examination, but in some elusively foreign
+      way. There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked. His speech
+      was English enough to the ear, it was true, but it was the considered
+      English of a book, and its phrases had a deftness which was hardly native.
+      He looked, if not a sad young man, then one conscious always of sufficient
+      reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time, to see that the mood
+      beneath was not melancholy. It had even its sprightly side, which shone
+      out irregularly in his glance and talk, from a sober mean of amiable
+      weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe knew his extraordinary story&mdash;that of a poor tutor, earning
+      his living in ignorance of the fact that he had a birthright of any sort,
+      who had been miraculously translated into the heir, not only to an ancient
+      title but to vast collateral wealth. He had been born and reared in
+      France, and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change in his
+      affairs had found him out. There was a good deal more to the story,
+      including numerous unsavoury legends about people now many years dead, and
+      it was impossible to observe the young Duke and not seem to perceive signs
+      that he was still nervously conscious of these legends. The story of his
+      wife&mdash;a serene, grey-eyed, rather silent young person, with a pale
+      face of some beauty, and with much purity and intellect&mdash;was strange
+      enough to match. She also had earned her own living, as a private
+      secretary or type-writing girl, or something of the sort, and her husband
+      had deliberately chosen her after he had come into his title. One might
+      study her very closely, however, and catch no hint that these facts in any
+      degree disconcerted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe studied her a good deal, in a furtive way, with a curiosity born of
+      his knowledge that the Duke had preferred her, when he might have married
+      his widowed cousin, who was now Thorpe's own wife. How he had come to know
+      this, he could never have told. He had breathed it in, somehow, with the
+      gossip-laden atmosphere of that one London season of his. It was patent
+      enough, too, that his wife&mdash;his Edith&mdash;had not only liked this
+      ducal youngster very much, but still entertained toward him a considerable
+      affection. She had never dissembled this feeling, and it visibly informed
+      her glance and manner now, at her own table, when she turned to speak with
+      him, where he sat at her right hand. Thorpe had never dreamed of thinking
+      ill of his wife's friendship, even when her indifference to what he
+      thought had been most taken for granted. Now that this was all changed,
+      and the amazing new glory of a lover had enveloped him, he had a distinct
+      delight in watching the myriad charming phases of her kind manner,
+      half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the grave-faced young man. It was all
+      a part of the delicious change which these past few days had wrought in
+      her, this warm and supple softness of mien, of eye and smile and voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could have
+      taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave more
+      attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the conversation
+      of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the young Duchess
+      beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which left him
+      abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while she turned
+      to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred
+      Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies interested him but
+      indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested that it was amusing.
+      He looked from his wife to the Duchess and back again, in ever-recurring
+      surprise that the coronet had been carried past Edith. And once he looked
+      a long time at his wife and the Duke, and formulated the theory that she
+      must have refused him. No doubt that was why she had been sympathetically
+      fond of him ever since, and was being so nice to him now. Yes&mdash;clearly
+      that was it. He felt upon this that he also liked the Duke very much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. Both he and his
+      Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even deferentially polite, but
+      there was a painstaking effect about it, which, seemingly, they lacked the
+      art altogether to conceal. It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests
+      unconsciously took their cue from this august couple, and all exposed
+      somewhat the effort their civility to him involved. At another time the
+      suspicion of this would have stung him. He had only to glance across the
+      table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. What other people
+      thought of him&mdash;how other people liked or disliked him&mdash;was of
+      no earthly importance. Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel
+      from them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull inability to
+      read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich outsider
+      who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable tolerance
+      this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to do so, he
+      could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and the burst
+      of thunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination, to
+      contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. The young man seemed
+      both clever and sensible, and in a way impressionable as well. Thorpe
+      thought that he would probably have some interesting things to say, but
+      still more he thought of him as a likely listener. It would be the easier
+      to detach him from the company, since the occasion was one of studied
+      informality. The Duke did not go about in society, in the ordinary sense
+      of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe to meet a large
+      party. He was here as a kinsman and friend of his hostess for a quiet
+      week; and the few other guests fitted readily enough into the picture of a
+      family gathering. The spirit of domesticity had indeed so obviously
+      descended upon the little group in the drawing-room, an hour or so after
+      dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural thing to put his arm through
+      that of the Duke and lead him off to his personal smoking-room. He even
+      published his intention by audibly bidding the Hon. Balder Plowden to
+      remain with the ladies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the host
+      had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in the
+      matter of large rich cigars, a brief silence ensued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject,&rdquo; Thorpe was
+      inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries aside. &ldquo;If a man of
+      fortune wishes to do genuine good with his money, here in England, how
+      should he best go about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash of surprise on
+      his dark, mobile face. He hesitated a moment, and smiled a little. &ldquo;You
+      ask of me the sum of human wisdom,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is the hardest of all
+      problems; no one solves it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly. &ldquo;That's all the more reason
+      why it ought to be solved,&rdquo; he declared, with slow emphasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other expressed by look and tone an augmented consciousness of the
+      unexpected. &ldquo;I did not know,&rdquo; he remarked cautiously, &ldquo;that this was a
+      matter in which you were specially concerned. It pleases me very much to
+      hear it. Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have as many as
+      possible turning the problem over in their minds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but I'm going to solve it!&rdquo; Thorpe told him, with round confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. &ldquo;Do not think
+      me a cynic,&rdquo; he began at last. &ldquo;You are a man of affairs; you have made
+      your own way; you should be even more free from illusions than I am. If
+      you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one to
+      dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional
+      importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me. I
+      come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs as we
+      think it has&mdash;for that matter, if it has any power at all. The
+      shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the moment&mdash;change
+      it about and alter it in many ways&mdash;but its effect is only temporary.
+      As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms rearrange themselves
+      as they were before, and the old conditions return. I think the only force
+      which really makes any permanent difference is character&mdash;and yet
+      about even that I am not sure. The best man I have ever known&mdash;and in
+      many respects the ablest&mdash;devoted untold energy and labour, and much
+      money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in Somerset, on land
+      of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and worked out. Perhaps
+      you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his System?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had worked tremendously for years at it. He fell ill and went away&mdash;and
+      in a day all the results of his labours and outlay were flat on the
+      ground. The property is mine now, and it is farmed and managed again in
+      the ordinary way, and really the people there seem already to have
+      forgotten that they had a prophet among them. The marvelous character of
+      the man&mdash;you look in vain for any sign of an impress that it left
+      upon them. I never go there. I cannot bear those people. I have sometimes
+      the feeling that if it were feasible I should like to oppress them in some
+      way&mdash;to hurt them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! 'the people' are hogs, right enough,&rdquo; Thorpe commented genially, &ldquo;but
+      they ARE 'the people,' and they're the only tools we've got to work with
+      to make the world go round.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you leave the world alone,&rdquo; objected the Duke, &ldquo;it goes round of
+      itself. And if you don't leave it alone, it goes round just the same,
+      without any reference whatever to your exertions. Some few men are always
+      cleverer or noisier or more restless than the others, and their activity
+      produces certain deviations and peculiarities in their generation. The
+      record of these&mdash;generally a very faulty and foolish record&mdash;we
+      call history. We say of these movements in the past that some of them were
+      good and some were bad. Our sons very likely will differ totally from us
+      about which were good and which were bad; quite possibly, in turn, their
+      sons may agree with us. I do not see that it matters. We cannot treat
+      anything as final&mdash;except that the world goes round. We appear out of
+      the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried across and pitched off into
+      the darkness at the other edge of it. We are certain about nothing else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Except that some of us have to pay for our ride, and others don't,&rdquo; put
+      in Thorpe. The tone in which he spoke made his meaning so clear that his
+      Grace sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, you think we do not pay?&rdquo; he queried, his countenance brightening
+      with the animation of debate. &ldquo;My dear sir, we pay more than anyone else.
+      Our fares are graduated, just as our death-duties are. No doubt there are
+      some idle and stupid, thick-skinned rich fellows, who escape the
+      ticket-collector. But for each of them there are a thousand idle poor
+      fellows who do the same. You, for example, are a man of large wealth. I,
+      for my sins, carry upon my back the burden of a prodigious fortune. Could
+      we not go out now, and walk down the road to your nearest village, and
+      find in the pub, there a dozen day-labourers happier than we are? Why&mdash;it
+      is Saturday night. Then I will not say a dozen, but as many as the tap
+      will hold. It is not the beer alone that makes them happy. Do not think
+      that. It is the ability to rest untroubled, the sense that till Monday
+      they have no more responsibility than a tree-toad. Does the coming of
+      Sunday make that difference to you or to me? When night comes, does it
+      mean to us that we are to sleep off into oblivion all we have done that
+      day, and begin life afresh next morning? No-o! We are the tired people;
+      the load is never lifted from our backs. Ah, do we not pay indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh-ho!&rdquo; ejaculated Thorpe. He had been listening with growing
+      astonishment to the other's confession. He was still surprised as he
+      spoke, but a note of satisfaction mounted into his voice as he went on.
+      &ldquo;You are unhappy, too! You are a young man, in excellent health; you have
+      the wife you want; you understand good tobacco; you have a son. That is a
+      great deal&mdash;but my God! think what else you've got. You're the Duke
+      of Glastonbury&mdash;one of the oldest titles in England. You're one of
+      the richest men in the country&mdash;the richest in the old peerage, at
+      any rate, I'm told. And YOU'RE not happy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other smiled. &ldquo;Ah, the terms and forms survive,&rdquo; he said, with a kind
+      of pedagogic affability, &ldquo;after the substance has disappeared. The
+      nobleman, the prince, was a great person in the times when he monopolized
+      wealth. It enabled him to monopolize almost everything else that was
+      pleasant or superb. He had the arts and the books and the musicians and
+      the silks and velvets, and the bath-tubs&mdash;everything that made
+      existence gorgeous&mdash;all to himself. He had war to amuse himself with,
+      and the seven deadly sins. The barriers are down now. Everything which
+      used to be exclusively the nobleman's is now within everybody's reach,
+      including the sins. And it is not only that others have levelled up to
+      him; they have levelled him down. He cannot dress now more expensively
+      than other people. Gambling used to be recognized as one of his normal
+      relaxations, but now, the higher his rank, the more sharply he is scolded
+      for it. Naturally he does not know what to do with himself. As an
+      institution, he descends from a period when the only imaginable use for
+      wealth was to be magnificent with it. But now in this business age, where
+      the recognized use of wealth is to make more wealth, he is so much out of
+      place that he has even forgotten how to be magnificent. There are some
+      illustrated articles in one of the magazines, giving photographs of the
+      great historic country-houses of England. You should see the pictures of
+      the interiors. The furniture and decorations are precisely what a Brixton
+      dressmaker would buy, if she suddenly came into some money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the same,&rdquo; Thorpe stuck to his point, &ldquo;you are not happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duke frowned faintly, as if at the other's persistency. Then he
+      shrugged his shoulders and answered in a lighter tone. &ldquo;It hardly amounts
+      to that, I think. I confess that there are alleviations to my lot. In the
+      opinion of the world I am one of its most fortunate citizens&mdash;and it
+      is not for me to say that the world is altogether wrong. The chief point
+      is&mdash;I don't know if you will quite follow me&mdash;there are limits
+      to what position and fortune can give a man. And so easily they may
+      deprive him of pleasures which poorer men enjoy! I may be wrong, but it
+      seems impossible to me that any rich man who has acres of gardens and
+      vineries and glass can get up the same affection for it all that the
+      cottager will have for his little flower-plot, that he tends with his own
+      hands. One seems outside the realities of life&mdash;a mere spectator at
+      the show.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but why not DO things?&rdquo; Thorpe demanded of him. &ldquo;Why merely stand, as
+      you say, and look on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other leant his head back again. &ldquo;Pray what do you recommend?&rdquo; he
+      asked almost listlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why&mdash;politics, for example.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duke nodded, with an air of according to the suggestion a certain
+      respect. &ldquo;Unhappily I am too much of a foreigner,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;I know
+      Englishmen and their affairs too imperfectly. Sometime&mdash;perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And philanthropic work&mdash;you don't care about that,&rdquo; pursued the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;we go not so far as that,&rdquo; said his Grace, with a deprecatory
+      wave of the hands. &ldquo;My wife finds many interests in it, only she would not
+      like to have you call it philanthropical. She is London-born, and it is a
+      great pleasure to her to be of assistance to poorer young women in London,
+      who have so little done for them by the community, and can do so little
+      for themselves. I am much less skeptical about that particular work, I may
+      tell you, than about philanthropy in general. In fact, I am quite clear
+      that it is doing good. At least it is doing a kindness, and that is a
+      pleasant occupation. We are really not so idle as one might think. We work
+      at it a good deal, my wife and I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So am I London-born,&rdquo; Thorpe remarked, with a certain irrelevancy. After
+      a moment's pause he turned a sharply enquiring glance upon his guest.
+      &ldquo;This thing that you're doing in London&mdash;does it give you any 'pull'
+      there?&rdquo; &ldquo;Pull?&rdquo; repeated the other helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there was something you wanted the people of London to do, would they
+      do it for you because of what you've been doing for them&mdash;or for
+      their girls?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Duke looked puzzled for a moment. &ldquo;But it isn't conceivable that I
+      should want London to do anything&mdash;unless it might be to consume its
+      own smoke,&rdquo; he observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so!&rdquo; said Thorpe, rising bulkily to his feet, but signifying by a
+      gesture that his companion was to remain seated. He puffed at his cigar
+      till its tip gleamed angrily through the smoke about him, and moved a few
+      steps with his hands in his pockets. &ldquo;That is what I wanted to get at. Now
+      I'm London-born, I've got the town in my blood. The Thorpes have been
+      booksellers there for generations. The old name is over the old shop
+      still. I think I know what Londoners are like; I ought to. It's my belief
+      that they don't want gifts. They'll take 'em, but it isn't what they want.
+      They're a trading people&mdash;one of the oldest in the world. Commercial
+      traditions, the merchant's pride&mdash;these are bred in their bones. They
+      don't want something for nothing. They like an honest bargain&mdash;fair
+      on both sides. 'You help me and I'll help you.' And it's the only way you
+      can do anything worth doing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the Duke, passively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thorpe halted, and still with the cigar between his teeth, looked down at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can go into London, and study out the things that are to be done&mdash;that
+      need to be done&mdash;and divide these into two parts, those that belong
+      to private enterprise and those that ought to be done publicly. And I can
+      say to Londoners&mdash;not in so many words, mind you, but in a way the
+      sharper ones will understand: 'Here, you fellows. I'll begin doing out of
+      my own pocket one set of these things, and you in turn must put yourselves
+      at my back, and stand by me, and put me in a position where I can make the
+      Government do this other set of things.' That will appeal to them. A poor
+      man couldn't lead them any distance, because he could always be killed by
+      the cry that he was filling his pockets. They will believe in a man whose
+      ambition is to win an earldom and five thousand a year out of politics,
+      but they will stone to death the man who merely tries to get a few
+      hundreds a year out of it for his wife and children. And a man like you
+      can't do anything in London, because they can't see that there's anything
+      you want in return&mdash;and besides, in their hearts, they don't like
+      your class. Don't forget it! This is the city that chopped off the king's
+      head!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but this is also the city,&rdquo; retorted the other, with placid pleasure
+      in his argument, &ldquo;which decked itself in banners and ribbons to welcome
+      back the son of that same king. And if you think of it, he was rather a
+      quaint thing in sons, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the women did that,&rdquo; Thorpe affirmed with readiness. &ldquo;They get
+      their own way once in a while, when the men are tired out, and they have
+      their little spell of nonsense and monkey-shines, but it never lasts long.
+      Charles II. doesn't matter at all&mdash;but take my word for it, his
+      father matters a great deal. There was a Thorpe among the judges who voted
+      to behead him. I am descended in a straight line from him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His Grace shrugged his slight shoulders again. &ldquo;It happens that my
+      ancestors had extremely large facilities for doing unpleasant things, and,
+      God knows, they did them&mdash;but I don't quite see what that goes to
+      prove, now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you don't grasp the idea,&rdquo; said Thorpe, resignedly. After a moment's
+      pause he took the cigar from his lips, and straightened himself &ldquo;All the
+      same,&rdquo; he declared roundly, &ldquo;I am going to do the trick. London has been
+      waiting for an organizer&mdash;a leader&mdash;for a hundred years. The
+      right kind of a man, going the right way to work, can stand London on its
+      head, as surely as I can burn this cigar. And I'm going to have a try at
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very interesting,&rdquo; remarked the Duke, with vagueness. &ldquo;But&mdash;are
+      the ladies waiting for us? And if so, aren't we keeping them up
+      unconscionably?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if in comment upon his words, there was the sound of a faint rap at the
+      door. Then it opened, and through the dense blue haze of the room they saw
+      some shadowed forms softly indistinct save where the light from the
+      ceiling outside shone down upon a group of coiffured heads. A noise of
+      mingled coughing and laughter specifically completed the introduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I'm&mdash;it's unendurable in there,&rdquo; spoke the voice of the hostess.
+      &ldquo;We WERE coming in to smoke with you,&rdquo; she called out through the cloud,
+      &ldquo;since you wouldn't stop with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along!&rdquo; answered Thorpe, cheerily. He strode to the end of the room
+      and raised a window. From the same corner he turned on some added lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under this more effective illumination, the lady of the house advanced,
+      with Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred close behind her. &ldquo;Frank has gone
+      to bed,&rdquo; she explained to the Duke, who had risen. Then she turned to her
+      husband a bright-eyed glance: &ldquo;You don't mind&mdash;our coming?&rdquo; she
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mind!&rdquo; he called out, with robust impressiveness. &ldquo;Mind!&rdquo; As if to
+      complete the expression of his meaning, he threw his arm loosely about
+      her, where she stood, and brought her to his side. They remained standing
+      thus, before the fireplace, after the others were all seated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thorpe has been outlining to me the most wonderful plans,&rdquo; said the
+      Duke, looking from one face to another, with a reserved smile. &ldquo;It seems
+      that philanthropy fails unless it is combined with very advanced politics.
+      It is a new idea to me&mdash;but he certainly states it with vigour. Do
+      you understand it, Edith?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, perfectly,&rdquo; replied the wife, smilingly. &ldquo;I am his first convert.
+      Behold in me the original disciple.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The worst of that is,&rdquo; commented Thorpe, with radiant joviality, &ldquo;she
+      would subscribe to any other new doctrine of mine just as readily.&rdquo; He
+      tightened the arm encircling her by a perceptible trifle. &ldquo;Wouldn't you,
+      sweetheart?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed in nowise embarrassed by these overt endearments. There was
+      indeed the dimmest suggestion in her face and voice of a responsive mood.
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; she began, with a soft glance, half-deprecation, half-pride,
+      bent upon the others, and with thoughtful deliberation,&mdash;&ldquo;really the
+      important thing is that he should pursue some object&mdash;have in view
+      something that he is determined to master. Without that, he is not
+      contented&mdash;not at his best. He should have been a soldier. He has a
+      passion for battle in his blood. And now that he sees something he is
+      eager to do&mdash;I am very glad. It makes it none the less acceptable
+      that good is to come from it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I still maintain,&rdquo; said Miss Madden, interpolating her words through the
+      task of lighting a cigarette, and contriving for them an effect of
+      drollery which appealed to Thorpe most of all&mdash;&ldquo;I shall always
+      insist, just the same, that crime was his true vocation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/298.txt b/298.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,12675 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Market-Place
+
+Author: Harold Frederic
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2008 [EBook #298]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARKET-PLACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Hamm
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MARKET-PLACE
+
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the field--sitting alone
+with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.
+
+His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat
+shapeless to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried
+to define to himself what its limits would probably be. Vistas of
+unchecked, expanding conquest stretched away in every direction. He held
+at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, it rested entirely with
+him to say whether there should be any such thing as mercy at all--and
+until he chose to utter the restraining word the rout of the vanquished
+would go on with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush and
+torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired. The responsibility
+of having to decide when he would stop grinding their faces might come
+to weigh upon him later on, but he would not give it room in his mind
+to-night.
+
+A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames
+in the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom
+visages: they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright.
+They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself above rage
+and cunning. Only here and there did he recall a name with which to
+label one of these countenances; very few of them raised a memory of
+individual rancour. The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt,
+but their persecution of him had been impersonal; his great revenge was
+equally so. As he looked, in truth, there was only one face--a composite
+mask of what he had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample
+implacably under foot. He stared with a conqueror's cold frown at it,
+and gave an abrupt laugh which started harsh echoes in the stillness of
+the Board Room. Then he shook off the reverie, and got to his feet. He
+shivered a little at the sudden touch of a chill.
+
+A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the table where the
+two least-considered of his lieutenants, the dummy Directors, had left
+it. He poured a small quantity and sipped it. During the whole eventful
+day it had not occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat
+liquor seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain. With more
+deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad, floridly-decorated
+open box beside the bottle, lit it, and blew a long draught of smoke
+thoughtfully through his nostrils. Then he put his hands in his pockets,
+looked again into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile. God in heaven!
+it was actually true!
+
+This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel exhilaration,
+which yet was not novel. Upon reflection, he perceived that he felt as
+if he were a boy again--a boy excited by pleasure. It surprised as much
+as it delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy of a
+child. He caught the inkling of an idea that perhaps his years were an
+illusion. He had latterly been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the
+grey hairs thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him. Now all
+at once he saw that he was not old at all. The buoyancy of veritable
+youth bubbled in his veins. He began walking up and down the room,
+regarding new halcyon visions with a sparkling eye. He was no longer
+conscious of the hated foe beneath his feet; they trod instead elastic
+upon the clouds.
+
+The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside, and of trying
+a door near by, suddenly caught his attention. He stood still and
+listened with alertness for a surprised instant, then shrugged his
+shoulders and began moving again. It must be nearly seven o'clock;
+although the allotment work had kept the clerks later than usual that
+day, everybody connected with the offices had certainly gone home. He
+realized that his nerves had played him a trick in giving that alarmed
+momentary start--and smiled almost tenderly as he remembered how notable
+and even glorious a warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state.
+They would be all right after a night's real rest. He would know how to
+sleep NOW, thank God!
+
+But yes--there was somebody outside--and this time knocking with
+assurance at the right door, the entrance to the outer office. After a
+second's consideration, he went into this unlighted outer office, and
+called out through the opaque glass an enquiry. The sound of his voice,
+as it analyzed itself in his own ears, seemed unduly peremptory. The
+answer which came back brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes. He
+hurriedly unlocked and opened the door.
+
+"I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room," said
+the newcomer, as he entered. "I assumed it must be you. Hope I don't
+interrupt anything."
+
+"Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden," replied
+the other, leading the way back to the inner apartment. "In fact, I
+couldn't have asked anything better."
+
+The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it not quite
+in harmony with this declaration. He turned, under the drop-light
+overhanging the Board-table, and shook hands with his guest, as if to
+atone for this doubtful accent. "I shake hands with you again," he
+said, speaking rapidly, "because this afternoon it was what you may call
+formal; it didn't count. And--my God!--you're the man I owe it all to."
+
+"Oh, you mustn't go as far as that--even in the absence of witnesses,"
+replied Lord Plowden, lightly. "I'll take off my coat for a few
+minutes," he went on, very much at his ease. "It's hot in here. It's by
+the merest chance I happened to be detained in the City--and I saw your
+lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity whatever for a quiet
+talk. No--I won't drink anything before dinner, but I'll light a cigar.
+I want to say to you, Thorpe," he concluded, as he seated himself
+"that I think what you've done is very wonderful. The Marquis thinks so
+too--but I shouldn't like to swear that he understands much about it."
+
+The implication that the speaker did understand remained in the air
+like a tangible object. Thorpe took a chair, and the two men exchanged a
+silent, intent look. Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from
+the fire, pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them
+from above, had for a moment a mysterious something in common. Then
+the tension of the glance was relaxed--and on the instant no two men in
+London looked less alike.
+
+Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man. Thorpe had even
+heard him called the handsomest man in England--though this seemed in
+all likelihood an exaggeration. But handsome he undoubtedly was--tall
+without suggesting the thought of height to the observer, erect yet
+graceful, powerfully built, while preserving the effect of
+slenderness. His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful
+guardsman-type--regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness. When he
+talked, or followed with interest the talk of others, it revealed almost
+an excess of animation. Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his
+glance, the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows, and saw
+that it was not the guardsman face at all. His skin was fresh-hued, and
+there was a shade of warm brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche,
+but his hair, wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black. There
+were perceptible veins of grey in it, though he had only entered his
+thirty-fifth year. He was dressed habitually with the utmost possible
+care.
+
+The contrast between this personage and the older man confronting him
+was abrupt. Thorpe was also tall, but of a burly and slouching figure.
+His face, shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard, invited no
+attention. One seemed always to have known this face--thick-featured,
+immobile, undistinguished. Its accessories for the time being were even
+more than ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were ragged with
+neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes looked as if he had slept in
+them. The hands resting on his big knees were coarse in shape, and
+roughened, and ill-kept.
+
+"I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in," he
+repeated now, speaking with a drag, as of caution, on his words.
+"Witnesses or no witnesses, I'm anxious to have you understand that I
+realize what I owe to you."
+
+"I only wish it were a great deal more than it is," replied the other,
+with a frank smile.
+
+"Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands," said Thorpe.
+
+He could hear that there was a kind of reservation in his voice; the
+suspicion that his companion detected it embarrassed him. He found
+himself in the position of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings
+impelled him to be perfectly open. He paused, and was awkwardly
+conscious of constraint in the silence which ensued. "You are very kind
+to put it in that way," said Lord Plowden, at last. He seemed also to be
+finding words for his thoughts with a certain difficulty. He turned
+his cigar round in his white fingers meditatively. "I gather that
+your success has been complete--as complete as you yourself could have
+desired. I congratulate you with all my heart."
+
+"No--don't say my success--say our success," put in Thorpe.
+
+"But, my dear man," the other corrected him, "my interest, compared with
+yours, is hardly more than nominal. I'm a Director, of course, and I'm
+not displeased that my few shares should be worth something instead of
+nothing, but----"
+
+Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands. "That isn't my view of the thing
+at all. To be frank, I was turning over in my mind, just awhile ago,
+before you came in, some way of arranging all that on a different
+footing. If you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's all right."
+
+Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore to Lord Plowden
+his accustomed fluency of speech.
+
+"I came here to say precisely that thing," he began--"that I do trust
+it to you. We have never had any very definite talk on the subject--and
+pray don't think that I want to go into details now. I'd much rather
+not, in fact. But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe in
+you. I feel sure that you are going to go far, as the saying is. Well,
+I want to tie myself to your star. Do you see what I mean? You are going
+to be a power in finance. You are going to be able to make and unmake
+men as you choose. I should be very much obliged indeed if you would
+make me."
+
+Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion with what seemed
+to the other a lethargic gaze. In truth, his mind was toiling with
+strenuous activity to master, in all its bearings, the significance of
+what had been said. This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye,
+the while he was hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous asset which he
+had never up to that time learned that he possessed. Unconsciously, he
+dampened the spirits of his companion.
+
+"Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you," Lord Plowden said,
+growing cool in the face of this slow stare. "I'm asking nothing at all.
+I had the impulse to come and say to you that you are a great man, and
+that you've done a great thing--and done it, moreover, in a very great
+way."
+
+"You know how it was done!" The wondering exclamation forced itself from
+Thorpe's unready lips. He bent forward a little, and took a new visual
+hold, as it were, of his companion's countenance.
+
+Lord Plowden smiled. "Did you think I was such a hopeless duffer, then?"
+he rejoined.
+
+For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs, and patted
+his knee contentedly. All at once his face had lightened; a genial
+speculation returned to his grey eyes.
+
+"Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see," he began to
+explain. The relief with which he spoke was palpable. "I could not for
+the life of me make up my mind whether to tell you about it or not.
+Let's see--this is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the
+scheme didn't dawn on me myself until toward evening Tuesday.
+But yesterday, of course, I could have told you--and again this
+afternoon--but, as I say, I couldn't make up my mind. Once I had it on
+the tip of my tongue--but somehow I didn't. And you--you never gave me a
+hint that you saw what was going on."
+
+Again Lord Plowden smiled. "I voted with you," he put in softly.
+
+Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar. "Well, I couldn't have asked
+anything better than this," he declared once again. "It beats all the
+rest put together, to my mind."
+
+"Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning," commented the other
+tentatively.
+
+"Why man," Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his choice of words,
+but speaking with evident fervour; "I was more anxious about you--and
+the way you'd take it--than about anything else. I give you my word I
+was. I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing. You might
+think that it was all right, and then again you might round on me--or
+no, I don't mean quite that--but you might say it wasn't good enough for
+you, and wash your hands of the whole affair. And I can't tell you what
+a relief it is to find that you--that you're satisfied. Now I can go
+ahead."
+
+"Ah, yes--ahead," said the younger man, thoughtfully. "Do you mind
+telling me--you see I'm quite in the dark as to details--how much
+further ahead we are likely to go? I comprehend the general nature of
+our advance--but how far off is the goal you have in sight?"
+
+"God knows!" answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of excitement in his
+voice. "I don't give it any limit. I don't see why we should stop at
+all. We've got them in such a position that--why, good heavens! we can
+squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz." He chuckled grimly at
+the suggestion of his simile. "We'll get more ounces to the ton out of
+our crushings than they ever heard of on the Rand, too."
+
+"Might I ask," interposed the other, "who may 'they' be?"
+
+Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort to remember names.
+"Oh, there are a lot of them," he said, vaguely. "I think I told you
+of the way that Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let me
+believe they were going to take me up, and then, because I wouldn't give
+them everything--the very shirt off my back--turned and put their knife
+into me. I don't know them apart, hardly--they've all got names like
+Rhine wines--but I know the gang as a whole, and if I don't lift the
+roof clean off their particular synagogue, then my name is mud."
+
+Lord Plowden smiled. "I've always the greatest difficulty to remember
+that you are an Englishman--a Londoner born," he declared pleasantly.
+"You don't talk in the least like one. On shipboard I made sure you
+were an American--a very characteristic one, I thought--of some curious
+Western variety, you know. I never was more surprised in my life than
+when you told me, the other day, that you only left England a few years
+ago."
+
+"Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen," Thorpe corrected him. He
+studied his companion's face with slow deliberation.
+
+"I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss," he remarked,
+after a little pause. "If you'd known that I was an Englishman, when
+we first met, there on the steamer, I kind o' suspect that you and I'd
+never have got much beyond a nodding acquaintance--and even that mostly
+on my side. I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything--that is,
+not specially--but I've often thought since that it was a mighty good
+thing I did. Now isn't that true--that if you had taken me for one of
+your own countrymen you'd have given me the cold shoulder?"
+
+"I dare say there's a good deal in what you say," the other admitted,
+gently enough, but without contrition. "Things naturally shape
+themselves that way, rather, you know. If they didn't, why then the
+whole position would become difficult. But you are an American, to all
+intents and purposes."
+
+"Oh, no--I never took any step towards getting naturalized," Thorpe
+protested. "I always intended to come back here. Or no, I won't say
+that--because most of the time I was dog-poor--and this isn't the place
+for a poor man. But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it
+off--if I ever found my self a rich man--THEN I'd come piking across the
+Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would carry me."
+
+The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam in his eye. "And you
+ARE a rich man, now," he observed, after a momentary pause.
+
+"We are both rich men," replied Thorpe, gravely.
+
+He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken. "This is
+how it seems to me the thing figures itself out: It can't be said that
+your name on the Board, or the Marquis's either, was of much use so far
+as the public were concerned. To tell the truth, I saw some time ago
+that they wouldn't be. Titles on prospectuses are played out in London.
+I've rather a notion, indeed, that they're apt to do more harm than
+good--just at present, at least. But all that aside--you are the man who
+was civil to me at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about my
+scheme, and you are the man who was good to me later on, when I didn't
+know where to turn for a friendly word. Very well; here I am! I've made
+my coup! And I'd be a sweep, wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so
+glad to remember a week ago. But you see, I don't forget! The capital
+of the Company is 500,000 pounds, all in pound shares. We offered the
+public only a fifth of them. The other four hundred thousand shares are
+mine as vendor--and I have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of
+them to be yours."
+
+Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words. "It is
+too much--you don't reflect what it is you are saying," he murmured
+confusedly. "Not a bit of it," the other reassured him. "Everything that
+I've said goes."
+
+The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet. "It is a preposterously
+big reward for the merest act of courtesy," he insisted. "Of course it
+takes my breath away for joy--and yet I feel I oughtn't to be consenting
+to it at all. And it has its unpleasant side--it buries me under a
+mountain of obligation. I don't know what to do or what to say."
+
+"Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then," replied Thorpe, with a
+gesture before which the other resumed his seat. "Just a word more--and
+then I suppose we'd better be going. Look at it in this way. Your
+grandfather was Lord Chancellor of England, and your father was
+a General in the Crimea. My grandfather kept a small second-hand
+book-shop, and my father followed him in the business. In one sense,
+that puts us ten thousand miles apart. But in another sense, we'll say
+that we like each other, and that there are ways in which we can be of
+immense use to each other, and that brings us close together. You need
+money--and here it is for you. I need--what shall I say?--a kind of
+friendly lead in the matter of establishing myself on the right footing,
+among the right people--and that's what you can do for me. Mind--I'd
+prefer to put it all in quite another way; I'd like to say it was
+all niceness on your part, all gratitude on mine. But if you want to
+consider it on a business basis--why there you have it also--perfectly
+plain and clear."
+
+He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well. The two men
+shook hands in silence.
+
+When the latter spoke, it was to say: "Do you know how to open one of
+those soda-water bottles? I've tried, but I can never get the trick. I
+think I should like to have a drink--after this."
+
+When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man was getting
+into his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy and cigars within a
+cabinet at the corner of the room, and carefully turned a key upon them.
+
+"If you're going West, let me give you a lift," said Lord Plowden, hat
+in hand. "I can set you down wherever you like. Unfortunately I've to go
+out to dinner, and I must race, as it is, to get dressed."
+
+Thorpe shook his head. "No, go along," he bade him. "I've some odds and
+ends of things to do on the way."
+
+"Then when shall I see you?"--began the other, and halted suddenly
+with a new thought in his glance. "But what are you doing Saturday?"
+he asked, in a brisker tone. "It's a dies non here. Come down with me
+to-morrow evening, to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday,
+and drive about on Sunday, if you like--and there we can talk at our
+leisure. Yes, that is what you must do. I have a gun for you. Shall we
+say, then--Charing Cross at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will
+dine at home."
+
+The elder man pondered his answer--frowning at the problem before him
+with visible anxiety. "I'm afraid I'd better not come--it's very good of
+you all the same."
+
+"Nonsense," retorted the other. "My mother will be very glad indeed to
+see you. There is no one else there--unless, perhaps, my sister has some
+friend down. We shall make a purely family party."
+
+Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. "All right. Charing Cross,
+5:15," he said then, with the grave brevity of one who announces a
+momentous decision.
+
+He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments after his
+companion had gone. Then, going to a closet at the end of the room, he
+brought forth his coat and hat; something prompted him to hold them up,
+and scrutinize them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put
+them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused, playing in his
+beard.
+
+The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. He made
+his way out, and downstairs to the street. It was a rainy, windy October
+night, sloppy underfoot, dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a
+cabman, motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening rubber
+cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed
+him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, "Strand!" as he
+clambered into the hansom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe, half an hour
+later: "you never did believe in me, as a sister should do."
+
+He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
+dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering
+gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only
+the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.
+Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
+Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this
+portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility
+for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the
+walls of which he was dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about
+Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out
+of the mists of his childhood.
+
+Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with
+quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The
+peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like
+snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at
+the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same
+rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights,
+in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he
+was a boy?
+
+"I know you always say that," replied Louisa, impassively.
+
+She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice
+or intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair,
+drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest
+brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
+contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of
+figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large,
+capable hands on her knees.
+
+"I believed in you as much as you'd let me," she went on, indifferently,
+almost wearily. "But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did
+or didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What
+had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world
+you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know
+whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it
+was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London--but
+elsewhere you might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover, I
+don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something very
+different from the boy Joel that left the shop--it must be twenty years
+ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell me."
+
+"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
+intent glance, "you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to
+succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'"
+
+She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued
+failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless
+point.
+
+"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself," she admitted,
+listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke
+with more animation: "You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was
+very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking
+about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a
+stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your
+life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof
+over my head--to keep the little business from disappearing altogether.
+It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the
+big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the
+invalid husband to support for between three and four years--a dead
+weight on me every week--and then the children to look after, to clothe
+and educate."
+
+At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. "Don't think
+I'm ungrateful"--she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile--"but I
+almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What
+it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't
+be able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of
+life--and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what
+will become of them."
+
+The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam
+in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
+moustache.
+
+"But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over," he
+persisted, doggedly--"and I told you there'd be more where that came
+from, and that I stood to pull off the great event--even then, now, you
+didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking
+about, did you?"
+
+She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. "For heaven's
+sake, Joel," she said, sharply--"you become a bore with that stupid
+nonsense. I want to be patient with you--I do indeed sympathize with you
+in your misfortunes--you know that well enough--but you're very tiresome
+with that eternal harping on what I believed and what I didn't believe.
+Now, are you going to stop to supper or not?--because if you are I must
+send the maid out. And there's another thing--would it be of any help to
+you to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have Alfred's room
+as well as not--till Christmas, at least."
+
+"Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel till I'd settled
+my bill," suggested Thorpe tentatively, in a muffled voice.
+
+The practical woman reflected for an instant. "I was thinking," she
+confessed then, "that it might be cheaper to leave your things there,
+and buy what little you want--I don't imagine, from what I've seen, that
+your wardrobe is so very valuable--but no, I suppose the bill ought to
+be paid. Perhaps it can be managed; how much will it be?"
+
+Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over to her chair. With
+his thick hands on his sister's shoulders he stooped and kissed her on
+the forehead.
+
+"You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?" he said, as he straightened
+himself behind her.
+
+The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from the perfunctory
+salute with which he had greeted her on his arrival from foreign parts,
+six months before--brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain
+face. Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted gaze she was
+bending upon the fireless grate. Something extraordinary, unaccountable,
+was in the manner of her brother. She recalled that, in truth, he was
+more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell what wild,
+uncanny second nature had not grown up in him under those
+outlandish tropical skies? He had just told her that his ruin was
+absolute--overwhelming--yet there had been a covert smile in the
+recesses of his glance. Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle
+from him, there as he stood behind her!
+
+The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain loomed up and
+possessed her. She flung herself out of the chair, and, wheeling, seized
+its back and drew it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare
+of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.
+
+"What"--she began, stammering--"What is the matter, Joel?"
+
+He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly at her for a further
+moment. Then he tossed his head, and laughed abruptly.
+
+"Sit down, old girl," he adjured her. "Try and hold yourself together,
+now--to hear some different kind of news. I've been playing it rather
+low down on you, for a fact. Instead of my being smashed, it's the other
+way about."
+
+She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp upon the chair-back.
+Her breathing troubled her as she regarded him, and tried to take in the
+meaning of his words.
+
+"Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about your Company?" she
+asked, confusedly.
+
+"No--no--not at all," he replied, now all genial heartiness. "No--what
+I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking a rise out of you all the
+same." He seemed so unaffectedly pleased by his achievement in kindly
+duplicity that she forced an awkward smile to her lips.
+
+"I don't understand in the least," she said, striving to remember what
+he had told her. "What you said was that the public had entirely failed
+to come in--that there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
+flotation expenses--those were your own words. Of course, I don't
+pretend to understand these City matters--but it IS the case, isn't it,
+that if people don't subscribe for the shares of a new company, then the
+company is a failure?"
+
+"Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule," he nodded at
+her, still beaming.
+
+"Well, then--of course--I don't understand," she owned.
+
+"I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've explained it
+to you," he said, seating himself, and motioning her to the other chair.
+"But yes, of course you will. You're a business woman. You know what
+figures mean. And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You
+remember that I told you----"
+
+"But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie out before the
+shops close."
+
+"Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked up for that. I'll
+get something at the hotel before I go to bed, if I feel like it. But
+say!"--the thought suddenly struck him--"if you want to come out with
+me, I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London. What d'ye
+say?"
+
+She shook her head. "I shall have some bread and cheese and beer at
+nine. That's my rule, you know. I don't like to break it. I'm always
+queer next day if I do. But now make haste and tell me--you're really
+not broken then? You have really come out well?"
+
+For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height, and spread his
+bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a
+triumphant glow.
+
+"Broken?" he echoed her word, with emphasis. "My dear Louisa, I'm not
+the sort that gets broken. I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall
+break them!"
+
+He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender,
+excitedly telling his story to her. Sometimes he threw the words over
+his shoulder; again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his
+hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the
+meaning of his speech--and then she found it peculiarly difficult to
+realize that he was her brother.
+
+Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced
+this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for
+her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with
+the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings
+in strange lands--and these he had frequently told her about before.
+Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a
+new thread. One after another, these experiences of his, as he related
+them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and
+malice had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a
+hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch
+Indies, in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
+waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were
+yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled
+him--everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden
+consummation. In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself. There
+had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before the Empire fell,
+in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in British Columbia when the
+first rumours of rich ore were whispered about--many times when fortune
+seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had always played him
+false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the
+temptation of profitable treason.
+
+But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession slipping
+through his fingers, only to strain and tighten them for a clutch at
+another. It did not surprise his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly
+attract her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
+comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the wage-earning
+sort. Apparently, he had done no work at all, in the bread-winner's
+sense of the word. This was so like Joel that it was taken for granted
+in his sister's mind. All his voyages and adventures and painful
+enterprises had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer--the
+passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst, to get
+something for nothing.
+
+The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last
+it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and
+crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that
+place that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago.
+Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his narrative that he
+now became vague as to details. There were concessions of rubber forests
+mentioned, and the barter of these for other concessions with money
+to boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about where the true
+boundary of Guatemala ran--but she failed clearly to understand much
+about it all. His other schemes and mishaps she had followed readily
+enough. Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw everything
+jumbled and distorted, as through a haze. Once or twice she interrupted
+him to ask questions, but he seemed to attach such slight importance to
+her comprehending these details that she forbore. Only one fact was
+it necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode, apparently. When
+he quitted Tehuantepec, to make his way straight to London, at the
+beginning of the year, he left behind him a rubber plantation which he
+desired to sell, and brought with him between six and seven thousand
+pounds, with which to pay the expenses of selling it. How he had
+obtained either the plantation or the money did not seem to have made
+itself understood. No doubt, as his manner indicated when she ventured
+her enquiries, it was quite irrelevant to the narrative.
+
+In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that no
+villain had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans. He at least
+mentioned no one who had wronged him there. When he came to London,
+however, there were villains and to spare. He moved to the mantel, when
+he arrived at this stage of the story, and made clear a space for his
+elbow to rest among the little trinkets and photographs with which it
+was burdened. He stood still thereafter, looking down at her; his voice
+took on a harsher note.
+
+Much of this story, also, she knew by heart. This strange, bearded,
+greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often during the past
+half-year to the little book-shop, and the widow's home above it, his
+misshapen handbag full of papers, his heart full of rage, hope, grief,
+ambition, disgust, confidence--everything but despair. It was true, it
+had never been quite real to her. He was right in his suggestion that
+she had never wholly believed in him. She had not been able to take
+altogether seriously this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who
+talked about millions. It was true that he had sent her four hundred
+pounds for the education of her son and daughter; it was equally true
+that he had brought with him to London a sum which any of his ancestors,
+so far as she knew about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he
+treated as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate the machinery of
+his great enterprise. She had heard, at various times, the embittered
+details of the disappearance of this money, little by little. Nearly a
+quarter of it, all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart
+of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the belief that London
+could be best approached through him. When at last this wretch was
+kicked downstairs, the effect had been only to make room for a fresh
+lot of bloodsuckers. There were so-called advertising agents, so-called
+journalists, so-called "men of influence in the City,"--a swarm of
+relentless and voracious harpies, who dragged from him in blackmail
+nearly the half of what he had left, before he summoned the courage and
+decision to shut them out.
+
+Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands he stumbled
+next--a group of City men concerned in the South African market, who
+impressed him very favourably at the outset. He got to know them by
+accident, and at the time when he began to comprehend the necessity of
+securing influential support for his scheme. Everything that he heard
+and could learn about them testified to the strength of their position
+in the City. Because they displayed a certain amiability of manner
+toward him and his project, he allowed himself to make sure of their
+support. It grew to be a certainty in his mind that they would see him
+through. He spent a good deal of money in dinners and suppers in their
+honour, after they had let him understand that this form of propitiation
+was not unpleasant to them. They chaffed him about some newspaper
+paragraphs, in which he was described as the "Rubber King," with
+an affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed that he
+detected a genuine respect for his abilities.
+
+Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for the better part
+of two months, he laid before them, at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a
+dinner in a private room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
+They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property, and place it
+upon the market; in consideration of their finding the ready money for
+this exploitation, they were to have for themselves two-fifths of the
+shares in the Company ultimately to be floated. They listened to these
+details, and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself, with
+rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves that evening to
+nothing definite. It took him nearly a week thereafter to get an answer
+from any of them. Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at
+all, it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving nine-tenths
+of the shares.
+
+He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his original amazement,
+that they named these preposterous terms merely because they expected
+to be beaten down, and he summoned all his good nature and tact for
+the task of haggling with them. He misunderstood their first show of
+impatience at this, and persevered in the face of their tacit rebuffs.
+Then, one day, a couple of them treated him with overt rudeness, and
+he, astonished out of his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he
+could hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his. They
+closed their office doors to him; even their clerks treated him with
+contemptuous incivility.
+
+This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him, curiously enough, as
+no other misadventure of his life had done.
+
+Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her, at the
+time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why it should disturb
+him so profoundly: to her mind, these men had done nothing so monstrous
+after all. But to him, their offense swallowed up all the other
+indignities suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. A
+sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated
+nobody else as he hated them. How often she had heard him swear, in
+solemn vibrating tones, that to the day of his death his most sacred
+ambition should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust and
+mire!
+
+And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant against
+the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took point and shape. It was
+about these very men that he was talking.
+
+"And think of it!" he was saying, impressively. "It's magnificent enough
+for me to make this great hit--but I don't count it as anything at
+all by comparison with the fact that I make it at their expense. You
+remember the fellows I told you about?" he asked abruptly, deferring to
+the confused look on her face.
+
+"Yes--you make it out of them," she repeated, in an uncertain voice. It
+occurred to her that she must have been almost asleep. "But did I miss
+anything? Have you been telling what it is that you have made?"
+
+"No--that you shall have in good time. You don't seem to realize it,
+Louisa. I can hardly realize it myself. I am actually a very rich man.
+I can't tell how much I've got--in fact, it can be almost as much as I
+like--half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want to make
+it that much. Yes--it takes the breath away, doesn't it? But best of
+all--a thousand times best of all--practically every dollar of it comes
+out of those Kaffir swine--the very men that tried to rob me, and
+that have been trying to ruin me ever since. I tell you what I wish,
+Louise--I wish to God there could only be time enough, and I'd take it
+all in half-sovereigns--two millions of them, or three millions--and
+just untwist every coin, one by one, out from among their heart-strings.
+Oh--but it'll be all right as it is. It's enough to make a man feel
+religious--to think how those thieves are going to suffer."
+
+"Well" she said, slowly after reflection, "it all rather frightens me."
+
+As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly
+accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and,
+stooping, lit the fire.
+
+He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff awkwardness
+over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note
+of the room--the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that
+had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and
+begrimed low ceiling--all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to which
+she had been condemned.
+
+"Frightens you?" he queried, with a kind of jovial tenderness, as she
+got to her feet; "frightens you, eh? Why, within a month's time, old
+lady, you'll be riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers
+folding their arms up behind, and you'll be taking it all as easy and as
+natural as if you'd been born in a barouche."
+
+He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows: "Barouche?
+That's what we'd call in England a landau."
+
+She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined
+meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the
+snapping sparks. "No," she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling
+with pride in her voice. "I was born here over the shop."
+
+"Well, good God! so was I," he commented, lustily. "But that's no reason
+why I shouldn't wind up in Park Lane--or you either."
+
+She had nothing to say to this, apparently. After a little, she seated
+herself again, drawing her chair closer to the hearth. "It's years since
+I've lit this fire before the first of November," she remarked, with the
+air of defending the action to herself.
+
+"Oh, we're celebrating," he said, rubbing his hands over the reluctant
+blaze. "Everything goes, tonight!"
+
+Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment of her
+mind. "You set out to tell me what it was all about," she reminded him.
+"You see I'm completely in the dark. I only hear you say that you've
+made a great fortune. That's all I know. Or perhaps you've told me as
+much as you care to."
+
+"Why, not at all," he reassured her, pulling his own chair toward him
+with his foot, and sprawling into it with a grunt of relief. "If you'll
+draw me a glass of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. It's
+not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed to a human being,
+for that matter--but you'll enjoy it, and it'll be safe enough with
+you."
+
+As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily after her: "No
+more beer when that keg runs dry, you know. Nothing but champagne!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister brought him.
+
+"Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty," he said, when he put the glass
+down. "Truth is--I've lost track of myself altogether since--since the
+big thing happened. I seem to be somebody else--a comparative stranger,
+so to speak. I've got to get acquainted with myself, all over again. You
+can't imagine what an extraordinary feeling it is--this being hit every
+few minutes with the recollection that you're worth half a million.
+It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down. There are such
+thousands of things to do--you dance about, all of a flutter. You don't
+know where to begin."
+
+"Begin where you left off," suggested Louisa. "You were going to tell me
+how--how 'the big thing' happened. You're always coming to it--and never
+getting any further."
+
+Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification, he plunged
+forthwith into the tale.
+
+"You remember my telling you at the time how I got my Board together.
+I'm speaking now of the present Company--after I'd decided to be my own
+promoter, and have at least some kind of 'a look-in' for my money. There
+wasn't much money left, by the way; it was considerably under three
+thousand. But I come to that later. First there was the Board. Here was
+where that Lord Plowden that I told you about--the man that came over on
+the ship with me--came in. I went to him. I--God! I was desperate--but I
+hadn't much of an idea he'd consent. But he did! He listened to me, and
+I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the Syndicate would have cut my
+throat if I hadn't pulled away,--and he said, 'Why, yes, I'll go on your
+Board.' Then I told him more about it, and presently he said he'd get me
+another man of title--a sky-scraper of a title too--to be my Chairman.
+That's the Marquis of Chaldon, a tremendous diplomatic swell, you know,
+Ambassador at Vienna in his time, and Lord Lieutenant and all sorts of
+things, but willing to gather in his five hundred a year, all the same."
+
+"Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?" asked the
+sister.
+
+"Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten quid a week, and a
+few extras. The other Directors get three hundred. This Lord Plowden
+is one of them--but I'll tell you more about him later on. Then there's
+Watkin, he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson, he's a
+wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm in Dundee, but gets along
+the best way he can on a very dicky business here in London, now. And
+then there's General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say,
+but I guess he needs all he can get. He's started wearing his fur-coat
+already. Well, that's my Board. I couldn't join it, of course, till
+after allotment--that's because I'm the vendor, as they call it--but
+that hasn't interfered at all with my running the whole show. The Board
+doesn't really count, you know. It only does what I want it to do. It's
+just a form that costs me seventeen hundred a year, that's all."
+
+"Seventeen hundred a year," she repeated, mechanically.
+
+"Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see. Or first, there were
+other things to be done. I saw that a good broker's name counted for
+a lot on a prospectus. I picked out one that I'd heard was
+reasonable--it'd been a splendid name if I could have got it--but he
+calmly said his price was two thousand pounds, all cash down--and I came
+away. Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much of anything yet, and
+so wasn't so stiff about his figure. He agreed to take 500 pounds cash,
+and 2,000 in shares. It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned
+out, at the pinch, to be the one man in a million for me. But I'll tell
+you about him later. He's the Broker, mind; you mustn't forget him.
+Well, then, he and I got a Solicitor--he took 200 pounds cash, but he
+had to have 2,000 shares--and the firm of Auditors--they were 100 pounds
+cash and 1,000 shares. Every company has to have these people pasted on
+to it, by law. Oh yes, and then you must have your Bankers. You
+don't pay them anything, though, thank God! Well, then, there was
+the machinery complete, all ready to start. I took a handsome set of
+offices, and furnished them up to the nines--but that I was able to do
+pretty well on credit. You see, ready money was getting short.
+
+"And now came the biggest pull of all. There was the press to be
+worked."
+
+He spoke as if there were no other papers in London but the financial
+journals.
+
+"I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up. You've got no more
+idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have of--of a coil of
+snakes thawing out hungry in the spring. Why, if one blackmailer came
+to me, I swear a hundred did. They scared the life out of me, the first
+month or so. And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say
+they can keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it worth their
+while. But they all wanted too much money for me--and for a while I was
+at my wits' ends. At last I got a fellow--he's not behaved so badly, all
+things considered--who had some sporting blood in his veins, and he was
+willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds, if I could pay 1,500
+pounds down, and the rest in shares. But that was just what I couldn't
+do, you see, so finally he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in
+shares--and as I say he's done it tolerably well. There was one editor
+that I had to square personally--that is to say, 100 pounds cash--it
+had to be in sovereigns, for notes could be traced--and a call of 2,000
+shares at par,--he's the boss pirate that everybody has to square--and
+of course there were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule
+I just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out. The moment a
+fellow came in, and handed me his card, and said he had proofs of two
+kinds of articles in his pocket, one praising me, one damning me, I told
+him to go and see my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then
+to go to hell. That's the way you've got to talk in the City," he added,
+as if in apologetic explanation.
+
+Louisa looked impassively at her brother. "Oh, I've heard the expression
+as far west as the Strand," she remarked.
+
+"Well, then came the issue. That was last Saturday. You saw the
+prospectus in Saturday morning's papers, and in the weeklies. The
+list was to be kept open, it said, till Wednesday morning--that was
+yesterday. That is to say, during all that time, people could apply for
+shares."
+
+"Which they didn't do--according to your account," the sister suggested,
+dryly.
+
+Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair, and eyed her with
+a momentary quizzical gleam in his eye. Then he became serious again.
+The recollection of what he was now to narrate brought a frown to his
+brows.
+
+"On Tuesday afternoon," he began, with portentous deliberation--"Or no,
+first I must explain something. You see, in bringing out a company, you
+can't put up too stout a bluff. I mean, you've got to behave as if
+you were rolling in wealth--as if everything was coming your way, and
+fortunes were to be made by fastening to you. I don't know that it often
+fools anybody very much, but it's part of the game, and you must play
+it. Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday morning, and
+has his jobber shout out that he'll buy 'Rubber Consols'--that's what
+our shares are called on the street--at an eighth premium; that is to
+say, he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were offering to
+the public for twenty shillings. Of course, you see, the object of that
+was to create the impression that there was a regular God-almighty
+rush for our shares. As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled
+anybody--but at least there was the chance that it might start up some
+dealing in the shares--and all those things help. Besides, you got the
+sales noticed in the papers, and that might start up applications from
+the public. Well, the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday.
+On Monday, when it might still be possible to change the luck, he bought
+3,500 more, still at that premium of an eighth. He bought some Tuesday
+morning too--say 4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and
+keep an eye on the Broker. He's worth watching--as you'll see."
+
+"What's his name?" asked the sister, with an accession of alertness in
+her face. "You call him 'Broker'--and that doesn't mean anything to me.
+They're all brokers, aren't they?"
+
+"Semple--Colin Semple, that's his name. He's a young Scotchman--father's
+a Presbyterian minister. He's a little, insignificant runt of a chap to
+look at--but I learned a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by his
+looks. However--where was I?"
+
+"You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon, weren't you?"
+
+He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long breath in
+preparation for the dramatic recital before him. "On Tuesday afternoon,"
+he began again, with impressive slowness, "I was walking on Throgmorton
+Street, about four o'clock. It was raining a little--it had been raining
+on and off all day--a miserable, rotten sort of a day, with greasy mud
+everywhere, and everybody poking umbrellas into you. I was out walking
+because I'd 'a' cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office another
+ten minutes. All that day I hadn't eaten anything. I hadn't slept worth
+speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was worse
+than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds
+in the bank--and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I tell you, I
+was just plumb busted.
+
+"There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen the cuss before
+during the day, walking up and down near my offices. I took notice
+of him, because he was the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking
+cripple you ever saw in your life. Now I read what was on his boards. It
+was the bill of a paper that I had refused to be bled by, and there
+it was in big letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!' 'Thorpe's Audacity
+Punished!' Those were the words. I can see them with my eyes shut. I
+stood there, looking at the fellow, and I suppose there was something in
+the way I looked, for he stopped too. Of course, he didn't know me from
+Adam, but all the same, I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me--as
+if we two had a joke between us. And at that I burst out laughing--I
+simply roared with laughter, like a boy at a pantomime--and I took that
+last half-crown out of my pocket, and I gave it to the sandwich-man.
+God! you should have seen his face."
+
+"I don't particularly mind, Joel," said his sister, "but I never heard
+you swear so much before."
+
+"Oh, what the--what the deuce!" he protested, impatiently. "Don't
+interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street. The members of the
+Stock Exchange were coming out of 'the house,' and making up little
+groups on the pavement. They do business inside, you know, until closing
+time--this day it happened to be four o'clock--and then they come out
+and deal in the street with one another, with the kerb-stone mob, who
+are not allowed inside, standing round to watch the thing. I came along
+into the thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts of
+things--'East Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,' and what not, but
+these went in one ear and out the other. If there ever was a man with no
+stomach for the market it was me. But then someone roared out:
+
+"'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five hundred Rubber at
+seven-eighths! Sell five hundred at three-quarters! At three-quarters
+you have 'em! Rubber Consols! Sell a thou. at three-quarters!'
+
+"This thing went into my brain like a live coal. I stopped and looked
+up at the fellow--and by God, it was one of the men I've been
+talking about--one of those Kaffir scoundrels. I wish I was better at
+remembering names--but I knew his face. There were some of the others
+around him, and they laughed at me, and he laughed at me. Oh, they had
+a heap of fun out of me--for a minute or two. Pretty good fun, too! I
+guess they'll remember it quite a while."
+
+"Go on!" Louisa adjured him. The obvious proximity of the dramatic
+climax drew her forward in her chair, and brought a glow of expectation
+to her eyes.
+
+"I got myself away from that crowd somehow--I think I was afraid if I
+stayed I'd strangle the one who was shouting on the steps--and I went
+toward my office. But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage
+to go in. I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any other office
+in Austin Friars, and I had a kind of feeling that the sight of those
+carpets, and oak-tables and desks, and brass-railings and so on would
+make me sick. I owed for 'em all, bear in mind----"
+
+"But--Joel," the sister interposed. "One thing I don't understand. How
+many people had applied for shares? You haven't mentioned that."
+
+A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of his present mood. "It
+was hardly worth mentioning," he answered, with bitter mirth. "Between
+five and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. I think the
+withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand.
+We offered a hundred thousand, you know.--But let me go on with my
+story. I stood there, in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance.
+The words of that Jew--'Sell Rubber Consols at three-quarters!'--buzzed
+inside my head as if they would burst it open. I turned--and I happened
+to see my Broker--the Scotchman, Semple, you know--coming along toward
+me. Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on me. In less
+than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten outfit turned upside down,
+with me on top. I made a jump, and ran to meet Semple.
+
+"'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him, with a grip
+tight on his arm.
+
+"The little chap was looking mighty sick. He figured up in his mind.
+'I'm afraid it's eight thousand five hundred, all told,' he said, in a
+sort of Presbyterian whimper.
+
+"'Well--how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver their
+goods--that is, supposing we got a settlement?'
+
+"I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face. He looked puzzled for a
+minute. Then he put out his lip. Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a
+razor, and we looked into one another's eyes.
+
+"'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters, a minute ago,' I
+told him.
+
+"He was onto the game like lightning. 'Wait for me in the office,' he
+whispered. 'We'll go nap on this!'
+
+"With that he was off like a streak. He stopped running just before he
+got to the corner, though, and began walking slowly, sauntering along,
+you know, as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books. I watched
+him out of sight--and then I went back, and up to the offices. The
+furniture didn't scare me a bit this time. Why, I stopped and felt
+of the brass-railing just outside the Board Room, and I said to
+myself--'Pshaw! We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'"
+
+He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she felt was intended
+to be a significant look. She shrank from the confession that its
+meaning was Greek to her. "Well--and what next?" she asked, guardedly.
+
+"Semple came back in twenty minutes or so--and the next morning he was
+at it again--and what with him and his jobber, by George, on the quiet,
+they picked up nearly eighteen thousand of our shares. Some they paid
+fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six and even ten.
+That doesn't matter; it's of no more importance than the coppers you
+give to crossing-sweepers. The thing was to get the shares--and by God
+we've got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares, that's what
+we've got. Now, do you see what that means?"
+
+"Why yes," she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption of confidence.
+"Of course, you know the property is so good that you'll make a profit
+on the shares you've bought far below their value. But I don't think I
+quite see----"
+
+He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter. "Don't think you
+quite see?" he gurgled at her, with tears of pleasure in his eye. "Why,
+you dummy, you haven't got the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's
+all about. The value of the property's got nothing in the world to
+do with it. That's neither here nor there. If there wasn't any such
+property in existence, it would be just the same."
+
+He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this, and explained
+more gently: "Why, don't you see, Lou, it's this way. This is what has
+happened. We've got what's called a corner on the bears. They're caught
+short, and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content. What--you don't
+understand now? Why, see here! These fellows who've sold twenty-six
+thousand of our shares--they haven't got them to sell, and they
+can't get them. That is the point--they can't get them for love nor
+money--they must pay me my own price for them, or be ruined men. The
+moment they realize the situation, they will begin offering a premium
+for Rubber Consols. The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds,
+then four--six--ten--twenty--thirty--whatever I want to drive it to."
+
+Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes. It seemed to her that she
+understood now. It was very exciting.
+
+"You see," he went on, taking approving note of the new light of
+comprehension in her glance, "we did something that Tuesday afternoon
+beside buy up these shares. Semple rushed off to his office, and he and
+his clerks got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out in
+all the different names they could be safe in using, and they put these
+into the bank with the application money--Semple found that--and next
+day he went and saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
+auditors--and got them to pool the shares that I've promised to give
+them. A pool? That means they agree to transfer their shares to me
+as trustee, and let me deal with them as I like--of course to their
+advantage. In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't
+be dealt with in this transaction. So you see the thing is hermetically
+sealed. Nobody can get a share except from me, and at my price. But
+these fellows that have sold them--they've got to have them, don't you
+see. They had their little temporary joke with me on the street that
+afternoon--and now they must walk up to the captain's office and settle.
+They've got to pay me at least half a million pounds for that few
+minutes' fun of theirs. I may make it a good deal more; I don't know
+yet."
+
+"Oh, Joel!" she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction. His rather
+languid indecision as to whether half a million was going to be enough,
+impressed her more powerfully than had any detail of his narrative.
+
+In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for her what there was
+to tell. "This afternoon my Board met to allot the shares. They saw the
+applications, amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares. It took
+their breath away--they had heard that things were going quite the
+other way with us. They were so tickled that they asked no questions The
+allotment went through like a greased pig. About 5,000 shares went to
+those who had actually applied for them, and 88,000 were solemnly given
+to the dummy applicants. Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these
+dummies. Nobody winked so much as an eyelash. But I've found since that
+one of the directors--that Lord Plowden I told you about--was onto
+the thing all the while. But he's all right. Everybody's all right. Of
+course the dummies' shares still stand in their names--on paper--but in
+reality I've got them all in my safe--in my pocket you might say. They
+are really mine, you understand. So now there's nothing for us to do
+but to apply to the Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and
+meanwhile lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. Or fry
+in their own fat, eh? That's better."
+
+"But," she commented slowly, "you say there are no shares to be
+bought--and yet as I understand it, there are those five thousand that
+were sent out to the people who really applied."
+
+"Bravo, Lou!" he answered her jovially. "You actually do understand the
+thing. You've put your finger straight on the point. It is true that
+those shares are out against us--or might be turned against us if they
+could be bought up. But in reality, they don't count at all. In the
+first place, you see, they're scattered about among small holders,
+country clergymen and old maids on an annuity and so on--all over the
+country. Even if these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose
+it was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell. The bigger the
+price they were offered, the more mulish they would be about holding.
+That's always the way with them. But even if they did all sell, their
+five thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket. There would be over
+twenty thousand others to be accounted for. That would be quite enough
+for my purposes. Oh, I figured all that out very carefully. My own first
+notion was to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand, and
+even a little over. Then, you see, we might have allotted everything
+to the dummies, and sent back the money and applications of the genuine
+ones. But that would have been rather hard to manage with the Board. The
+Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made pro rata--that
+is, giving everybody a part of what they applied for--and that would
+have mixed everything up. And then, too, if anybody suspected
+anything, why the Stock Exchange Committee would refuse us a special
+settlement--and, of course, without that the whole transaction is
+moonshine. It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny."
+
+"It's all pretty risky, I should think," she declared as she rose. "I
+should think you'd lie awake more than ever now--now that you've built
+your hopes so high and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing."
+
+He smilingly shook his head. "No, it can no more fail than that gas
+can fail to burn when you put a light to it. It's all absolute. My
+half-million is as right as if it were lying to my credit in the Bank of
+England. Oh, that reminds me," he went on in a slightly altered
+tone--"it's damned comical, but I've got to ask you for a little money.
+I've only got about seven pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it
+would give me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. Of course
+he'd let me have anything I wanted--but, you can see--I don't like to
+ask him just at the moment."
+
+She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a wistful gaze. "You're
+quite sure, Joel?"--she began--"and you haven't told me--how long will
+it be before you come into some of this money?"
+
+"Well,"--he in turn paused over his words--"well, I suppose that by next
+week things will be in such shape that my bank will see I'm good for an
+overdraft. Oh heavens, yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some
+ready. But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I tell
+you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill, paying one
+hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me have now. Come, old lady:
+you don't get such interest every day, I'll bet."
+
+"I don't want any interest from you, Joel," she replied, simply. "If
+you're sure I can have it back before Christmas, I think I can manage
+thirty pounds. It will do in the morning, I suppose?"
+
+He nodded an amused affirmative. "Why--you don't imagine, do you,"
+he said, "that all this gold is to rain down, and none of it hit you?
+Interest? Why of course you'll get interest--and capital thrown in. What
+did you suppose?"
+
+"I don't ask anything for myself," she made answer, with a note of
+resolution in her voice. "Of course if you like to do things for the
+children, it won't be me who'll stand in their light. They've been
+spoiled for my kind of life as it is."
+
+"I'll do things for everybody," he affirmed roundly. "Let's see--how old
+is Alfred?"
+
+"He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months older than he is."
+
+"Gad!" was Thorpe's meditative comment. "How they shoot up! Why I was
+thinking she was a little girl." "She never will be tall, I'm afraid,"
+said the literal mother. "She favours her father's family. But Alfred is
+more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer--but of
+course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them--and
+they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in
+the country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age:
+he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's not a bit
+fonder of hard work."
+
+"There's one mighty big difference between us, though," remarked Thorpe.
+"He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old
+father hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich
+man."
+
+"I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head," she replied,
+with visible apprehension. "You mustn't encourage him to build too high
+hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know--and anything might happen to
+you. And then--you may marry, and have sons of your own."
+
+He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new to his mind. A
+slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his
+lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.
+
+"Well," he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an
+eye about for his coat and hat. "I'll be round in the morning--on my way
+to the City. Good-bye till then."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by
+the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.
+This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the
+last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud
+nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some
+quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a
+piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the
+general upheaval in the routine of his life.
+
+From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that
+his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar
+things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to
+him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now,
+as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all
+disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With
+the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
+disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and shining
+hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of
+discovery in the unknown.
+
+Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to
+the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after
+breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in
+the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin,
+tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence;
+the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen
+years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
+misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant
+where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he
+had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the
+looking-glass. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most
+in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all
+the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous
+distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an
+average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.
+
+His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old
+book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his
+own clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring
+implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived
+his youth. The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man
+spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing
+all earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he
+had had during the day in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and
+embroidered braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors,
+toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the
+gratified tradesmen to give him the best of everything--this delight had
+been distinctively boyish. He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could
+have risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected
+upon the contents of his portmanteaus. To apprehend their full value one
+must have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful
+advantage--that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
+nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could
+be without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and
+mostly unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to
+appreciate to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.
+
+It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good
+tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and
+his evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume
+for shooting harassed his mind. He had brought along with him, for
+this eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and
+leather, much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable
+by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic
+country. At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had
+packed it, to be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject
+had soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy
+as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's
+investigations and purchases. He had reached the point now of hoping
+that it would rain bitterly on the morrow.
+
+It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since
+he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time
+was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in
+this matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
+He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in
+readiness on the arrival of his host. As it was, he could not even tell
+the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now
+less than two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of
+intercepting his friend at the front of the station; then halted, and
+went back, upon the recollection that while he was going out one way,
+Plowden might come in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now,
+became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere
+beyond the barrier provoked within him an impulse to tearful profanity.
+
+Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken
+young man came up, touched his hat, and asked: "Will you kindly show me
+which is your luggage, sir?"
+
+Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the
+glaringly new bags--and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at
+discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.
+
+"It's all right; my man will look out for your things," said the latter,
+as they shook hands. "We will go and get our places."
+
+The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. A lean, elderly man
+in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled obsequiously before them down the
+platform, opened to them a first-class compartment with a low bow and a
+deprecatory wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door upon
+them. "The engine will be the other way, my Lord, after you leave Cannon
+Street," he remarked through the open window, with earnest deference.
+"Are there any of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?"
+
+Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook his head at the second.
+The elderly man at this, with still another bow, flapped out a green
+flag which he had been holding furled behind his back, and extended it
+at arm's length. The train began slowly to move. Mr. Thorpe reflected to
+himself that the peerage was by no means so played-out an institution as
+some people imagined.
+
+"Ho-ho!" the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed his hat into the
+rack above his head. "We shall both be the better for some pure air.
+London quite does me up. And you--you've been sticking at it months
+on end, haven't you? You look rather fagged--or at all events you did
+yesterday. You've smartened yourself so--without your beard--that I
+can't say I'd notice it to-day. But I take it every sensible person is
+glad to get away from London."
+
+"Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put my nose outside
+London since I landed here." Thorpe rose as he spoke, to deposit his hat
+also in the rack. He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's
+was an ordinary low black bowler. "I can tell you, I SHALL be glad of
+the change. I would have bought the tickets," he went on, giving words
+at random to the thought which he found fixed on the surface of his
+mind, "if I'd only known what our station was."
+
+Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss the subject.
+He took a cigar case from his pocket, and offered it to Thorpe.
+
+"It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether," he said, as they
+lighted their cigars. "I was up late last night--turned out late this
+morning, been late all day, somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock
+for the life of me. Your statement to me last night--you know it rather
+upset me."
+
+The other smiled. "Well, I guess I know something about that feeling
+myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today like a hen with her head cut
+off. But it's fun, though, aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every
+once in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course it means a
+thousand times more to me than it does to you."
+
+The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern of Cannon
+Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro on the platform, and a
+number of them shook the handle of the locked door. There was an effect
+of curses in the sound of their remarks which came through the closed
+window. Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.
+
+"Ah, that's where you mistake," said Plowden, contemplating the mouthful
+of smoke he slowly blew forth. "My dear man, you can't imagine anybody
+to whom it would mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those
+fellows have a key. They're an awful bore on this train. I almost
+never go by it, for that reason. Ah, thank God we're off!--But as I was
+saying, this thing makes a greater difference to me than you can think
+of. I couldn't sleep last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me
+so. I take it you--you have never had much money before; that is, you
+know from experience what poverty is?"
+
+Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.
+
+"Well--but you"--the other began, and then paused. "What I mean is,"
+he resumed, "you were never, at any rate, responsible to anybody but
+yourself. If you had only a sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for
+that matter, you could accommodate yourself to the requirements of
+the situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy it any more than I
+should--but at least it was open to you to do it, without attracting
+much attention. But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty
+has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine. You see, there is
+no way in which I can earn a penny. I had to leave the Army when I was
+twenty-three--the other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it
+was impossible for me to drag along with a title and an empty pocket. I
+daresay that I ought to have stuck to it, because it isn't nearly so bad
+now, but twelve years ago it was too cruel for any youngster who had any
+pride about him--and, of course, my father having made rather a name in
+the Army, that made it so much harder for me. And after that, what was
+there? Of course, the bar and medicine and engineering and those things
+were out of the question, in those days at least. The Church?--that was
+more so still. I had a try at politics--but you need money there as
+much as anywhere else--money or big family connections. I voted in
+practically every division for four years, and I made the rottenest
+speeches you ever heard of at Primrose League meetings in small places,
+and after all that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet
+in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took in depreciated
+rupees. When I tried to talk about something at home, they practically
+laughed in my face. I had no leverage upon them whatever. They didn't
+care in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home. Their
+majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty to one. So that door
+was shut in my face. I've never been inside the House since--except once
+to show it to an American lady last summer--but when I do go again I
+rather fancy"--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome head
+significantly--"I rather fancy I shall turn up on the other side."
+
+"I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics," interposed Thorpe.
+
+Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left London
+Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions, and leant back
+comfortably. "Of course there was the City," he went on, speaking
+diagonally across to his companion, between leisurely intervals of
+absorption in his cigar. "There have been some directors' fees, no
+doubt, and once or twice I've come very near to what promised to be a
+big thing--but I never quite pulled it off. Really, without capital what
+can one do?--I'm curious to know--did you bring much ready money with
+you to England?"
+
+"Between six and seven thousand pounds."
+
+"And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you got left?"
+
+Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question,
+but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to
+answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. "Oh, less than a hundred," he
+said, and laughed aloud.
+
+Plowden also laughed. "By George, that's fine!" he cried. "It's
+splendid. There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know.
+Something told me it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was
+that that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you were
+a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of
+courage is so rare! When a man has it, he can stand the world on
+its head." "But I was plumb scared, all the while, myself," Thorpe
+protested, genially. "Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots."
+
+"Ah, yes, but that's the great thing," insisted the other. "You didn't
+look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was
+sublime. And nothing else matters--it was sublime."
+
+"Curious--that thing happened to me once before," commented Thorpe, with
+ruminating slowness. "It was out on the plains, years ago, and I was
+in pretty hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north, and
+some cowboys held me up, and were going to make kindling wood of me,
+they being under the impression that I was a horse-thief they were
+looking after. There was five or six minutes there when my life
+wasn't worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was the
+scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life. And then something
+happened to be said that put the matter right--they saw I was the wrong
+man--and then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. They half
+emptied their flasks down my throat, and they rode with me all the way
+to the next town, and there they wanted to buy everything liquid in the
+place for me. But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows got
+a tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much that they told me
+so, but they told others about it. They really thought I was game to the
+core--when in reality, as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you
+ever heard of."
+
+"That's just it," said Plowden, "the part of you which was engaged in
+making mental notes of the occasion thought you were frightened; we will
+say that it was itself frightened. But the other part of you, the part
+that was transacting business, so to speak--that wasn't in the least
+alarmed. I fancy all born commanders are built like that. Did you ever
+see General Grant?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head.
+
+"What reminded me of him--there is an account in his Memoirs of how he
+felt when he first was given a command, at the beginning of the Civil
+War. He was looking about for the enemy, who was known to be in the
+vicinity, and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was, the
+more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed as if cowardice
+were getting complete mastery of him. And then suddenly it occurred to
+him that very likely the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of
+the enemy, and that moment his bravery all returned to him. He went in
+and gave the other man a terrible thrashing. It doesn't apply to your
+case, particularly--but I fancy that all really brave men have those
+inner convictions of weakness, even while they are behaving like
+lions. Those must have been extraordinarily interesting experiences of
+yours--on the plains. I wish I could have seen something of that part
+of America when I was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come my
+way."
+
+"I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West."
+
+Plowden smiled. "I'm afraid I did think it was West at the time. But
+since my return I've been warned that I mustn't call Chicago West. That
+was as far as I went. I had some business there, or thought I had. When
+my father died, that was in 1884, we found among his papers a lot of
+bonds of some corporation purporting to be chartered by the State of
+Illinois. Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find out
+nothing about them, and there the matter rested. Finally, last year,
+when I decided to make the trip, I recollected these old bonds, and
+took them with me. I thought they might at least pay my expenses. But
+it wasn't the least good. Nobody knew anything about them. It seems they
+related to something that was burned up in the Great Fire--either that,
+or had disappeared before that time. That fire seems to have operated
+like the Deluge--it cancelled everything that had happened previously.
+My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment. I shall
+have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow, a very picturesque and
+comprehensive collection of Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I
+remember it, eighty thousand dollars--that is, sixteen thousand pounds.
+I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot.
+My dear father bought them--I should not be surprised to learn that he
+bought them at a premium. If they ever touched a premium for a day, that
+is certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too
+rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of
+paper--that is, on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I
+think it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine how he got
+them--but there were actually bonds among them issued by Kossuth's
+Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well--now you can see the kind of
+inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and sister more or less to
+look after, too."
+
+Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated
+expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now
+betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.
+
+"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what I don't perhaps
+quite understand--well, this is it. You have this place of yours in the
+country, and preserve game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
+It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable
+living, is poverty to a man in your position."
+
+"Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all. I could never have
+kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has
+been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you
+know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three
+daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest,
+got the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me
+eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as
+my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to
+explain to everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's
+enough. It's a dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that
+you're going to see it."
+
+"I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.
+
+"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman went on, sitting
+upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, "centre round
+Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are
+things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very
+small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud
+voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics.
+He got a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a
+soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart. He gave a certain military
+distinction to the peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the
+fortune. And then I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General,
+and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think of a more
+idiotic box for a man to be in. But now--thanks to you--there comes
+this prospect of an immense change. If I have money at my back--at once
+everything is different with me. People will remember then promptly
+enough that I am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party
+whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet in India at
+four hundred a year that they'll offer me, but a Governorship at six
+thousand--that is, if I wish to leave England at all. And we'll see
+which set of whips are to have the honour of offering me anything. But
+all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment, to realize that
+things have really come my way. And about that--about the success of the
+affair--I suppose there can be no question whatever?"
+
+"Not the slightest," Thorpe assured him. "Rubber Consols can go up to
+any figure we choose to name."
+
+Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped
+himself after he had given his companion a light. Then he threw himself
+back against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. "I'm not going
+to say another word about myself," he announced, pleasantly. "I've had
+more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a
+moment the reverse of the medal. You're doing wonderful things for me. I
+only wish it were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I can
+do for you."
+
+"Oh, that'll be all right," said the other, rather vaguely.
+
+"Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind
+just what you want to do," Plowden reflected aloud. "Of course it has
+come suddenly upon you--just as it has upon me. There are things in
+plenty that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a
+long way off. It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we
+shall proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands. But have
+you any plans at all? Do you fancy going into Parliament, for example?"
+
+"Yes," answered Thorpe, meditatively. "I think I should like to go into
+Parliament. But that would be some way ahead. I guess I've got my plans
+worked out a trifle more than you think. They may not be very definite,
+as regards details, but their main direction I know well enough. I'm
+going to be an English country gentleman."
+
+Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. He seemed
+annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so, turning abruptly first
+to stare out of the window, then shifting his position on the seat, and
+at last stealing an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his
+tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment.
+
+Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. Plowden
+saw that at once, but it relieved even more than it surprised him to see
+also that Thorpe appeared not to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in
+good-natured if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.
+
+"Oh, that'll be all right, too," he said, with the evident intention
+of reassurance. "I can do it right enough, so far as the big things are
+concerned. It'll be in the little things that I'll want some steering."
+
+"I've already told you--you may command me to the utmost of my power,"
+the other declared. Upon reflection, he was disposed to be ashamed
+of himself. His nerves and facial muscles had been guilty of an
+unpardonable lapse into snobbishness--and toward a man, too, who
+had been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its courtesy and
+generosity than any he had encountered in all the "upper circles" put
+together. He recalled all at once, moreover, that Thorpe's "h's" were
+perfect--aud, for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.
+
+"My dear fellow"--he began again, confronting with verbal awkwardness
+the other's quizzical smile--"don't think I doubt anything about you. I
+know well enough that you can do anything--be anything--you like."
+
+Thorpe laughed softly.
+
+"I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-school man," he said.
+
+Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. "No--I didn't know
+that," he admitted, frankly.
+
+"Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon," Thorpe went on, "as they called them in
+my day. That's gone out now, I'm told, since they've moved to the big
+buildings in Hammersmith. I did very well at school, too; came out in
+the first fourteen. But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further.
+He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's and
+learning the book-business. He had precisely the same kind of dynastic
+idea, you know, that you fellows have. His father and his grand-father
+had been booksellers, and he was going to hand on the tradition to me,
+and my son after me. That was his idea. And he thought that Paul's would
+help this--but that Oxford would kill it.
+
+"Of course, he was right there--but he was wrong in supposing there was
+a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough, mind you--but damn
+the people that came to buy them, I couldn't stand it. You stood two
+hours watching to see that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and
+at the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. While you
+were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off with a book worth
+eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. I didn't hit it off with the old
+man, either. We didn't precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook.
+I hung about London for some years, trying this thing and that. Once I
+started a book-shop of my own--but I did no good here. Finally I turned
+it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been in
+almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to be
+shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting
+to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger--but
+I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my father's
+book-shop."
+
+Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the other's mood.
+He was silent for a moment, then lifted his head as if something had
+occurred to him. "You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed
+to your father's business--and your son after you--you're not married,
+are you?"
+
+Thorpe slowly shook his head.
+
+"Our station is the next," said the younger man. "It's a drive of
+something under two miles. You'd better light another cigar." He added,
+as if upon a casual afterthought: "We can both of us think of marrying
+now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied
+with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed
+suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively
+by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
+horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins,
+and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial
+silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them
+from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close
+behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the
+question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst
+forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
+once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies
+to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the
+animal--"So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so"--and
+his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
+strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth
+of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a
+modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed,
+in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good
+deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence
+was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could
+not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.
+
+It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the
+most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily
+developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower
+than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all
+at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel
+road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse.
+Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a
+low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
+curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
+conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
+front of the central portion of this house.
+
+A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the
+vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what
+the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
+comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
+There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
+and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
+massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
+Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
+broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing
+richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.
+
+What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
+swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
+somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once
+there were a number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back
+and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and
+beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica
+of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them
+apart.
+
+Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at
+his watch. "We did it in a bit over eight minutes," he remarked, with
+obvious satisfaction. "With four people and heavy roads that's not so
+bad--not so bad. But come inside."
+
+They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like
+of which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with
+a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and
+left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old
+and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of
+tigers and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase
+about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic
+weapons caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer
+peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of
+hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a
+fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low
+chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic
+occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table in
+the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books,
+flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers,
+and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides--all this
+self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a
+profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
+to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to
+overflowing with servants, amazed him.
+
+The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His
+mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished
+at nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
+Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.
+
+"If you will follow Pangbourn," said his host, indicating this second
+domestic, "he will look after you. You would like to go up and change
+now, wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room."
+
+Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus,
+taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low
+passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing
+of the house. The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite of
+himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and
+most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be--spacious and quaintly
+rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
+effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and
+chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm,
+cozy glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at
+the photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
+posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted
+face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.
+
+This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe
+looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was
+conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to
+unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel
+after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa
+beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he
+had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.
+
+Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of
+his tongue--but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands
+in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented
+something which it seemed better for him to say.
+
+"I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things," he remarked,
+casually. "My man has been buying them today--and I don't know what he
+mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray
+or was stolen at some station or other--the first part of the week--I
+think it must have been Leeds."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Pangbourn, without emotion. "They're very careless,
+sir."
+
+He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading
+them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging
+the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to
+foresee everything--for there was not an instant's hesitation in the
+clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in
+one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set
+the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican
+shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its
+constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
+sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the
+trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been
+fashioned expressly for them.
+
+Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for
+Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now
+he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind.
+Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though
+he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why not
+Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became
+apparent that the man's task was nearing completion--and then frowned
+at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the
+end of a visit.
+
+"Will you dress now, sir?" asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct
+enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.
+
+"Eh?" said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's
+thought.
+
+"Shall you require me any further, sir?" the man reframed the question,
+deferentially.
+
+"Oh! Oh--no," replied Thorpe. "No--I'll get along all right."
+
+Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing.
+The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror
+presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he
+was used to--but upon second thought he preferred this restrained
+aristocratic glimmer.
+
+He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with
+his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the
+darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait
+for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before
+he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and
+firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward
+to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a
+cigarette.
+
+"Have they looked after you all right?" said Plowden, nonchalantly.
+"Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never
+will keep matches in a bedroom."
+
+He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and
+stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. "I thought I'd tell
+you before we went down"--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the
+mantel, looked down at his handsome head--"my sister has a couple of
+ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on
+shipboard a Miss Madden--an American, you know--very tall and fine, with
+bright red hair--rather remarkable hair it was?"
+
+"I remember the lady," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "but we didn't
+meet." He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those
+days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to
+him to know them.
+
+Lord Plowden smiled a little. "Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun--if
+she's in the mood. My mother and sister--I had them call on her in
+London last spring--and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no
+end of money, you know--at least a million and a half--dollars,
+unfortunately. Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
+waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if they'd crossed
+over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous
+country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told
+you--it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you
+were English."
+
+Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence.
+This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was
+not altogether grateful to his ears.
+
+"The other one," continued Plowden, "is Lady Cressage. You'll be
+interested in her--because a few years ago she was supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder--he
+would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he was
+drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!" he
+started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face--"it didn't in
+the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How
+did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?"
+
+Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. "Why, you introduced me to him
+yourself, didn't you?" he asked, slowly.
+
+Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it
+over in his mind. "By George! I think you're right," he said. "I'd quite
+forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
+readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he can get. He was
+bothering her about money--that was it, I remember now--but what an
+idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying--there's no one else but
+my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty or
+thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army.
+If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but
+cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the
+party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If
+you've finished your cigarette"--he threw his own into the grate, and
+rose as he spoke--"we may as well be moving along. By the way," he
+concluded, as they walked toward the door, "I've an idea that we won't
+say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to
+keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister, you know."
+
+Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored
+equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He
+had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in
+the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much
+at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had
+feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had
+wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with
+serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious
+of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a
+new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of
+everything.
+
+The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous
+shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows
+and eyelashes--had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for
+his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
+connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers
+toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy
+firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated
+at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent
+his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened
+to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were
+concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He
+said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed
+to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
+motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor
+throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and
+smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him,
+whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original
+half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify
+itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the
+other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent
+smile that he could command. He reasoned it out that Plowden must have
+said something pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to
+the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
+fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth
+to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own
+merits--and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her
+where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
+white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of
+alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.
+
+He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder,
+of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all
+a busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
+young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She
+was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner
+life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired
+to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate
+aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few
+words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve
+close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only
+that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did--but to him,
+really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago--why, yes, even a
+fortnight ago--the golden rumour of millions would have shone round
+her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
+Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a
+mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman
+to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference
+with which he considered her.
+
+The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a
+sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in
+part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano.
+Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told
+him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's
+hand. This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung
+together, these two young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions
+all the evening, that this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady
+Cressage, and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the
+house, peering through her pince-nez from under unduly thick black
+brows, formed a party of their own. Their politeness toward him had been
+as identical in all its little shades of distance and reservation as if
+they had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would be unfair
+to them to assume from their manner that they disliked him, or were even
+unfavourably impressed by him. The finesse of that manner was far too
+delicate a thing to call into use such rough characterizations. It was
+rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. He thought he
+could see that they united upon a common demeanour toward the American
+girl, although of course they knew her much better than they knew
+him. It was not even clear to him that there were not traces of this
+combination in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. The
+bond between them had twisted in it strands of social exclusiveness, and
+strands of sex sympathy.
+
+He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the
+impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed
+these impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him
+consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He
+had formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the
+idea that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest
+weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
+his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions
+about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had
+scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
+which included ladies--certainly never in the presence of such
+certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however,
+was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this
+briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of
+the great subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women
+sticking together, for example--here before his eyes was one of the
+prettiest instances of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two
+figures on the sofa, so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit
+to each other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really
+touching.
+
+Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the
+piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of
+it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline--sensitive,
+high-spirited, somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. He
+moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces,
+and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the
+Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious
+wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
+the music said less than nothing to his ears--that it was the face that
+had beckoned him to advance.
+
+Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
+this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
+beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
+thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and
+chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he
+could not be sure.
+
+So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said
+to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which
+belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in
+diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of
+the great lady--they were all there in their supreme expression. And
+yet--why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his
+old General Kervick--the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military
+gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did
+what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three
+hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter, and she also was poor.
+Plowden had said so.
+
+Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
+father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to
+have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a
+directorship. But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
+forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have
+been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady
+Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he
+could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
+military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by
+directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered
+Kervick's name, when the chance arose to give the old boy a leg up, and
+then had clean forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
+his liking for Plowden.
+
+He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer
+sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so
+nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of
+him but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
+Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's
+daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him,
+and about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial
+position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very
+fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should
+render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the
+piano before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from
+the others a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and
+enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been
+deaf to something that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks
+which seemed to be regarded as apposite.
+
+"What IS it?" asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. "I don't know
+when anything has touched me so much."
+
+"Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or
+two," replied Miss Madden. "I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly
+enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?"
+
+"We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and musicians--like
+this," affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.
+
+With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the
+conversation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs next
+morning before anybody else in the house, apparently, was astir. At all
+events, he saw no one in either the hall or the glass vestibule, as he
+wandered about. Both doors were wide open, however, to the mild,
+damp morning air. He found on one of the racks a cap that was less
+uncomfortable than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.
+
+His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason told him
+they ought to be. The disquieting impression of bad dreams hung about
+him. The waking hour--always an evil time for him in these latter days
+of anxiety--had been this morning a peculiarly depressing affair. It had
+seemed to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness, that he
+was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man; the illusion of disaster
+had been, indeed, so complete and vivid that, even now, more than an
+hour later, he had not shaken off its effects.
+
+He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along the gravel paths,
+to the task of reassuring himself. There were still elements of chance
+in the game, of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight,
+to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum--that it was
+nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed the situation in
+painstaking detail, and at every point it was all right, or as nearly
+all right as any human business could be. He scolded himself sharply for
+this foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. "Look at
+Plowden!" he bade his dolorous spirit. "See how easy he takes things."
+
+It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very easily indeed.
+He had talked with eloquence and feeling about the miseries and
+humiliations of a peerage inadequately endowed with money, but no traces
+of his sufferings were visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman
+himself looked the very image of contented prosperity--handsome,
+buoyant, light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London.
+And this ancestral home of his--or of his mother's, since he seemed to
+insist upon the distinction--where were its signs of a stinted income?
+The place was overrun with servants. There was a horse which covered a
+distance of something like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out,
+Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty. Yet its master told
+the most unvarying tales of poverty, and no doubt they were in one sense
+true. What he wished to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for
+himself from, was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved as
+if they were rich.
+
+The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by high hedges and
+trees from what seemed to be a public road beyond, were fairly spacious,
+but the sleek decorum of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was
+scarcely interesting. He liked better to study the house itself, which
+in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal of what a historic English
+country-house of the minor class should be.
+
+There had been a period in his youth when architecture had attracted him
+greatly as offering a congenial and lucrative career. Not much remained
+to him now of the classifications and phraseology which he had gone to
+the trouble of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked at
+buildings with a kind of professional consciousness. Hadlow House
+said intelligible things to him, and he was pleased with himself for
+understanding them. It was not new in any part, apparently, but there
+was nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never been a castle,
+or a fortified residence. No violent alteration in habits or needs
+distinguished its present occupants from its original builders. It
+had been planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
+not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle people to
+have homes, without fighting to defend them. One could fancy that its
+calm and infinitely comfortable history had never been ruffled from that
+day to this. He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening
+that the house stood upon the site of an old monastery. No doubt that
+accounted for its being built in a hollow, with the ground-floor on the
+absolute level of the earth outside. The monks had always chosen these
+low-lying sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they have done
+so? he wondered--and then came to a sudden mental stop, absorbed in a
+somewhat surprised contemplation of a new version of himself. He was
+becoming literary, historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open
+again, to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors. He had
+read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old book-shop! For many years
+that boyhood of eager concern in the printed page had seemed to him to
+belong to somebody else. Now, all at once, it came back to him as his
+own possession; he felt that he could take up books again where he had
+dropped them, perhaps even with the old rapt, intent zest.
+
+Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he would gather for
+himself. And it should be in no wise for show--the gross ostentation of
+the unlettered parvenu--but a genuine library, which should minister
+to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon his
+interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be
+smooth and simple. He seemed not to have reasoned it out to himself in
+detail before, but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough.
+Why should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings about himself, as
+if he had come out of the gutter?
+
+Why indeed? He had passed through--and with credit, too--one of the
+great public schools of England. He had been there on a footing of
+perfect equality, so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic
+families or of great City potentates. And as to birth, he had behind him
+three generations at least of scholarly men, men who knew the contents,
+as well as the commercial value, of the books they handled.
+
+His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling. The tradition of
+Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of how he requited it by
+securing Caxton's "Golden Legend" for the library of that distinguished
+collector, under the very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of
+Marlborough, was tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop.
+And Thorpe's father, too, though no such single achievement crowned his
+memory, had been the adviser and, as one might say, the friend of many
+notable writers and patrons of literature. The son of such forbears
+needed only money to be recognized by everybody as a gentleman.
+
+On his mother's side, now that he thought of it, there was something
+perhaps better still than a heritage of librarians' craft and tastes.
+His mother's maiden name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the
+solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact, in the course
+of domestic discussions. Who the Stormonts were he could not recall that
+he had ever learned, but his mother had been very clear indeed about
+their superiority to the usual ruck of people. He would ask his sister
+whether she knew anything about them. In the meantime there was no
+denying that Stormont was a fine-sounding name. He reflected that it
+was his own middle name--and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him a
+card-plate on which appeared the legend--"Mr. Stormont Thorpe."
+
+It was an inspiration! "Joel" he had not used for so many years that now,
+after six months' familiarity with it on his sister's lips, he could not
+get accustomed to it. The colourless and non-committal style of "J. S.
+Thorpe," under which he had lived so long, had been well enough for the
+term of his exile--the weary time of obscure toil and suspense. But now,
+in this sunburst of smiling fortune, when he had achieved the right to a
+name of distinction--here it was ready to his hand. A fleeting question
+as to whether he should carry the "J" along as an initial put itself
+to his mind. He decided vigorously against it. He had always had a
+prejudice against men who, in the transatlantic phrase, parted either
+their hair or their names in the middle.
+
+He had made his unheeding way past the house to the beginning of the
+avenue of trees, which he remembered from the previous evening's drive.
+To his right, an open space of roadway led off in the direction of the
+stables. As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take, the
+sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear, and he stood still. In a
+moment there came into view, round a curve in the leafy distance, two
+horses with riders, advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that
+the riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him, and then
+it was to be seen that they were the pair he had judged to be such close
+friends last night--Lady Cressage and the daughter of the house.
+
+They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his cap and bowed.
+Their cheeks were glowing and their eyes sparkling with the exhilaration
+of their ride. Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished
+in his eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity. She seemed to
+carry herself better in the saddle than she did out of it; the sweep of
+her habit below the stirrup lent dignity to her figure.
+
+But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly toward the
+stepping-block--how should he bring within the compass of thought the
+impressions he had had of her as she passed? There seemed to have been
+no memory in his mind to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she
+had made. Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like
+some queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable. He stared after
+her, mutely bewildered at the effect she produced upon him--until he saw
+that a groom had run from the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity
+to dismount. The angry thought that he might have done this himself rose
+within him--but there followed swiftly enough the answering conviction
+that he lacked the courage. He did not even advance to proffer his
+services to the other young lady, while there was still time. The truth
+was, he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him.
+
+He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company of which
+they made part, the previous evening. There had been an hour or more,
+indeed, before the party broke up, in which he had borne the lion's
+share of the talk--and they had appeared as frankly entertained as the
+others. In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he
+had addressed his monologue of reminiscences--curious experiences and
+adventures in Java and the Argentine, in Brazil and the Antilles and
+Mexico and the far West--it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he
+seemed to discern the most genuine interest.
+
+Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The whimsical theory
+that the wine at dinner had given him a spurious courage occurred
+to him. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his
+pockets, turned toward the stables.
+
+The stable-yard is, from some points of view, the prettiest thing about
+Hadlow. There is a big, uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of
+which, from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous girth
+and height. All around this enclosure are buildings of the same pale
+yellowish brick as the mansion itself, but quaintly differing one
+from another in design and size. Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a
+laundry, a brewery, and half a dozen structures the intention of which
+is now somewhat uncertain--some flat-topped, some gabled, others with
+turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging timbered upper
+stories--form round this unkempt, shadowed green a sort of village, with
+a communal individuality of its own.
+
+A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great
+house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices
+of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge
+themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the
+enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might
+think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since
+man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck.
+Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here; half the
+buildings on the side nearest the house belong to their time, and one
+of them still bears a partially-defaced coat of arms that must have
+belonged to an Abbot. And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb
+and vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. Its population
+crossed themselves less, and worked much harder, but they remained in a
+world of their own, adjacent aud subject to the world of their masters,
+yet separated from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances.
+
+Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. He counted three men
+and a boy who visibly belonged to this department. The dog-cart of the
+previous evening had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained
+the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now beneath the
+sponge of one of the hostlers. Under cover, he discerned two other
+carriages, and there seemed to be at least half a dozen horses. The
+men who, in the half gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these
+animals made a curious whistling noise as they worked. Everybody in the
+yard touched a forelock to him as he passed.
+
+From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at his leisure,
+through an open gate in the wall at the back, into the gardens behind
+the house. There was not much in the way of flowers to look at, but
+he moved about quite unconscious of any deprivation. A cluster of
+greenhouses, massed against the southern side of the mansion, attracted
+his listless fancy, and he walked toward what appeared to be an entrance
+to them. The door was locked, but he found another further on which
+opened to his hand. The air was very hot and moist inside, and the place
+was so filled with broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants that he had
+to stoop to make his way through to the end. The next house had a more
+tolerable atmosphere, and contained some blossoms to which he gave
+momentary attention. In the third house, through the glass-door, he
+could see a man--evidently a gardener--lifting some pots to a shelf
+overhead.
+
+The thought occurred to him that by entering into conversation with this
+man, he might indirectly obtain a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at
+Hadlow. It was now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry.
+Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something? he wondered.
+Perhaps there had been some such summons, and he had not heard it. It
+might be the intelligent thing for him to return to the house, at all
+events, and sit in the hall where the servants could see him, in case
+the meal was in progress.
+
+Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile, it suddenly
+dawned upon him that the face and figure were familiar. He stared more
+intently at the man, casting about in his memory for a clue to his
+identity. It came to him that the person he had in mind was a fellow
+named Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished and down-at-the-heels
+sort of hotel and general store on the road from Belize to Boon Town, in
+British Honduras. Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson. What on earth was
+he doing here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration to this problem.
+It was of more immediate importance to recall the circumstances of his
+contact with the man. He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel
+his headquarters for the better part of a month--the base of supplies
+from which he made numerous prospecting tours into the mountains of the
+interior. Had he paid his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about
+that. He could even recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like
+scale of charges, and the lack of perception of opportunity, which
+characterized the bill in question. He remembered now his impression
+that Gafferson would never do any good. It would be interesting to know
+what kind of an impression he, in turn, had produced on his thriftless
+host. At any rate, there was no good reason why he should not find out.
+He opened the door and went in.
+
+The gardener barely looked up from his occupation, and drew aside to
+let the newcomer pass with no sign of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe
+halted, and tried to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about
+such things.
+
+"What are you doing?" he asked, in the tentative tone of one who is in
+no need of information, but desires to be affable.
+
+"Drying off the first lot of gloxinias," answered the other. "Some
+people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright, close to the
+glass. It stands to reason, if you think about it."
+
+"Why, certainly," said Thorpe, with conviction. In his mind he
+contrasted the independence of Gafferson's manner with the practised
+servility of the stable-yard--and thought that he liked it--and then
+was not so sure. He perceived that there was no recognition of him. The
+gardener, as further desultory conversation about his work progressed,
+looked his interlocutor full in the face, but with a placid, sheep-like
+gaze which seemed to be entirely insensible to variations in the human
+species.
+
+"How did you ever get back here to England?" Thorpe was emboldened to
+ask at last. In comment upon the other's stare of puzzled enquiry, he
+went on: "You're Gafferson, aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw
+you, you were running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize.
+That was in '90."
+
+Gafferson--a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a straggling
+reddish beard--turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. "I suppose
+you would have been stopping at Government House," he remarked. "That
+was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to see
+my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because of
+the Gaffersoniana hybrids. There was a good bit in the papers about them
+last spring." Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put
+into words. "Well, it beats all," he mused aloud. "Why, man, there's
+gold in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed
+as you were. And there's cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in
+rubber, too. All that country's waiting for is better communications.
+And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land--and yet here
+you are back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in
+the mud."
+
+He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond his earlier
+limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness. "No, I wasn't in the
+Governor's outfit at all. I was looking for gold then--with occasionally
+an eye on rubber. I stopped at your place. Don't you remember me? My
+name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one of your niggers
+were with me three or four days once, up on the ridge beyond the Burnt
+Hills--why, you remember, the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was
+forever bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those on the
+mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby wrinkle his nose, and you
+found a pepper coming through the swamp, and you tipped me the wink,
+and you handed that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him.
+Hell! You must remember that!"
+
+"That would have been the Chavica pertusum," said Gafferson,
+thoughtfully. He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in the story
+itself with some difficulty. "Yes--I remember it," he admitted, finally.
+"I shouldn't have known you though. I'm the worst in the world about
+remembering people. It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I
+go up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men that I had the
+longest talks with the time before. Once you get wrapped up in your
+flowers, you've got no room in your head for anything else--that's the
+way of it."
+
+Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. "So this is the sort of
+thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be doing this, eh? than making
+your pile in logwood and mahogany out there, or floating a gold mine?"
+Gafferson answered quite simply: "I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile.
+I got led into going out there when I was a youngster, and there didn't
+seem to be any good in trying to get back, but I wasn't making more than
+a bare living when you were there, and after that I didn't even do that
+much. It took me a good many years to find out what my real fancy was. I
+hated my hotel and my store, but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an
+American gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place, and
+he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em, and he says to me,
+'You're no good to run a hotel, nor yet a store, and this aint your
+country for a cent. What you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't
+afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it, but you gather
+up your seeds and roots and so on, and come along with me to Atlanta,
+Georgia, and I'll put fat on your bones.'
+
+"That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word, and I was with
+him two years, and then I thought I'd like to come to England, and since
+then I've worked my way up here, till now I take a Royal Horticultural
+medal regular, and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll
+be in the market next spring that's named after my master. And what
+could I ask more 'n that?"
+
+"Quite right," said Thorpe. "What time do they have breakfast here?"
+
+The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild
+glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the
+advent of this new topic.
+
+"It seems to me they eat at all hours," he said. "But if you want to see
+his Lordship," he went on, considering, "about noon would be your best
+time."
+
+"See his Lordship!" repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin. "Why I'm a
+guest here in the house. All I want is something to eat."
+
+"A guest," Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was nothing
+unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp glance failed to detect
+any trace of offensive intention in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet
+it seemed to pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised, and
+that there were abundant grounds for his surprise.
+
+"Why, yes," said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he could summon,
+"your master is one of my directors. I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm
+going to make a rich man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place
+here, and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away over
+Sunday to oblige him. By the way--I shall buy an estate in the country
+as soon as the right thing offers, and I shall want to set up no end of
+gardens and greenhouses and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a
+better man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole arrangement
+of it in your hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Whatever his Lordship agrees to," the gardener replied, sententiously.
+He turned to the staging, and took up one of the pots.
+
+Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door,
+which he could see opened upon the lawn. He was conscious of annoyance
+with this moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a
+splendid chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship--it might even
+be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship--and who had so
+clumsily failed to rise to the situation. The bitter thought of going
+back and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he
+paused for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. The
+gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit
+in which it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And
+moreover, was it so certain that he would take it? He had not said "sir"
+once, and he had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. The
+rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course,
+but if there was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided
+that he could not afford the risk.
+
+He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward
+the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful
+and resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw
+that a white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him
+beside the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two
+padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian
+workmanship. The sound was delightful, but even more so was the
+implication that it betokened breakfast.
+
+With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been
+fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. "That's
+the kind of concert I like," he declared, bestowing the patronage of a
+jovial smile upon her pleased and comely face. "Show me the way to this
+breakfast that you've been serenading about."
+
+Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly
+the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. "Thorpe,"
+he said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia--"Thorpe--yes--I
+remember his initials--J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me
+about him? and what was it he told me?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe
+found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of
+embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight
+to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined
+himself seated with four ladies at a table--three of them, moreover,
+ladies of title--and doing it all so well.
+
+For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to
+speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their
+deportment the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and
+fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with
+an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right
+places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.
+
+The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well,
+accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the
+outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which
+had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most
+fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything
+he said as amusing.
+
+"Oh, when we're by ourselves," the kindly little old hostess explained
+to him, "my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour
+yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's
+farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind
+of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of
+habits. Why we do it I couldn't say--because he never comes down in any
+event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps
+very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining. We're only too
+glad--for his sake."
+
+"And Balder," commented the sister, "he's as bad the other way. He
+gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the
+still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we
+never see him till luncheon."
+
+"I've been on the point of asking so many times," Miss Madden
+interposed--"is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in
+Matthew Arnold's poem?"
+
+"It was his father's choice," Lady Plowden made answer. "I think the
+Viking explanation is the right one--it certainly isn't in either
+family. I can't say that it attracted me much--at first, you know."
+
+"Oh, but it fits him so splendidly," said Lady Cressage. "He looks the
+part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier
+names--and you have only to look at him to see that he was predestined
+for a soldier from his cradle."
+
+"I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then,"
+put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. "The
+poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous,
+as his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a
+soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition
+with the Army, and he's mad about everything military--and surely he's
+as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
+of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and yet that
+suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. And all over England there
+are young gentlemen like that--the very pick of the hunting-fields,
+strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men
+England wants to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
+in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief over last
+time?--because they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran
+that's the capital of Persia.
+
+"They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the
+point of the bayonet--and find out their names afterward--but it seems
+that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior
+clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages--and much good they
+will do us when the time of trouble comes!"
+
+"Then you think the purchase-system was better?" asked the American
+lady. "It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously."
+
+"Prefer it?" said Lady Plowden. "A thousand times yes! My husband made
+one of the best speeches in the debate on it--one do I say?--first and
+last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
+the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it
+would have been those speeches. He pointed out all the evils that
+would follow the change. You might have called it prophetic--the way
+he foresaw what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular, of
+course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.
+
+"As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower
+classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered
+about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do
+they respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his
+learning? Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him
+with the greatest contempt. The man they will serve is the man whose
+birth gives him the right to command them, or else the man with money in
+his pockets to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders
+they understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace,
+among our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away
+from England, in a time of war?"
+
+"But, mamma," the Hon. Winifred intervened, "don't you see how badly
+that might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little
+money, and all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people--and
+so on? It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and I'm
+sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot."
+
+Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness. "You see so
+little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of
+its movements. The people who make fortunes in England are every whit
+as important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually
+I'm sure they are often much more deserving. Every generation sniffs
+at its nouveaux riches, but by the next they have become merged in the
+aristocracy. It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been
+that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start from a wealthy
+merchant, or some other person who made a fortune. They are really the
+back-bone of England. You should keep that always in mind."
+
+"Of course--I see what you mean"--Winnie replied, her dark cheek
+flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. She had passed her
+twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had in it the docile
+self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke with diffident slowness,
+her gaze fastened upon her plate. "Of course--my grandfather was
+a lawyer--and your point is that merchants--and others who make
+fortunes--would be the same."
+
+"Precisely," said Lady Plowden. "And do tell us, Mr. Thorpe"--she turned
+toward where he sat at her right and beamed at him over her spectacles,
+with the air of having been wearied with a conversation in which he
+bore no part--"is it really true that social discontent is becoming more
+marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?"
+
+"I'm not an American, you know," he reminded her. "I only know one or
+two sections of the country--and those only as a stranger. You should
+ask Miss Madden."
+
+"Me?" said Celia. "Oh, I haven't come up for my examinations yet. I'm
+like Balder--I'm preparing."
+
+"What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us," suggested Lady Cressage,
+mildly, "is about the flowers in the tropics--in Java, for example, or
+some of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them."
+
+"Speaking of flowers," Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact; "I
+met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning, an old acquaintance
+of mine, the gardener, Gafferson. The last time I saw him, he was
+running the worst hotel in the world in the worst country in the
+world--out in British Honduras."
+
+"But he's a wonderful gardener," said Lady Cressage. "He's a magician;
+he can do what he likes with plants. It's rather a hobby of mine--or
+used to be--and I never saw his equal."
+
+Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn environment on the
+Belize road, and his success in making them laugh drew him on to other
+pictures of the droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. The
+ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen to him; the
+charm of having them all to himself, and of holding them in interested
+entertainment by his discourse--these ladies of supremely refined
+associations and position--seemed to provide an inspiration of its own.
+He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating itself to
+their critical ears. His language was producing itself with as much
+delicacy of selection as if it came out of a book--and yet preserving
+the savour of quaint, outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly
+liked. Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts, and
+glance across the table, warned him that they were to rise, he said
+deliberately to himself that this had been the most enjoyable episode of
+his whole life.
+
+There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel, out in the hall, and
+Winnie indicated them to him with the obvious suggestion that he was
+expected to smoke. He looked her over as he lit his cigar--where she
+stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs, and concluded
+that she was much nicer upon acquaintance than he had thought. Her
+slight figure might not be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were
+ladylike. The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind to her
+thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features. They bore the stamp
+of caste, and so did the way she looked at one through her eye-glasses,
+from under those over-heavy black eyebrows, holding her head a little
+to one side. Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit of
+her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her mother had shown
+that she had it under admirable control.
+
+He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's book-shop the
+previous day. Unfortunately it did not give her age, but that was not so
+important, after all. She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter
+of one Viscount and the sister of another. Her grandfather had been
+an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess a bewildering number
+of relationships among titled folks. All this was very interesting to
+him--and somewhat suggestive. Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in
+his brain as he looked at her.
+
+"I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions of entertaining his
+guests," she remarked to him, over her shoulder. The other ladies had
+not joined them.
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," he protested cordially. "I should hate to have
+him put himself out in the slightest." Upon consideration he added: "I
+suppose he has given up the idea of shooting to-day."
+
+"I think not," she answered." The keeper was about this morning, that
+is--and he doesn't often come unless they are to go out with the guns. I
+suppose you are very fond of shooting."
+
+"Well--I've done some--in my time," Thorpe replied, cautiously. It did
+not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire his first gun on
+English soil. "It's a good many years," he went on, "since I had the
+time and opportunity to do much at it. I think the last shooting I did
+was alligators. You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of a
+hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't the least idea. Is
+the shooting round I here pretty good?"
+
+"I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says my brother
+Balder kills all the birds off every season. Balder's by way of being
+a crack-shot, you know. There are some pheasants, though. We saw them
+flying when we were out this morning."
+
+Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her upon the question
+of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make some difference in his garb, yet
+the mental vision of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed
+itself now as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out of his mind
+to have conceived anything so preposterous as rigging himself out, among
+these polished people, like a cow-puncher down on his luck.
+
+"I wonder when your brother will expect to start," he began, uneasily.
+"Perhaps I ought to go and get ready."
+
+"Ah, here comes his man," remarked the sister. A round-faced,
+smooth-mannered youngster--whom Thorpe discovered to be wearing
+cord-breeches and leather leggings as he descended the stairs--advanced
+toward him and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. "His
+Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes--and he hopes you'll be
+ready, sir," the valet said.
+
+"Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room," Miss Winnie bade him, and
+with a gesture of comprehensive submission he went away.
+
+The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution for his
+difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. It would never have occurred to
+him that Pangbourn was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
+obvious it had been to her. These old families did something more than
+fill their houses with servants; they mastered the art of making these
+servants an integral part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a
+man to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then dress you,
+into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.
+
+"It seems that we're going shooting," Thorpe found himself explaining, a
+few moments later in his bedroom, to the attentive Pangbourn. He
+decided to throw himself with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful
+good-feeling. "I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I
+got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead--and so I fetched
+along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make me feel more at home
+in the saddle than anything else would. You know how fond a man gets of
+old, loose things like that. But about this shooting--I want you to fix
+me out. What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You can
+manage them for me, can't you?"
+
+Pangbourn could and did--and it was upon his advice that the Mexican
+jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt
+uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe,
+as he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe,
+felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of
+pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent to his appearance.
+
+"We will find a cap below, sir," Pangbourn announced, with serenity, and
+Thorpe, who had been tentatively fingering the big, flaring sombrero,
+thrust it back upon its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.
+
+Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done, and there was
+nobody now to bear him company. He lit another cigar, tried on various
+caps till he found a leathern one to suit him, and then dawdled about
+the room and the adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than
+half an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt, did not
+commend itself so warmly to him as did some others. Everybody else,
+however, seemed to regard it as so wholly a matter of course that
+Plowden should do as he liked, that he forbore formulating a complaint
+even to himself.
+
+At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs once more. "His
+Lordship will be down very shortly now, sir," he declared--"and will you
+be good enough to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?"
+
+Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase--the existence
+of which he had not suspected--into a bare-looking apartment fitted like
+a pantry with shelves. After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost
+glaringly lighted. The windows and another door opened, he saw, upon a
+court connected with the stable-yard. By this entrance, no doubt, had
+come the keeper, a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature
+years, with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood looking at
+the contents of the shelves. He mechanically saluted Thorpe in turn, and
+then resumed his occupation. There were numerous gun cases on the lower
+shelf, and many boxes and bags above.
+
+"Did his Lordship say what gun?" the keeper demanded of the valet. He
+had a bright-eyed, intent glance, and his tone conveyed a sense of some
+broad, impersonal, out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.
+
+The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders and eloquently
+shook his head.
+
+"Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?" the keeper turned to Thorpe.
+
+To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out the meaning of the
+query. "Oh, anything'll do for me," he said, awkwardly smiling. "It's
+years since I've shot--I daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another
+to me."
+
+He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking all his
+measurements as a sportsman. "You'd do best with 'B,' sir, I fancy," the
+functionary decided at last, and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the
+notion that "B" must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys. He
+watched the operation of putting the gun together, and then took it, and
+laid it over his arm, and followed the valet out into the hall again, in
+dignified silence. To the keeper's remark--"Mr. Balder has its mate with
+him today, sir," he gave only a restrained nod.
+
+There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord Plowden appeared.
+He came down the stairs then with the brisk, rather impatient air of a
+busy man whose plans are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others.
+He was fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat and cap,
+gloves, scarf round his throat and all--and he behaved as if there was
+not a minute to lose. He had barely time to shake perfunctorily the
+hand Thorpe offered him, and utter an absent-minded "How are you this
+morning?"
+
+To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door, bearing his
+master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully, "We are very late
+today, Barnes." They went out, and began striding down the avenue of
+trees at such a pace that the keeper and his following of small boys and
+dogs, who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot to keep up
+with it.
+
+Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would afford
+exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate talk with his host,
+but he perceived very soon that this was not to be the case. They walked
+together for half a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and
+then across some fields, but the party was close at their heels, and
+Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort, save an occasional
+remark about the birds and the covers between him and the keeper, was
+impracticable. The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
+leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course was deflected
+toward him, but even when they came up to him, the expedition seemed
+to gain nothing of a social character. The few curt words that were
+exchanged, as they halted here to distribute cartridges and hold brief
+consultation, bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.
+
+The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe, breathing heavily over
+the unwonted exercise and hoping for nothing so much as that they would
+henceforth take things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that
+the two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders of this
+elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed to a certain point in one
+direction, and that nobleman, followed by his valet with the gun and
+the stool, set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility,
+vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the bidding of the
+keeper. Neither of them had intervened to mitigate the destiny of their
+guest, or displayed any interest as to what was going to become of him.
+
+Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and though afterward,
+when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station under a
+clump of trees at the autocrat's behest, he strove to soothe his ruffled
+feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely correct
+deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
+Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction
+about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of
+which nettled him.
+
+To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from
+the spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the
+skyline of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool
+which his valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment
+that he had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and he
+turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.
+
+This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had
+begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses
+of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he
+hastened back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when
+he heard the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came
+his way, he liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended
+pride with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the
+responsibility he had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden's guest had
+no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant
+keeper. Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears,
+punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!" These cries,
+and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied
+and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own.
+He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by
+instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and
+followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then,
+taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first
+pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a
+plummet.
+
+He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for
+joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never
+have been a cleaner "kill." In the warming glow of his satisfaction in
+himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden
+and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel
+delight of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the
+shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was
+conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and again the
+cry of "mark!" rose, strenuously addressed to him.
+
+Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest
+of the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but
+when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with
+as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously
+that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by
+way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game
+carried by two of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a
+rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.
+
+"Well, Thorpe?" asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and
+the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his
+mood. "I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?"
+
+Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. "Let some of the
+boys run over," he said slowly. "There are nine birds within sight, and
+there are two or three in the bushes--but they may have got away."
+
+"Gad!" said Balder.
+
+"Magnificent!" was his brother's comment--and Thorpe permitted himself
+the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.
+
+The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything
+that remained of Thorpe's visit. He set down to it without hesitation
+the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The
+temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of
+the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him,
+but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred
+little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally
+at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own
+restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to
+the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the
+man of the pheasants.
+
+Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was
+alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was
+much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to
+himself.
+
+On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town,
+his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day.
+He had been so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were some
+things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt
+most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses
+and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his
+guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of
+what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music
+of the voice lingered in his ears.
+
+"And she is old Kervick's daughter!" he said to himself more than once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London
+nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in
+indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be
+so brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage
+irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged
+dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which
+the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke
+about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
+to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid
+gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South
+Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its
+wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however, upon
+this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said
+he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the
+idea that any other railway could be half so bad.
+
+The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the
+champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up
+additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay
+and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the
+newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing
+a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and
+inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues,
+was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive
+and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed
+either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the
+Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.
+
+But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost too short.
+The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the
+Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the
+window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit
+from which he was returning.
+
+When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his
+mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to
+him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
+superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over
+and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself
+with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at
+the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street
+through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.
+
+Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small, huddled
+rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a
+corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like
+one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.
+
+The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk
+who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish
+this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in
+a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the
+personification of business--without an ounce of distracting superfluous
+flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary
+politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine
+perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a
+joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke
+cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to
+belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing
+anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was
+more than a touch of what the rustic calls "ginger" in his hair and
+closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid
+skin. His eyes--notably direct, confident eyes--were of a grey which had
+in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
+and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.
+
+He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin
+lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. "Well?" he asked,
+impassively.
+
+"Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?" asked Thorpe in turn. "I want a
+talk with you."
+
+For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two,
+he remarked, "Go ahead till we're stopped," and seated himself on the
+corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig.
+Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.
+
+"I've worked out the whole scheme," he began, as if introducing the
+product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. "I'm going to leave
+England almost immediately--go on the Continent and loaf about--I've
+never seen the Continent."
+
+Semple regarded him in silence. "Well?" he observed at last.
+
+"You see the idea, don't you?" Thorpe demanded.
+
+The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. "Go on," he said.
+
+"But the idea is everything," protested the other. "We've been thinking
+of beginning the campaign straight away--but the true game now is to lie
+low--silent as the grave. I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular
+is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
+I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else--and so
+there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me,
+d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The
+Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of
+course, and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show,
+but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general
+impression that I've gone to pieces. Now d'ye see?"
+
+"It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of," commented Semple.
+
+"Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would move heaven
+and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind
+of what was going on. The only weak point in our game is just there.
+Absolutely everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally,
+then, our play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We
+don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we're
+up to, till after we're safe past that rock. So we go on in the way
+to attract the least possible attention. You or your jobber makes the
+ordinary application for a Special Settlement, with your six signatures
+and so on; and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as shut
+up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols--and the thing works
+itself. You do see it, don't you?"
+
+"I see well enough the things that are to be seen," replied Semple, with
+a certain brevity of manner. "There was a sermon of my father's that I
+remember, and it had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are
+seen, but at the things which are not seen.'"
+
+Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. "Semple," he said,
+bringing his chair forward to the desk, "that's what I've come for. I
+want to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you've laid
+out already, in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid
+back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that to one side.
+Now then, leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought
+to have out of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not
+thinking of your 2,000 vendor's shares----"
+
+"No--I'm not thinking much of them, either," interposed Semple, with a
+kind of dry significance.
+
+"Oh, they'll be all right," Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as
+he did so. "No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come
+to you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board."
+
+"Twenty thousand pounds," said Semple, readily.
+
+Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. "I had thought thirty would be
+a fairer figure," he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.
+
+The broker put out his under-lip. "You will find people rather disposed
+to distrust a man who promises more than he's asked," he remarked
+coldly.
+
+"Yes--I know what you mean," Thorpe hurried to say, flushing awkwardly,
+even though the remark was so undeserved; "but it's in my nature. I'm
+full of the notion of doing things for people that have done things
+for me. That's the way I'm built. Why"--he halted to consider the
+advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord Plowden,
+and decided against it--"why, without you, what would the whole
+thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone--the money for the
+applications--I could have no more got at it than I could at the Crown
+Jewels in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once--if you don't
+mind the question--how did you happen to have so much ready money lying
+about."
+
+"There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for
+them," the broker explained. "If they get five per cent. for the four
+months, they'll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take
+thirty thousand instead of twenty--if it presents itself to your mind in
+that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course."
+
+"Of course," assented Thorpe. "Write it now, if you like." He pushed his
+chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. "What
+I want to do is this," he said, looking up. "I'll make the promise for
+thirty-two thousand, and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in
+cash now--a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang about on
+the Continent for four months. I judge you think it'll be four months
+before things materialize, eh?"
+
+"The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come
+shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then
+the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin--and it is for you to
+say how long you allow that to go on."
+
+"But about the two thousand pounds now," Thorpe reminded him.
+
+"I think I will do that in this way," said Semple, kicking his small
+legs nonchalantly. "I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you,
+for cash down, NOT vendor's shares, you observe--and then I will take
+your acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given
+date. In that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would
+have a stake in the game." "Your stake's pretty big, already," commented
+Thorpe, tentatively.
+
+"It's just a fancy of mine," said the other, with his first smile. "I
+like to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very
+exciting."
+
+"All right," said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two
+letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on
+the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and
+wrote a cheque.
+
+"Do you want it open?" he asked over his shoulder. "Are you going to get
+it cashed at once?"
+
+"No--cross it," said the other. "I want it to go through my bankers.
+It'll warm their hearts toward me. I shan't be going till the end of the
+week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart."
+
+"On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business in Frankfort
+once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all."
+
+"But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?" Thorpe asked him, as he
+folded the cheque in his pocket-book.
+
+"Oh yes--many things," responded the broker, lightly. "It's a pleasure,
+for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par."
+
+"Oh, if you call it buying," said Thorpe, and then softened his words
+with an apologetic laugh. "I didn't tell you, did I? I've been spending
+Saturday and Sunday with Plowden--you know, the Lord Plowden on my
+Board."
+
+"I know of him very well," observed the Scotchman.
+
+"Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual
+form with guinea-pigs."
+
+"Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all," Thorpe asserted,
+warmly. "He's really a splendid fellow--with his little oddities, like
+the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place?
+I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
+country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and it's kept
+up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his
+real income is supposed to be?"
+
+Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly
+with the palm of his hand.
+
+"I asked," Thorpe went on, "because he had so much to say about his
+poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his
+doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all
+over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of
+England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I
+knocked the pheasants!" A clerk showed his head at the door, with a
+meaning gesture. "I must go now," said Semple, briskly, and led the way
+out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
+brief injunction, "Don't go away without seeing me."
+
+It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's
+slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe
+noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of
+fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him
+luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had
+been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only
+a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab,
+and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very
+agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the "Court" section of
+a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two
+messages. They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick
+at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square
+country--and the other looked for him at his club. Both begged him to
+lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.
+
+There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his
+hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to
+his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway,
+and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned
+presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop
+of his family.
+
+In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks
+and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy
+to his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a
+dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
+It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that
+the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of
+different planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and
+she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the
+doorway bore still its century-old legend, "Thorpe, Bookseller."
+
+He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the
+books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy
+guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious
+recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
+very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its
+expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions
+if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with
+a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
+brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered
+if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young
+fool. No--no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day--and
+especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of
+what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague
+as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those
+days there still were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
+bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.
+
+Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to
+apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's
+servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before
+how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men.
+The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two
+generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named
+Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of
+buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked
+acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and
+friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the
+law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a
+book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as
+the Plowdens.
+
+A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way
+along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small
+open space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a
+high desk. She did not look up.
+
+"Well--I visited his Lordship all right." He announced his presence thus
+genially.
+
+"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked, turning to him, after a
+pause, her emotionless, plain face.
+
+"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity. "You should have
+seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe'
+there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself at
+breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer than silk. Oh, it's
+clear as daylight--I was intended for a fashionable career."
+
+She smiled in a faint, passive way. "Well--they say 'better late
+than never,' you know." "And after all, IS it so very late?" he said,
+adopting her phrase as an expression of his thought. "I'm just turned
+forty, and I feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
+the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first
+Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into
+the House of Commons until he was seven-and-forty."
+
+"You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain," she commented.
+
+"I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The
+mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me feel as if I was at the very
+least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me,
+and listened to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
+might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her."
+
+Louisa laughed in his face. "Don't be a fool, Joel," she adjured him,
+with a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience
+with the buoyancy of his smile. "Why, of course, you'll know her," he
+protested. "What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going
+to allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in
+your window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm
+a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a
+thing!"
+
+"There's no good talking about it at all," she observed, after a little
+pause. "It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And as I said the other
+night, if you want to do things for the children, that's another matter.
+They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody chooses to teach
+them."
+
+"Where are they now?" he asked. Upon the instant another plan began to
+unfold itself in the background of his mind.
+
+"They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at different places, of
+course. I was recommended to send Julia there--one of our old customers
+is a Governor, or whatever it's called--and he got special terms for
+her. She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged it
+very nicely for her--and there is such a good boys' college there,
+it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. Julia is to finish at
+Christmas-time--and what I'm going to do with her afterward is more than
+I know."
+
+"Is she pretty?" the uncle of Julia enquired.
+
+"She's very nice," the mother answered, with vague extenuation in her
+tone. "I don't know about her looks--she varies so much. Sometimes I
+think she's pretty--and then again I can't think it. She's got
+good features, and she holds herself well, and she's very much the
+lady--rather too much, I think, sometimes--but it all depends upon what
+you call pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after her father's
+family. The Dabneys are all little people."
+
+Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. "And what's Alfred like?"
+he asked.
+
+"He wants to be an artist!" There was a perceptible note of apprehension
+in the mother's confession.
+
+"Well--why shouldn't he--if he's got a bent that way?" demanded Thorpe,
+with reproof in his tone. "Did you want him to be a shop-keeper?"
+
+"I should like to see him a doctor," she replied with dignity. "It was
+always my idea for him."
+
+"Well, it's no good--even as an idea," he told her. "Doctors are like
+parsons--they can't keep up with the times. The age is outgrowing them.
+Only the fakirs in either profession get anything out of it, nowadays.
+It's all mystery and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick--medicine
+is--and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist, you're not
+in it. But an artist stands on his merits. There is his work--done by
+his own hands. It speaks for itself. There's no deception--it's easy
+enough to tell whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good,
+people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them. Of course, it
+won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking, whether his pictures sell
+well or not. But probably he'd give it up, if he didn't make a hit of
+it.
+
+"I don't know that there's any crying need that he should do anything.
+My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army, but I wouldn't dream of
+forcing it on him against his will. I had a bitter enough dose of that,
+myself, with father. I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps
+argue with him, if I thought he was making a jack of himself--but I
+wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he wants to be an artist, in God's
+name let him go ahead. It can be made a gentlemanly trade--and the main
+thing is that he should be a gentleman."
+
+Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. "If you
+don't mind, I don't know that I do," she said when it was finished.
+"Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick
+temper. He reminds me of father--oh, ever so much more than you do. He
+contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows it all."
+
+"But he's a good fellow, isn't he?" urged Thorpe. "I mean, he's got his
+likable points? I'm going to be able to get along with him?"
+
+"I didn't get along with him very well," the mother admitted,
+reluctantly, "but I daresay with a man it would be different. You see,
+his father was ill all those four years, and Alfred hated the shop as
+bad as you did, and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair.
+I want to be fair to him, you know."
+
+"But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word," Thorpe insisted.
+
+"Oh, mercy yes," Louisa made ready answer. "My only fear is--whether you
+won't find him too much of a gentleman."
+
+Thorpe knitted his brows. "I only hope we're talking about the same
+thing," he said, in a doubtful tone. Before she could speak, he lifted
+his hand. "Never mind--I can see for myself in ten minutes more than you
+could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan. I'm going on the Continent
+in a few days' time, to stay for three or four months. I've got nothing
+special to do--just to travel about and see things and kill time--I
+shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland and Paris and the Rhine
+and all sorts of places--and it occurred to me that I'd take the two
+youngsters with me. I could get acquainted with them, that way, and
+they'd be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would feel good
+to have some of my own flesh and blood about me--and I suppose they'd be
+tickled to death to go."
+
+"Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas," Mrs. Dabney
+objected, blankly.
+
+"Bah!" Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something
+good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. "What on earth
+difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and
+let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl
+was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four
+months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around
+in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?
+
+"And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought
+to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him.
+Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special
+start for it." He added, upon a luminous afterthought: "Perhaps his
+seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of
+wanting to be an artist."
+
+The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction.
+"Well--if you really think it's best," she began, "I don't know that
+I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
+Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if
+they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now
+you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and all
+I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write
+them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have
+some travelling clothes."
+
+"I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry up about it."
+
+Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on
+the desk. "I will give you back that thirty," he said, as he wrote, "and
+here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
+will you? and if you want more tell me."
+
+A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for
+leaving.
+
+His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand,
+was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible
+letters before her mental vision. "Even now I don't believe in him," the
+impalpable legend ran.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him
+hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the
+luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of
+the appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were
+fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently
+removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.
+
+By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon, speaking French to
+the waiter throughout. Divested of his imposing great-coat, he was seen
+to be a gentleman of meagre flesh as well as of small stature. He had
+the Roman nose, narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth
+and chin of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits of the
+Duke of Wellington. His face and neck were of a dull reddish tint, which
+seemed at first sight uniformly distributed: one saw afterward that
+it approached pallor at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in
+minute patches on the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose. Against
+this flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair and small, neatly-waxed
+moustache were very white indeed. It was a thin, lined, care-worn face,
+withal, which in repose, and particularly in profile, produced an effect
+of dignified and philosophical melancholy. The General's over-prominent
+light blue eyes upon occasion marred this effect, however, by glances
+of a bold, harsh character, which seemed to disclose unpleasant depths
+below the correct surface. His manner with the waiters was abrupt and
+sharp, but undoubtedly they served him very well--much better, in truth,
+than Thorpe had ever seen them serve anybody before.
+
+Thorpe observed his guest a good deal during the repast, and formed
+numerous conclusions about him. He ate with palpable relish of every
+dish, and he emptied his glass as promptly as his host could fill
+it. There was hardly a word of explanation as to the purpose of their
+meeting, until the coffee was brought, and they pushed back their
+chairs, crossed their legs, and lighted cigars.
+
+"I was lucky to catch you with my wire, at such short notice," Thorpe
+said then. "I sent two, you know--to your chambers and your club. Which
+of them found you?"
+
+"Chambers," said the General. "I rarely dress till luncheon time. I read
+in bed. There's really nothing else to do. Idleness is the curse of my
+life."
+
+"I've been wondering if you'd like a little occupation--of a well-paid
+sort," said Thorpe slowly. He realized that it was high time to invent
+some pretext for his hurried summons of the General.
+
+"My dear sir," responded the other, "I should like anything that had
+money in it. And I should very much like occupation, too--if it were, of
+course, something that was--was suitable to me."
+
+"Yes," said Thorpe, meditatively. "I've something in my mind--not at all
+definite yet--in fact, I don't think I can even outline it to you
+yet. But I'm sure it will suit you--that is, if I decide to go on with
+it--and there ought to be seven or eight hundred a year for you in
+it--for life, mind you."
+
+The General's gaze, fastened strenuously upon Thorpe, shook a little.
+"That will suit me very well," he declared, with feeling. "Whatever
+I can do for it"--he let the sentence end itself with a significant
+gesture.
+
+"I thought so," commented the other, trifling with the spoon in his cup.
+"But I want you to be open with me. I'm interested in you, and I want to
+be of use to you. All that I've said, I can do for you. But first,
+I'm curious to know everything that you can tell me about your
+circumstances. I'm right in assuming, I suppose, that you're--that
+you're not any too well-fixed."
+
+The General helped himself to another little glass of brandy. His mood
+seemed to absorb the spirit of the liqueur. "Fixed!" he repeated with a
+peevish snap in his tone. "I'm not 'fixed' at all, as you call it. Good
+God, sir! They no more care what becomes of me than they do about
+their old gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position--and
+everything--and they round on me like--like cuckoos." His pale, bulging
+eyes lifted their passionless veil for an instant as he spoke, and
+flashed with the predatory fierceness of a hawk.
+
+Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom "they" might mean. The temper
+visibly rising in the old man's mind was what he had hoped for. He
+proceeded with an informed caution. "Don't be annoyed if I touch upon
+family matters," he said. "It's a part of what I must know, in order to
+help you. I believe you're a widower, aren't you, General?"
+
+The other, after a quick upward glance, shook his head resentfully.
+"Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy with HER son-in-law--and her daughter.
+He is a man of property--and also, apparently, a man of remarkable
+credulity and patience." He paused, to scan his companion's face.
+"They divide him between them," he said then, from clenched teeth--"and
+I--mind you--I made the match! He was a young fellow that I found--and I
+brought him home and introduced him--and I haven't so much as an Italian
+postage-stamp to show for it. But what interest can you possibly take
+in all this?" The unamiable glance of his eyes was on the instant
+surcharged with suspicion.
+
+"How many daughters have you?" Thorpe ventured the enquiry with inward
+doubts as to its sagacity.
+
+"Three," answered the General, briefly. It was evident that he was also
+busy thinking.
+
+"I ask because I met one of them in the country over Sunday," Thorpe
+decided to explain.
+
+The old soldier's eyes asked many questions in the moment of silence.
+"Which one--Edith?--that is, Lady Cressage?" he enquired. "Of course--it
+would have been her."
+
+Thorpe nodded. "She made a tremendous impression upon me," he observed,
+watching the father with intentness as he let the slow words fall.
+
+"Well she might," the other replied, simply. "She's supposed to be the
+most beautiful woman in England."
+
+"Well--I guess she is," Thorpe assented, while the two men eyed each
+other.
+
+"Is the third sister unmarried?" it occurred to him to ask. The tone of
+the question revealed its perfunctory character.
+
+"Oh--Beatrice--she's of no importance," the father replied. "She goes in
+for writing, and all that--she's not a beauty, you know--she lives with
+an old lady in Scotland. The oldest daughter--Blanche--she has some good
+looks of her own, but she's a cat. And so you met Edith! May I ask where
+it was?"
+
+"At Hadlow House--Lord Plowden's place, you know."
+
+The General's surprise at the announcement was undoubted. "At
+Plowden's!" he repeated, and added, as if half to himself, "I thought
+that was all over with, long ago."
+
+"I wish you'd tell me about it," said Thorpe, daringly. "I've made it
+plain to you, haven't I? I'm going to look out for you. And I want you
+to post me up, here, on some of the things that I don't understand. You
+remember that it was Plowden who introduced you to me, don't you? It was
+through him that you got on the Board. Well, certain things that
+I've seen lead me to suppose that he did that in order to please your
+daughter. Did you understand it that way?"
+
+"It's quite likely, in one sense," returned the General. He spoke with
+much deliberation now, weighing all his words. "He may have thought
+it would please her; he may not have known how little my poor affairs
+concerned her."
+
+"Well, then," pursued Thorpe, argumentatively, "he had an object in
+pleasing her. Let me ask the question--did he want to marry her?"
+
+"Most men want to marry her," was the father's non-committal response.
+His moustache lifted itself in the semblance of a smile, but the blue
+eyes above remained coldly vigilant.
+
+"Well--I guess that's so too," Thorpe remarked. He made a fleeting
+mental note that there was something about the General which impelled
+him to think and talk more like an American than ever. "But was HE
+specially affected that way?"
+
+"I think," said Kervick, judicially, "I think it was understood that
+if he had been free to marry a penniless wife, he would have wished to
+marry her."
+
+"Do you know," Thorpe began again, with a kind of diffident
+hesitation--"do you happen to have formed an idea--supposing that had
+been the case--would she have accepted him?" "Ah, there you have me,"
+replied the other. "Who can tell what women will accept, and what
+they will refuse? My daughter refused Lord Lingfield--and he is an
+Under-Secretary, and will be Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister, and a
+rich man. After that, what are you to say?"
+
+"You speak of her as penniless," Thorpe remarked, with a casual air.
+
+"Six hundred a year," the father answered. "We could have rubbed along
+after a fashion on it, if she had had any notions at all of taking my
+advice. I'm a man of the world, and I could have managed her affairs for
+her to her advantage, but she insisted upon going off by herself. She
+showed not the slightest consideration for me--but then I am accustomed
+to that."
+
+Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the old gentleman read in this an
+encouragement to expand his grievances.
+
+"In my position," he continued, helping himself to still another
+tiny glass, "I naturally say very little. It is not my form to make
+complaints and advertise my misfortunes. I daresay it's a fault. I
+know it kept me back in India--while ever so many whipper-snappers were
+promoted over my head--because I was of the proud and silent sort. It
+was a mistake, but it was my nature. I might have put by a comfortable
+provision for my old age, in those days, if I had been willing to push
+my claims, and worry the Staff into giving me what was my due. But that
+I declined to do--and when I was retired, there was nothing for me but
+the ration of bread and salt which they serve out to the old soldier
+who has been too modest. I served my Queen, sir, for forty years--and I
+should be ashamed to tell you the allowance she makes me in my old age.
+But I do not complain. My mouth is closed. I am an English gentleman and
+one of Her Majesty's soldiers. That's enough said, eh? Do you follow me?
+And about my family affairs, I'm not likely to talk to the first comer,
+eh? But to you I say it frankly--they've behaved badly, damned badly,
+sir.
+
+"Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER son-in-law. He has
+large estates in one of the healthiest and most beautiful parts; he has
+a palace, and more money than he knows what to do with--but it seems
+that he's not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well--but that
+doesn't enter into anyone's calculations. No! let the worn-out old
+soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb! That's the spirit of woman-kind.
+And my daughter Edith--does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me--I
+secured for her the very greatest marriage in England. She would have
+been Duchess of Glastonbury today if her husband had not played the fool
+and drowned himself."
+
+"What's that you say?" put in Thorpe, swiftly.
+
+"It was as good as suicide," insisted the General, with doggedness. His
+face had become a deeper red. "They didn't hit it off together, and
+he left in a huff, and went yachting with his father, who was his own
+sailing-master--and, as might be expected, they were both drowned. The
+title would have gone to her son--but no, of course, she had no son--and
+so it passed to a stranger--an outsider that had been an usher in a
+school, or something of that sort. You can fancy what a blow this was to
+me. Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless widow
+thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then, to cap all, she
+takes her six hundred a year and goes off by herself, and gives me the
+cold shoulder completely. What is it Shakespeare says? 'How sharper than
+a serpent's teeth'----"
+
+Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an emphasis which
+abruptly broke the quotation in half. He had been frowning moodily
+at his guest for some minutes, relighting his cigar more than once
+meanwhile. He had made a mental calculation of what the old man had had
+to drink, and had reassured himself as to his condition. His garrulity
+might have an alcoholic basis, but his wits were clear enough. It was
+time to take a new line with him.
+
+"I don't want to hear you abuse your daughter," he admonished him now,
+with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance. "Damn it all, why
+shouldn't she go off by herself, and take care of her own money her
+own way? It's little enough, God knows, for such a lady as she is. Why
+should you expect her to support you out of it? No--sit still! Listen to
+me!"--he stretched out his hand, and laid it with restraining heaviness
+upon the General's arm--"you don't want to have any row with me.
+You can't afford it. Just think that over to yourself--you--can't
+afford--it."
+
+Major-General Kervick's prominent blue eyes had bulged forth in rage
+till their appearance had disconcerted the other's gaze. They remained
+still too much in the foreground, as it were, and the angry scarlets
+and violets of the cheeks beneath them carried an unabated threat of
+apoplexy--but their owner, after a moment's silence, made a sign with
+his stiff white brows that the crisis was over. "You must remember
+that--that I have a father's feelings," he gasped then, huskily.
+
+Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected. He had
+learned what he wanted to know about this veteran. If he had the fierce
+meannesses of a famished old dog, he had also a dog's awe of a stick. It
+was almost too easy to terrorize him.
+
+"Oh, I make allowances for all that," Thorpe began, vaguely. "But
+it's important that you should understand me. I'm this sort of a man:
+whatever I set out to do, and put my strength into it, that I do! I kill
+every pheasant I fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It's a way I have.
+To those that help me, and are loyal to me, I'm the best friend in
+the world. To those that get in my way, or try to trip me up, I'm the
+devil--just plain devil. Now then--you're getting three hundred a year
+from my Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my friend
+Plowden. You don't do anything to earn this money; you're of no earthly
+use on the Board. If I chose, I could put you off at the end of the year
+as easily as I can blow out this match. But I propose not only to keep
+you on, but to make you independent. Why do I do that? You should ask
+yourself that question. It can't be on account of anything you can do
+for the Company. What else then? Why, first and foremost, because you
+are the father of your daughter."
+
+"Let me tell you the kind of man I am," said the General, inflating his
+chest, and speaking with solemnity.
+
+"Oh, I know the kind of man you are," Thorpe interrupted him, coolly. "I
+want to talk now."
+
+"It was merely," Kervick ventured, in an injured tone, "that I can be as
+loyal as any man alive to a true friend."
+
+"Well, I'll be the true friend, then," said Thorpe, with impatient
+finality. "And now this is what I want to say. I'm going to be a very
+rich man. You're not to say so to anybody, mind you, until the thing
+speaks for itself. We're keeping dark for a few months, d'ye see?--lying
+low. Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well now, I wouldn't
+give a damn to be rich, unless I did with my money the things that I
+wanted to do, and got the things with it that I wanted to get. Whatever
+takes my fancy, that's what I'll do."
+
+He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-new project which
+seemed, by some surreptitious agency, to have already taken his fancy.
+It was a curious project; there were attractive things about it, and
+objections to it suggested themselves as well.
+
+"I may decide," he began speaking again, still revolving this
+hypothetical scheme in his thoughts--"I may want to--well, here's what
+occurs to me as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye
+see? and it seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be so
+poor. Well, then--I might say to you, here's two thousand a year, say,
+made over to you in your name, on the understanding that you turn over
+half of it, say, to her. She could take it from you, of course, as her
+father. You could say you made it out of the Company. Of course it might
+happen, later on, that I might like to have a gentle hint dropped to
+her, d'ye see, as to where it really came from. Mind, I don't say this
+is what is going to be done. It merely occurred to me."
+
+After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added a second thought:
+"You'd have to set about making friends with her, you know. In any case,
+you'd better begin at that at once."
+
+The General remained buried in reflection. He lighted a cigarette, and
+poured out for himself still another petit verre. His pursed lips and
+knitted brows were eloquent of intense mental activity.
+
+"Well, do you see any objections to it?" demanded Thorpe, at last.
+
+"I do not quite see the reasons for it," answered the other, slowly.
+"What would you gain by it?"
+
+"How do you mean--gain?" put in the other, with peremptory intolerance
+of tone.
+
+General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture. These hands
+were withered, but remarkably well-kept. "I suppose one doesn't do
+something for nothing," he said. "I see what I would gain, and what she
+would gain, but I confess I don't see what advantage you would get out
+of it."
+
+"No-o, I daresay you don't," assented Thorpe, with sneering serenity.
+"But what does that matter? You admit that you see what you would gain.
+That's enough, isn't it?"
+
+The older man's veined temples twitched for an instant. He straightened
+himself in his chair, and looked hard at his companion. There was a
+glistening of moisture about his staring eyes.
+
+"It surely isn't necessary--among gentlemen"--he began, cautiously
+picking his phrases--"to have quite so much that's unpleasant, is it?"
+
+"No--you're right--I didn't mean to be so rough," Thorpe declared, with
+spontaneous contrition. Upon the instant, however, he perceived
+the danger that advantage might be taken of his softness. "I'm a
+plain-spoken man," he went on, with a hardening voice, "and people must
+take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance, that I intended
+to be of service to you--and that that ought to interest you."
+
+The General seemed to have digested his pique. "And what I was trying
+to say," he commented deferentially, "was that I thought I saw ways of
+being of service to you. But that did not seem to interest you at all."
+
+"How--service?" Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.
+
+"I know my daughter so much better than you do," explained the other; "I
+know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar with the whole
+situation than you can possibly be--I wonder that you won't listen to
+my opinion. I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I think
+you should hear it."
+
+"I think so, too," Thorpe declared, readily enough. "What IS your
+opinion?"
+
+General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave an
+embarrassed little laugh. "But I can't form what you might call an
+opinion," he protested, apologetically, "till I understand a bit more
+clearly what it is you propose to yourself. You mustn't be annoyed if I
+return to that--'still harping on my daughter,' you know. If I MUST ask
+the question--is it your wish to marry her?"
+
+Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking of
+something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness
+that the question had been unduly intimate.
+
+"I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry," he replied,
+thoughtfully. "I may, and I may not. But--starting with that proviso--I
+suppose I haven't seen any other woman that I'd rather think about
+marrying than--than the lady we're speaking of. However, you see it's
+all in the air, so far as my plans go."
+
+"In the air be it," the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. "Let us consider
+it as if it were in the air--a possible contingency. This is what
+I would say--My--'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being a
+difficult lady--'uncertain, coy, and hard to please' as Scott says, you
+know--and it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which brings
+her to the surface. She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror
+of it. Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you know. I
+was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother carried it through.
+But--yes--about her--I think she is afraid to marry again. If she does
+ever consent, it will be because poverty has broken her nerve. If she is
+kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved, so to speak, into taking
+a husband. If she had sixteen hundred--either she would never marry at
+all, or she would be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught
+her fancy. That would be particularly like her. You would be simply
+endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her for yourself. D'ye
+follow me? If you'll leave it to me, I can find a much better way than
+that--better for all of us."
+
+"Hm!" said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. "I see what you
+mean," he remarked at last. "Yes--I see."
+
+The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time, deferring
+to the reverie of his host. When finally he offered a diversion, in
+the form of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook himself, and then
+ponderously rose to his feet. He took his hat and coat from the waiter,
+and made his way out without a word.
+
+At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the Embankment
+garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him the fact of his
+presence. "Which way are you going?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," Thorpe answered absently. "I think--I think I'll take a
+walk on the Embankment--by myself."
+
+The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. "But when am I
+to see you again?" he enquired, with an effect of solicitude that defied
+control.
+
+"See me?" Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him by surprise.
+
+"There are things to be settled, are there not?" the other faltered, in
+distressed doubt as to the judicious tone to take. "You spoke, you know,
+of--of some employment that--that would suit me."
+
+Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort to recall his
+wandering attention. "Oh yes," he said, with lethargic vagueness--"I
+haven't thought it out yet. I'll let you know--within the week,
+probably."
+
+With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. Walking
+heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat
+pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the
+idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he
+gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred
+consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within
+him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter
+self-disgust.
+
+The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep,
+had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still
+regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after
+the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the
+fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all," he
+said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is
+a cad, in the presence of a gentleman."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his
+niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.
+
+The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at
+the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the
+steam from the window with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both
+stared a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations of
+petulance.
+
+"Isn't it too provoking!" cried the girl, turning to her uncle at last.
+"This is where we are now--according to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds
+we enjoy a view of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left,
+the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For all one can see, we
+might as well be at Redhill."
+
+"It is pretty hard luck," Thorpe assented, passively glancing past her
+at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured the view. "But
+hang it all--it must clear up some time. Just you have patience, and
+you'll see some Alps yet."
+
+"Where we're going," the young man interposed, "the head-porter told me
+it was always cloudier than anywhere else."
+
+"I don't think that can be so," Thorpe reasoned, languidly, from his
+corner. "It's a great winter resort, I'm told, and it rather stands to
+reason, doesn't it? that people wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as
+all that."
+
+"The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland," said the
+girl--"they would do anything."
+
+Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. "Well, you can comfort
+yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again. The mountains'll
+stay here, all right," he assured her. The young people smiled back
+at him, and with this he rearranged his feet in a new posture on the
+opposite seat, lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more
+against the hard, red-plush cushion. Personally, he did not in the least
+resent the failure of the scenery.
+
+For something more than three months, this purposeless pleasure-tour had
+been dragging him about from point to point, sleeping in strange beds,
+eating extraordinarily strange food, transacting the affairs of a
+sight-seer among people who spoke strange languages, until he was
+surfeited with the unusual. It had all been extremely interesting, of
+course, and deeply improving--but he was getting tired of talking to
+nobody but waiters, and still more so of having nothing to do which he
+could not as well leave undone if he chose. After a few days more
+of Switzerland--for they had already gazed with blank faces at this
+universal curtain of mist from such different points of view as Lucerne,
+Interlaken, and Thun--it was clear to him that they would, as he
+phrased it, to himself, make a break for home. Unless, indeed, something
+happened at Montreux. Ah, would anything happen at Montreux? For four
+days his mind had been automatically reverting to that question; it
+lurked continually in the background of his thoughts, now, as he smoked
+and idly ruminated, on his way southward through the fog.
+
+All the rest of the prolonged trip had been without any specific motive,
+so far as he was concerned. The youngsters had planned all its routes
+and halts and details of time and connections, and he had gone along,
+with cheerful placidity, to look at the things they bade him observe,
+and to pay the bills. Perhaps in all things their tastes had not been
+his tastes. He would have liked more of Paris, he fancied, and less of
+the small Dutch and North German towns which they seemed to fancy
+so much. Still, the beer was good--and really their happiness, as a
+spectacle, had given him more satisfaction than a thousand miles of
+boulevards could have done.
+
+He liked this niece and nephew of his more than he could ever have
+imagined himself liking any young people. They had been shy with him at
+the outset--and for the first week his experiment had been darkened by
+the belief that, between themselves, they did not deem him quite good
+enough. He had been wise enough, then, to have it out with the girl--she
+was the one to whom he felt it easiest to talk frankly--and had
+discovered, to his immense relief, that they conceived him to be
+regarding them as encumbrances. At breakfast next morning, with tactful
+geniality, he set everything right, and thereafter they were all
+extremely happy together.
+
+So far as he could judge, they were very superior young people, both
+intellectually and spiritually. The girl spoke French, and her brother
+German, with what seemed to him remarkable proficiency. Their young
+minds were the repositories of an astounding amount of information:
+they knew who Charles the Bold was; they pointed out to their uncle the
+distinction between Gothic and Romanesque arches; they explained what
+was the matter with the Anabaptists; they told him that the story of
+the Bishop and the rats at Bingen was a baseless myth, and that probably
+there had never been any such man as William Tell. Nor did they get all
+this out of the guide-books which they pored over with such zest. It was
+impossible not to see that they were familiar with large numbers of the
+subjects that these books discussed, and that the itinerary which
+they marked out had reference to desires and interests that they had
+cultivated for themselves.
+
+Julia, upon even first sight, made a much pleasanter impression than her
+mother's hesitating description had prepared him for. As he came to know
+her well, he ceased to remember that there was a question in any mind
+as to her being a pretty girl. There was less colour in her face than he
+could have wished. Her smooth, pallid skin, almost waxen in texture, had
+a suggestion of delicate health which sometimes troubled him a little,
+but which appealed to the tenderness in his nature all the time. The
+face was unduly thin, perhaps, but this, and the wistful glance of the
+large grey eyes in repose, made up an effect that Thorpe found touched
+him a good deal. Even when she was in visibly high spirits, the look in
+these eyes seemed to him to be laying claim to his protection. She
+could be merry upon occasion, in a gentle and tranquil way, and as her
+self-confidence expanded under the shelter of their growing intimacy,
+she disclosed to her uncle plenty of initiative and individuality--but
+what he felt in her most was a peculiarly sweet and girlish
+trustfulness, which made him like himself more than he had ever
+done before. He could feel that he was at his very best--a hitherto
+unsuspected best--when Julia was about. He wanted to buy for her
+everything in the windows upon which she bestowed the most casual
+approving glance. It was a delight merely to look at her, and to
+meditate upon the felicity of being able to do things for so charming a
+girl.
+
+Alfred made a less direct demand upon his uncle's admiration, but he
+was a very good fellow all round. He was big and fair and muscular,
+and nothing about him but his spectacles seemed in Thorpe's mind to be
+related to his choice of art as a profession. That so robust and hearty
+a young fellow should wish to put paint on a canvas with small brushes,
+was to the uncle an unaccountable thing. It was almost as if he had
+wanted to knit, or do embroidery. Of the idleness and impatience of
+discipline which his mother had seemed to allege against him, Thorpe
+failed to detect any signs. The young man was never very late in the
+morning, and, beside his tireless devotion to the task of hunting up old
+pictures in out-of-the-way places, did most of the steward's work of
+the party with intelligence and precision. He studied the time-tables,
+audited the hotel-bills, looked after the luggage, got up the
+street-maps of towns and the like, to such good purpose that they never
+lost a train, or a bag, or themselves. Truly, an excellent young man.
+Thorpe noted with especial satisfaction his fine, kindly big-brother
+attitude toward his sister Julia--and it was impossible for him to
+avoid the conviction that Louisa was a simpleton not to appreciate such
+children. They did not often allude to their mother; when they did, it
+was in language the terms of which seemed more affectionate than the
+tone--and Thorpe said often to himself that he did not blame them. It
+was not so much that they had outgrown their mother's point of view.
+They had never occupied it.
+
+The journey, so far as Thorpe comprehended its character, had been
+shaped with about equal regard for Julia's interest in the romance of
+history, and Alfred's more technical and practical interest in art.
+Each had sufficient sympathy with the tastes of the other, however, to
+prevent any tendency to separation. They took their uncle one day to see
+where William the Silent was assassinated, and the next to observe how
+Rembrandt's theory of guild portrait-painting differed from Van der
+Helst's, with a common enthusiasm. He scrutinized with patient loyalty
+everything that they indicated to him, and not infrequently they
+appeared to like very much the comments he offered. These were chiefly
+of a sprightly nature, and when Julia laughed over them he felt that she
+was very near to him indeed.
+
+Thus they saw Paris together--where Thorpe did relinquish some of the
+multiplied glories of the Louvre to sit in front of a cafe by the
+Opera House and see the funny people go past--and thence, by Bruges and
+Antwerp, to Holland, where nobody could have imagined there were as many
+pictures as Thorpe saw with his own weary eyes. There were wonderful old
+buildings at Lubeck for Julia's eyes to glisten over, and pictures at
+Berlin, Dresden, and Dusseldorf for Alfred.
+
+The assumption existed that the excursion into the Thuringenwald to see
+the memorials of Luther was especially for the uncle's benefit, and he
+tried solicitously to say or look nothing which might invalidate it.
+There were other places in Germany, from Mainz to Munich, which he
+remembered best by their different beers. They spent Christmas at
+Vienna, where Julia had heard that its observance was peculiarly
+insisted upon, and then they saw the Tyrol in its heaviest vesture of
+winter snows, and beautiful old Basle, where Alfred was crazier about
+Holbein than he had been at Munich over Brouwer. Thorpe looked very
+carefully at the paintings of both men, and felt strengthened in his
+hopes that when Alfred got a little older he would see that this picture
+business was not the thing for a young gentleman with prospects to go
+into.
+
+It was at Basle that Thorpe received a letter from London which directly
+altered the plans of the party. He had had several other letters
+from London which had produced no such effect. Through Semple, he
+had followed in outline the unobtrusive campaign to secure a Special
+Settlement, and had learned that the Stock Exchange Committee,
+apparently without opposition, had granted one for the first week in
+February.
+
+Even this news, tremendously important as it was, did not prompt Thorpe
+to interfere with the children's projects. There was no longer any point
+in remaining away from London; there were, indeed, numerous reasons
+for a prompt return. But he was loth to deprive the youngsters of that
+descent into smiling, sunlit Italy upon which they had so fondly dwelt
+in fancy, and after all Semple could do all that was needful to be done
+for another month.
+
+So they went to Basle, and here it was that another kind of letter came.
+It was in a strange hand, at once cramped and fluttering, which puzzled
+the recipient a good deal; it was a long time before even the signature
+unravelled itself. Then he forced himself to decipher it, sentence by
+sentence, with a fierce avidity. It was from General Kervick.
+
+The next morning Thorpe astonished his young companions by suggesting
+an alteration in their route. In a roundabout and tentative fashion--in
+which more suspicious observers must have detected something
+shamefaced--he mentioned that he had always heard a great deal about
+Montreux as a winter-resort. The fact that he called it Montroox raised
+in Julia's mind a fleeting wonder from whom it could be that he had
+heard so much about it, but it occurred to neither her nor her brother
+to question his entire good faith. Their uncle had displayed, hitherto,
+a most comforting freedom from discrimination among European towns; he
+had, indeed, assured them many times that they were all one to him. That
+he should suddenly turn up now with a favourite winter-resort of his
+own selection surprised them considerably, but, upon reflection, it also
+pleased them. He had humoured all their wishes with such unfailing
+and bountiful kindness, that it was a delight to learn that there was
+something he wanted to do. They could not finish their breakfast till
+the guide-book had been brought to the table.
+
+"Oh! How splendid!" Julia had cried then. "The Castle of Chillon is
+there!"
+
+"Why of course!" said Thorpe, complacently.
+
+They laughed gayly at him for pretending that he had known this, and he
+as good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew a serious long breath
+of relief, however, when their backs were turned. It had gone off much
+better than he had feared.
+
+Now, on this Sunday afternoon, as the train made its sure-footed way
+across the mountains, the thought that he was actually to alight at
+Montreux at once fascinated and depressed him. He was annoyed with
+himself for suffering it to get such a hold upon his mind. What was
+there in it, anyway? There was a big hotel there, and he and his
+youngsters were to stop at it, and if he accidentally encountered a
+certain lady who was also stopping there--and of course the meeting
+would bear upon its face the stamp of pure chance--what of it?
+
+And if he did meet her, thus fortuitously--what would happen then? No
+doubt a lady of her social position met abroad great numbers of people
+that she had met at home. It would not in any way surprise her--this
+chance encounter of which he thought so much. Were there sufficient
+grounds for imagining that it would even interest her? He forced his
+mind up to this question, as it were, many times, and invariably it
+shied and evaded the leap.
+
+There had been times, at Hadlow House, when Lady Cressage had seemed
+supremely indifferent to the fact of his existence, and there had
+been other times when it had appeared manifest that he pleased her--or
+better, perhaps, that she was willing to take note of how much she
+pleased him. It must have been apparent to her--this fact that
+she produced such an impression upon him. He reasoned this out
+satisfactorily to himself. These beautiful women, trained from
+childhood for the conquest of a rich husband, must have cultivated an
+extraordinary delicacy of consciousness, in such matters. They must have
+developed for themselves what might be called a sixth sense--a power of
+feeling in the air what the men about were thinking of them. More than
+once he had caught a glimmer of what he felt to be the operation of this
+sense, in the company of Lady Cressage. He could not say that it had
+been discernible in her glance, or her voice, or her manner, precisely,
+but he was sure that he had seen it, somehow.
+
+But even assuming all this--admitting that in October, on a wet Sunday,
+in the tedium of a small country-house party, she had shown some
+momentary satisfaction in the idea that he was profoundly impressed by
+her--did it at all follow that in February, amid the distractions of a
+fashionable winter-resort, and probably surrounded by hosts of friends,
+she would pay any attention to him whatever? The abject fear that she
+might not even remember him--might not know him from Adam when he stood
+before her--skulked about in the labyrinths of his mind, but he drove it
+back whenever it showed itself. That would be too ignominious.
+
+The young people at the other side of the compartment, forever wiping
+the window with the napkin, and straining their eyes to see the
+invisible, diverted his unsettled attention. A new perception of how
+much he liked them and enjoyed having them with him, took hold of his
+thoughts. It had not occurred to him before, with any definiteness, that
+he would be insupportably lonely when the time came to part with them.
+
+Now, when he dwelt upon it, it made him feel sad and old.
+
+He said to himself at once, with decision, that there need be no parting
+at all. He would take a house without delay, and they should live with
+him. He could not doubt that this would be agreeable to them; it would
+solve every problem for him.
+
+His fancy sketched out the natural and legitimate extensions of this
+project. There would be, first of all, a house in town--a furnished
+house of a modest sort, having no pretension save to provide a cheerful
+temporary shelter for three people who liked one another. Here the
+new household would take shape, and get its right note of character.
+Apparently Louisa would not be urged to form part of this household. He
+said to himself with frankness that he didn't want her, and there had
+been nothing to indicate that her children would pine for her. She
+showed good sense when she said that her place was in the shop, and
+in her ancestral home over the shop. No doubt there would be a certain
+awkwardness, visible to others if not to themselves, about her living in
+one part of London and her children in another. But here also her good
+sense would come on;--and, besides, this furnished house in town would
+be a mere brief overture to the real thing--the noble country mansion
+he was going to have, with gardens and horses and hounds and artificial
+lakes and deer parks and everything. Quite within the year he would be
+able to realize this consummation of his dreams.
+
+How these nice young people would revel in such a place--and how they
+would worship him for having given it to them for a home! His heart
+warmed within him as he thought of this. He smiled affectionately at the
+picture Julia made, polishing the glass with vehement circular movements
+of her slight arm, and then grimacing in comic vexation at the deadly
+absence of landscape outside. Was there ever a sweeter or more lovable
+girl in this world? Would there have to be some older woman to manage
+the house, at the beginning? he wondered. He should like it immensely if
+that could be avoided. Julia looked fragile and inexperienced--but she
+would be twenty-one next month. Surely that was a mature enough age for
+the slight responsibility of presiding over servants who should be the
+best that money could buy. Many girls were married, and given households
+of their own to manage, when they were even younger.
+
+This reflection raised an obstacle against the smooth-flowing current
+of his thoughts. Supposing that Julia got the notion of marrying--how
+miserable that would make everything. Very likely she would never do any
+such thing; he had observed in her no shadow of a sign that a thought of
+matrimony had ever crossed her brain. Yet that was a subject upon which,
+of course, she could not be asked to give pledges, even to herself.
+
+Thorpe tried to take a liberal view of this matter. He argued to himself
+that there would be no objection at all to incorporating Julia's husband
+into the household, assuming that she went to the length of taking one,
+and that he was a good fellow. On this latter point, it was only the
+barest justice to Julia's tastes and judgment to take it for granted
+that he would be a good fellow. Yet the uncle felt uneasily that
+this would alter things for the worse. The family party, with that
+hypothetical young man in it, could never be quite so innocently and
+completely happy as--for instance--the family party in this compartment
+had been during these wonderful three months.
+
+Mechanically he rubbed the window beside him, and turned to look out
+with a certain fixedness--as if he might chance to catch a glimpse of
+the bridegroom with whom Julia would have it in her power to disturb
+the serenity of their prospective home. A steep white cliff, receding
+sullenly against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse grotesquely low for
+its size, crouching under big shelving galleries heaped with snow;
+an opening in front, to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a
+valley into which they would descend--he saw these things. They remained
+in his mind afterward as a part of something else that he saw, with
+his mental vision, at the same moment--a strikingly real and vivid
+presentment of Lady Cressage, attired as he had seen her in the saddle,
+her light hair blown about a little under her hat, a spot of colour
+in the exquisite cheek, the cold, impersonal dignity of a queen in the
+beautiful profile.
+
+The picture was so actual for the instant that he uttered an involuntary
+exclamation--and then looked hastily round to see whether his companions
+had heard it. Seemingly they had not; he lolled again upon the
+comfortless cushion, and strove to conjure up once more the apparition.
+Nothing satisfactory came of the effort. Upon consideration, he grew
+uncertain as to whether he had seen anything at all. At the most it was
+a kind of half-dream which had visited him. He yawned at the thought,
+and lighted a fresh cigar. All at once, his mind had become too indolent
+to do any more thinking. A shapeless impression that there would be a
+good many things to think over later on flitted into his brain and out
+again.
+
+"Well, how are the mountains using you, now?" he called out to his
+niece.
+
+"Oh, I could shake them!" she declared. "Listen to this: 'A view of
+singular beauty, embracing the greater part of the Lake of Geneva, and
+the surrounding mountains, is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are
+now--or were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort of valley
+in front of us--but that is all. If I could only see one mountain with
+snow on it----"
+
+"Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come to that," Thorpe
+insisted, with jocose perversity. "You're on mountains yourself, all the
+time."
+
+"You know what I mean," she retorted. "I want to see something like the
+coloured pictures in the hotels."
+
+"Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow," he said, for perhaps
+the twentieth time that day.
+
+"There--that looks like water!" said Alfred. "See? just beyond the
+village. Yes, it is water. There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events."
+
+"But it isn't the right colour," protested Julia, peering through the
+glass. "It's precisely like everything else: it's of no colour at all.
+And they always paint it such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss
+Government ought to return you your money."
+
+"You wait till you see it tomorrow--or next day," said the uncle,
+vaguely. He closed his eyes, and welcomed a drowsy mood. As he went off
+to sleep, the jolting racket of the train mellowed itself into a murmur
+of "tomorrow or next day, tomorrow or next day," in his ears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the big hotel, Julia
+looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. She was in such haste to behold
+it that she had not so much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her
+muff still in her hand. After one brief glance, she groaned aloud with
+vexation.
+
+Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both
+dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of
+water--motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour--which at some
+small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little
+further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the
+forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, beached under the shelter
+of the pier, there was no proof in sight that this was a lake at all. It
+was as uninspiring to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a
+porch.
+
+While her uncle and brother occupied themselves with the luggage being
+brought up by the porters, she opened a window and stepped out upon
+the tiny balcony. A flaring sign on the inner framework of this balcony
+besought her in Swiss-French, in the interests of order, not to feed
+the birds. The injunction seemed meaningless to her until she perceived,
+over by the water, several gulls lazily wheeling about. They were almost
+as grey as the fog they circled in. Suddenly they seemed to perceive
+her in turn, and, swerving sharply, came floating toward the hotel, with
+harsh, almost menacing cries. She hurried in, and shut the window with
+decision. It seemed to her that the smile with which, as she turned, she
+was able to meet her uncle's look, was a product of true heroism.
+
+Apparently this smile did not altogether delude him. "Oh, now, you
+mustn't get down on your luck," he adjured her. "We're going to be
+awfully cozy here. Have you seen your room? It's just there, in a little
+alley to the right of the door. They say it has an even finer view
+than these windows. Oh, you needn't laugh--this is the best view in the
+world, I'm told by those who know. And as a winter-resort, why----"
+
+"I say, look here!" The interruption came from Alfred, who, having gone
+out on one of the balconies, put in his head now to summon them. "Come
+here! Here's some fun."
+
+He pointed out to Thorpe the meaning of the inscription on the sign, and
+then pulled him forward to observe its practical defiance. A score of
+big gulls were flapping and dodging in excited confusion close before
+them, filling their ears with a painful clamour. Every now and again,
+one of the birds, recovering its senses in the hurly-burly, would make a
+curving swoop downward past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly
+catch in its beak something that had been thrown into the air.
+
+Thorpe, leaning over his railing, saw that a lady on a balcony one floor
+below, and some yards to the left, was feeding the birds. She laughed
+aloud as she did so, and said something over her shoulder to a companion
+who was not visible.
+
+"Well, that's pretty cool," he remarked to his niece, who had come to
+stand beside him. "She's got the same sign down there that we've got. I
+can see it from here. Or perhaps she can't read French."
+
+"Or perhaps she isn't frightened of the hotel people," suggested the
+girl. She added, after a little, "I think I'll feed them myself in
+the morning. I certainly shall if the sun comes out--as a sort of
+Thanksgiving festival, you know."
+
+Her uncle seemed not to hear her. He had been struck by the exceptional
+grace of the gestures with which the pieces of bread were flung forth.
+The hands and wrists of this lady were very white and shapely. The
+movements which she made with them, all unaware of observation as she
+was, and viewed as he viewed them from above, were singularly beautiful
+in their unconstraint. It was in its way like watching some remarkable
+fine dancing, he thought. He could not see much of her face, from his
+perch, but she was tall and fashionably clad. There was a loose covering
+of black lace thrown over her head, but once, as she turned, he could
+see that her hair was red. Even in this fleeting glimpse, the unusual
+tint attracted his attention: there was a brilliancy as of fire in it.
+Somehow it seemed to make a claim upon his memory. He continued to stare
+down at the stranger with an indefinable sense that he knew something
+about her.
+
+Suddenly another figure appeared upon the balcony--and in a flash he
+comprehended everything. These idiotic, fighting gluttons of gulls
+had actually pointed out to him the object of his search. It was
+Lady Cressage who stood in the doorway, there just below him--and her
+companion, the red-haired lady who laughed hotel-rules to scorn, was the
+American heiress who had crossed the ocean in his ship, and whom he
+had met later on at Hadlow. What was her name--Martin? No--Madden. He
+confronted the swift impression that there was something odd about these
+two women being together. At Hadlow he had imagined that they did not
+like each other. Then he reflected as swiftly that women probably had
+their own rules about such matters. He seemed to have heard, or read,
+perhaps, that females liked and disliked each other with the most
+capricious alternations and on the least tangible of grounds. At all
+events, here they were together now. That was quite enough.
+
+The two ladies had gone in, and closed their window. The sophisticated
+birds, with a few ungrateful croaks of remonstrance, had drifted away
+again to the water. His niece had disappeared from his elbow. Still
+Thorpe remained with his arms folded on the railing, his eyes fixed on
+the vacant balcony, below to the left.
+
+When at last he went inside, the young people were waiting for him with
+the project of a stroll before dinner. The light was failing, but there
+was plenty of time. They had ascertained the direction in which Chillon
+lay; a servant had assured them that it was only a few minutes' walk,
+and Alfred was almost certain that he had seen it from the window.
+
+Thorpe assented with a certain listlessness, which they had never noted
+in his manner before, but when Julia begged him not to stir if he were
+in the slightest degree tired, he replied honestly enough that he would
+do anything rather than be left alone. Then, of course, they said, there
+should be no walk, but to this he would not listen. The party trooped
+downstairs, accordingly, and out into the street. The walking was vile,
+but, as Julia had long ago said, if they were to be deterred by slush
+they would never get anywhere or see anything.
+
+It proved to be too late and too dark to either enter the castle or get
+much of an idea of its exterior. Returning, they paused again to look
+into the lighted window of the nice little book-shop. The numerous
+photographs of what they were entitled to behold from the windows of
+their hotel seemed more convincing than photographs usually were. As the
+young people inspected them, they became reassured. It was not credible
+that such a noble vista would forever deny itself to such earnest
+pilgrims. When their uncle introduced this time his ancient formula
+about the certainty of brilliant sunshine in the morning, they somehow
+felt like believing him.
+
+"Yes--I really think it must change," Julia declared, with her
+fascinated glance upon the photographs.
+
+Alfred looked at his watch. "We'd better get along to the hotel, hadn't
+we?" he suggested.
+
+"By the way"--Thorpe began, with a certain uneasiness of
+manner--"speaking of dinner, wouldn't you like to dine at the big table
+d'hote, instead of up in our sitting-room?"
+
+"If you're tired of our dining alone--by all means," answered Julia,
+readily. There was obvious surprise, however, in both her look and tone.
+
+"Tired nothing!" he assured her. "I like it better than anything else in
+the world. But what I mean is--I was thinking, seeing that this is
+such a great winter-resort, and all the swagger people of Europe come
+here--that probably you youngsters would enjoy seeing the crowd."
+
+Julia's glance, full of affectionate appreciation, showed how wholly she
+divined his spirit of self-sacrifice. "We wouldn't care in the least
+for it," she declared. "We enjoy being a little party by ourselves every
+whit as much as you do--and we both hate the people you get at table
+d'hotes--and besides, for that matter, if there are any real swells
+here, you may be sure they dine in their own rooms."
+
+"Why, of course!" Thorpe exclaimed swiftly, in palpable self-rebuke. "I
+don't know what I could have been thinking of. Of course they would dine
+in their rooms."
+
+Next morning, Thorpe rose earlier than ever--with the impression of a
+peculiarly restless and uncomfortable night behind him. It was not until
+he had shaved and dressed that he noted the altered character of the
+air outside. Although it was not fully daylight yet, he could see the
+outlines of the trees and vinerows on the big, snow-clad hill, which
+monopolized the prospect from his window, all sharp and clear cut, as if
+he were looking at them through an opera-glass. He went at once to the
+sitting-room, and thrust the curtains aside from one of the windows.
+
+A miracle had been wrought in the night. The sky overhead was serenely
+cloudless; the lake beneath, stirring softly under some faint passing
+breeze, revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. Between
+sky and water there stretched across the picture a broad, looming,
+dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here and there at the top by
+little slanting patches of an intensely glowing white. He looked at this
+darkling middle distance for a moment or two without comprehension. Then
+he turned and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's room and beat upon
+it.
+
+"Get up!" he called through the panels. "Here's your sunrise--here's
+your Alpine view. Go to your window and see it!"
+
+A clear voice, not unmirthful, replied: "I've been watching it for half
+an hour, thanks. Isn't it glorious?"
+
+He was more fortunate at the opposite door, for Alfred was still
+asleep. The young man, upon hearing the news, however, made a toilet of
+unexampled brevity, and came breathlessly forth. Thorpe followed him
+to the balcony, where he stood collarless and uncombed, with the fresh
+morning breeze blowing his hair awry, his lips parted, his eyes staring
+with what the uncle felt to be a painful fixedness before him.
+
+Thorpe had seen many mountains in many lands. They did not interest him
+very much. He thought, however, that he could see now why people who
+had no mountains of their own should get excited about Switzerland. He
+understood a number of these sentimental things now, for that matter,
+which had been Greek to him three months before. Unreceptive as his
+philistinism may have seemed to these delightful youngsters, it was
+apparent enough to him that they had taught him a great deal. If he
+could not hope to share their ever-bubbling raptures and enthusiasms,
+at least he had come to comprehend them after a fashion, and even to
+discern sometimes what it was that stirred them.
+
+He watched his nephew now--having first assured himself by a
+comprehensive downward glance that no other windows of the hotel-front
+were open. The young man seemed tremendously moved, far too much so to
+talk. Thorpe ventured once some remarks about the Mexican mountains,
+which were ever so much bigger, as he remembered them, but Alfred paid
+no heed. He continued to gaze across the lake, watching in rapt silence
+one facet after another catch the light, and stand out from the murky
+gloom, radiantly white, till at last the whole horizon was a mass of
+shining minarets and domes, and the sun fell full on his face. Then,
+with a long-drawn sigh, he turned, re-entered the room, and threw
+himself into a chair.
+
+"It's too good!" he declared, with a half-groan. "I didn't know it would
+be like that."
+
+"Why nothing's too good for us, man," his uncle told him.
+
+"THAT is," said the boy, simply, and Thorpe, after staring for a moment,
+smiled and rang the bell for breakfast.
+
+When Julia made her appearance, a few minutes later, the table was
+already laid, and the waiter was coming in with the coffee.
+
+"I thought we'd hurry up breakfast," her uncle explained, after she
+had kissed him and thanked him for the sunrise he had so successfully
+predicted--"because I knew you'd both be crazy to get out."
+
+He had not over-estimated their eagerness, which was so great, indeed,
+that they failed to note the excessive tranquility of his own demeanour.
+He ate with such unusual deliberation, on this exciting morning, that
+they found themselves at the end of their repast when, apparently, he
+had but made a beginning.
+
+"Now you mustn't wait for me at all," he announced to them then. "I'm a
+little tired this morning--and I think I'd just like to lie around and
+smoke, and perhaps read one of your novels. But you two must get your
+things on and lose no time in getting out. This is the very best time of
+day, you know--for Alpine scenery. I'd hate to have you miss any of it."
+
+Under his kindly if somewhat strenuous insistence, they went to their
+rooms to prepare for an immediate excursion. He was so anxious to have
+them see all there was to be seen that, when Julia returned, properly
+cloaked and befurred, and stood waiting at the window, he scolded a
+little.
+
+"What on earth is that boy doing?" he exclaimed, with a latent snarl in
+his tone which was novel to her ear. "He'll keep you here till noon!"
+
+"He's shaving, I think. He won't be long," she replied, with great
+gentleness. After a moment's pause, she turned from the window and came
+gayly forward.
+
+"Oh, I forgot: I was going to feed the birds. There are several of them
+out there now." As she spoke, she busily broke up some of the rolls on
+the table. Her face was bright with the pleasure of the thought.
+
+"If you don't much mind, Julia," her uncle began, with almost pleading
+intonations, "I rather think I wouldn't feed those birds. The rule is
+there before our eyes, you know--and it's always been my idea that if
+you're at a hotel it's the correct thing to abide by its rules. It's
+just an idea of mine--and I daresay, if you think about it, you'll feel
+the same way."
+
+The girl freed the last remaining bread-crumb from her gloves. "Why, of
+course, uncle," she said, with promptitude.
+
+Although there was no hint of protest in her tone or manner, he felt
+impelled to soften still further this solitary demonstration of his
+authority. "You see I've been all round the world, my little girl," he
+explained, haltingly, "and when a man's done that, and knocked about
+everywhere, he's apt to get finicking and notional about trifles every
+once in a while."
+
+"You're less so than anybody I ever knew," she generously interposed.
+
+"Oh, no I'm not. You don't know me well enough yet; that's what's the
+matter. And you see, Julia--another thing just because you saw that lady
+throwing out bread, that aint a very good reason why you should do it.
+You don't know what kind of a person she may be. Girls have got to be so
+frightfully careful about all that sort of thing."
+
+Julia offered a constrained little laugh in comment. "Oh, you don't know
+how careful I can be," she said.
+
+"But you're not annoyed?" he entreated her--and for answer she came
+behind him, and rested an arm on his shoulder, and patted it. He stroked
+her hand with his own. "That's something like the nicest niece in the
+world!" he exclaimed, with fervour.
+
+When at last she and her brother had gone, he made short work of his
+breakfast, and drank his coffee at a gulp. A restless activity suddenly
+informed his movements. He lit a cigar, and began pacing up and down the
+room, biting his lips in preoccupation as he went. After a little, he
+opened a window, and ventured cautiously as far out on the balcony
+as was necessary to obtain a view of the street below. Eventually, he
+identified his nephew and niece among the pedestrians beneath him, and
+he kept them in sight till, after more than one tiresome halt at a shop
+window, they disappeared round a bend in the road. Then he turned and
+came back into the room with the buoyant air of a man whose affairs are
+prospering.
+
+He smiled genially to himself as he gathered from the table in one
+capacious hand all the pieces of bread his beloved niece had broken
+up, and advanced again to the open window. Waiting here till one of the
+dingy gulls moving aimlessly about was headed toward him, he tossed out
+a fragment. The bird dashed at it with a scream, and on the instant the
+whole squawking flock were on wing. He suffered the hubbub to proceed
+unappeased for a little while he kept a watchful though furtive eye
+on that balcony to the left, below. Unhappily he could not get out far
+enough to see whether the inner curtains of its window were drawn. He
+threw another bit of bread, and then looked at his watch. It was a few
+minutes past nine. Surely people travelling to see scenery would be up
+by this hour.
+
+The strategy of issuing just enough bread to keep the feathered
+concourse in motion commended itself to his mind. As a precautionary
+measure, he took all the rolls remaining on the table, and put them in
+the drawer of a desk by the window. It even occurred to him to ring for
+more bread, but upon consideration that seemed too daring. The waiter
+would be sufficiently surprised at the party's appetites as it was.
+
+Half an hour later, his plan of campaign suddenly yielded a victory.
+Lady Cressage appeared on her balcony, clad in some charming sort of
+morning gown, and bareheaded. She had nothing in her hands, and seemed
+indifferent to the birds, but when Thorpe flung forth a handful of
+fragments into the centre of their whirling flock, she looked up at him.
+It was the anxious instant, and he ventured upon what he hoped was a
+decorous compromise between a bow and a look of recognition.
+
+She was in no haste to answer either. He could see rather than hear
+that she said something to her invisible companion within, the while she
+glanced serenely in the general direction of his balcony. It seemed to
+him that the answer to her remark, whatever it was, must have exerted
+a direct influence upon his destiny, for Lady Cressage all at once
+focussed her vague regard upon him, and nodded with a reasonably
+gracious smile.
+
+"It's wonderful luck to find you here," he called down to her. Having
+played their part, he wished now that the birds were at Jericho. Their
+obstreperous racket made conversation very difficult. Apparently she
+made him an answer, but he could catch nothing of it.
+
+"I'm here with my niece and nephew," he shouted down. "I don't hear what
+you say. May I come down and pay my respects--later on? What is your
+number, and when may I come?"
+
+These questions, as he flashed them in review through his mind, seemed
+to be all right from the most exacting social point of view. Doubtless
+it was equally all right that, before replying, she should consult her
+companion, as she did at some length. Then she replied--and he had no
+difficulty now in hearing her above the birds--that it would be
+very nice of him to come, say, in an hour's time. She told him the
+number--and then almost abruptly went in.
+
+Thorpe, during this hour that ensued, smoked with volcanic energy. He
+tried to interest himself in one after another of half a dozen Tauchnitz
+novels his niece carried about, with a preposterous absence of success.
+He strove to arrange in some kind of sequence the things that he should
+say, when this momentous interview should begin, but he could think of
+nothing which did not sound silly. It would be all right, he argued to
+himself in the face of this present mental barrenness; he always talked
+well enough on the spur of the moment, when the time came--and still was
+not reassured.
+
+He wondered if both ladies would be there to receive him, and
+decided that they would probably regard that as indispensable to the
+proprieties. In that case, their conversation would necessarily be of
+the most casual and general character. He would tell them a good deal
+about his niece, he foresaw. A man travelling about with a niece--and
+such a delightfully lady-like and engaging little niece--would take on
+some added interest and dignity, he perceived, in the eyes of ladies
+travelling alone. He essayed to estimate just how much they would
+probably like Julia. Of course he would say nothing about her mother and
+the book-shop; a vague allusion to a widowed sister would be ample on
+that head. But there could be confident references to Cheltenham; he
+knew from what Julia had said that it suggested the most satisfactory
+social guarantees, if taken strictly by itself. And then so much would
+depend upon Julia herself! If she succeeded in striking up a friendship
+with them--ah, then everything would be all right. Perhaps they would
+take a fancy to Alfred too! He was a boy, of course, but conceivably the
+fact that he wanted to paint, and knew about pictures, would appeal to
+them. He seemed to have heard somewhere that artists were the very devil
+among women.
+
+At last the weary time of waiting had worn itself out, somehow, and,
+after a final polishing before his glass, he went down, and found his
+right corridor, and knocked at the door. A pleasant voice bade him
+enter, and, hat and gloves in hand, he went in.
+
+As he had imagined, both ladies were present. He had not been prepared,
+however, for the fact that it was the American who played the part of
+hostess. It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down, and
+generally made him free of the apartment. When he shook hands with Lady
+Cressage, there was somehow an effect of the incidental in the ceremony,
+as if she were also a guest.
+
+Nothing could have been simpler or more pleasing than the little visit
+turned out to be. Miss Madden had suddenly grown tired of the snowless
+and dripping English winter, and had as promptly decided to come to
+Switzerland, where the drifts ought to be high enough, and the frosts
+searching enough, in all conscience. They had selected Territet, because
+it was familiar to her, and because it was on the way to Martigny and
+Brieg, and she had had a notion of crossing either the Simplon or the
+St. Bernard in winter. As she found now, the St. Bernard was quite
+impracticable, but admittedly a post road was kept open over the
+Simplon. It was said now that she would not be allowed to proceed by
+this, but it often happened that she did the things that she was not
+allowed to do. The hotel-people at both Brieg and Berisal had written
+refusing to let their horses attempt the Simplon journey, and they were
+of course quite within their rights, but there were other horses in
+Switzerland. One surely could buy horses--and so on.
+
+Thorpe also had his turn at autobiography. He told rather whimsically
+of his three months' experiences at the tail of the juvenile whirligigs,
+and his auditors listened to them with mild smiles. He ventured upon
+numerous glowing parentheses about Julia, and they at least did not say
+that they did not want to know her. They heard with politeness, too,
+what he could contrive to drag in about his artist-nephew, and said it
+must be very pleasant for him to have such nice company. At least Miss
+Madden said this: her companion, as he thought it over afterward, seemed
+hardly to have said anything at all. She answered the few remarks which
+he found it possible to direct to her, but the responses took no hold
+upon his memory. He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy, or both.
+
+Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension, were
+verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed itself--as
+splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing its glaciers above the mounting
+sunrise--in his brain.
+
+"We should all be charmed if you would come up and dine with us
+tonight," he said, under the abrupt impulsion of this idea. "It's been
+such an age since we wanderers have had the privilege of company at our
+table!"
+
+The felicity of these phrases from his lips attracted his admiring
+attention, even while he waited in suspense for an answer to them.
+
+The ladies exchanged a look. "Yes," said Miss Madden, after the
+slightest of pauses, "we shall be very happy."
+
+Shortly thereafter Thorpe took his leave, and went downstairs and out.
+He wandered about till luncheon time, observing the mountains across the
+lake from various standpoints, and, as it were, with new eyes. He was
+interested in them in a curious new fashion; they seemed to say things
+to him. His lip curled once at the conceit that he was one of the Alps
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+IT did not happen until three days later that Thorpe's opportunity to
+speak alone with Lady Cressage came.
+
+In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have become fused in a
+remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young
+people, and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day upon the
+striking prescience he had shown in bringing them.
+
+Both the ladies unaffectedly liked Julia; so much so that they seemed
+unwilling to make any plans which did not include her. Then it was only
+a matter of course that where she went her brother should go--and a
+further logical step quite naturally brought in their willing uncle. If
+he had planned everything, and now was ordering everything, it could not
+have gone more to his liking.
+
+Certain side speculations lent a savour to the satisfaction with which
+he viewed this state of affairs. He found many little signs to confirm
+the suspicion that the two ladies had been the readier to make much of
+Julia because they were not overkeen about each other's society. The
+bright, sweet-natured girl had come as a welcome diversion to a couple
+who in seclusion did battle with tendencies to yawn. He was not quite
+convinced, for that matter, that the American lady always went to that
+trouble. She seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person, who
+would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations from doing the
+things she wanted to do. Her relations with her companion afforded him
+food for much thought. Without any overt demonstrations, she produced
+the effect of ordering Lady Cressage about. This, so far as it went,
+tended to prejudice him against her. On the other hand, however, she was
+so good to Julia, in a peculiarly frank and buoyant way which fascinated
+the girl, that he could not but like her. And she was very good to
+Alfred too.
+
+There was, indeed, he perceived, a great deal of individuality about the
+friendship which had sprung up between Miss Madden and his nephew. She
+was years his senior--he settled it with himself that the American could
+not be less than seven-and-twenty,--yet Alfred stole covert glances of
+admiration at her, and seemed to think of nothing but opportunities for
+being in her company as if--as if--Thorpe hardly liked to complete the
+comparison in his own thoughts. Alfred, of course, said it was all on
+account of her wonderful hair; he rather went out of his way to
+dilate upon the enthusiasm her "colour scheme"--whatever that might
+mean--excited in him as an artist. The uncle had moments of profound
+skepticism about this--moments when he uneasily wondered whether it was
+not going to be his duty to speak to the young man. For the most part,
+however, he extracted reassurance from Miss Madden's demeanour toward
+the lad. She knew, it seemed, a vast deal about pictures; at least she
+was able to talk a vast deal about them, and she did it in such a calmly
+dogmatic fashion, laying down the law always, that she put Alfred in the
+position of listening as a pupil might listen to a master. The humility
+with which his nephew accepted this position annoyed Thorpe upon
+occasion, but he reasoned that it was a fault on the right side. Very
+likely it would help to keep the fact of the lady's seniority more
+clearly before the youngster's mind, and that would be so much gained.
+
+And these apprehensions, after all, were scarcely to be counted in the
+balance against the sense of achieved happiness with which these halcyon
+days kept Thorpe filled. The initiatory dinner had gone off perfectly.
+He could have wished, indeed, that Julia had a smarter frock, and more
+rings, when he saw the imposing costumes and jewelled throats and hands
+of his guests--but she was a young girl, by comparison, he reflected,
+and there could be no doubt that they found her charming. As for Alfred,
+he was notably fine-looking in his evening-clothes--infinitely more like
+the son of a nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying to himself,
+than that big dullard, the Honourable Balder. It filled him with a new
+pleasure to remember that Alfred had visiting cards presenting his name
+as D'Aubigny, which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate
+Dabney really stood for. The lad and his sister had united upon this
+excellent change long ago at Cheltenham, and oddly enough they had
+confessed it to their uncle, at the beginning of the trip, with a show
+of trepidation, as if they feared his anger. With radiant gayety he
+had relieved their minds by showing them his card, with "Mr. Stormont
+Thorpe" alone upon it. At the dinner table, in the proudest moment
+of his life, he had made himself prouder still by thinking how
+distinguished an appearance his and Alfred's cards would make together
+in the apartment below next day.
+
+But next day, the relations between the two parties had already become
+too informal for cards. Julia went down to see them; they came up to see
+Julia. Then they all went for a long walk, with luncheon at Vevey, and
+before evening Alfred was talking confidently of painting Miss Madden.
+Next day they went by train to St. Maurice, and, returning after dark,
+dined without ceremony together. This third day--the weather still
+remaining bright--they had ascended by the funicular road to Glion, and
+walked on among the swarming luegers, up to Caux. Here, after luncheon,
+they had wandered about for a time, regarding the panorama of lake and
+mountains. Now, as the homeward descent began, chance led the two young
+people and Miss Madden on ahead.
+
+Thorpe found himself walking beside Lady Cressage. He had upon his arm
+her outer wrap, which she said she would put on presently. To look at
+the view he must glance past her face: the profile, under the graceful
+fur cap, was so enriched by glowing colour that it was, to his thought,
+as if she were blushing.
+
+"How little I thought, a few months ago," he said, "that we should be
+mountaineering together!"
+
+"Oh, no one knows a day ahead," she responded, vaguely. "I had probably
+less notion of coming to Switzerland then than you had."
+
+"Then you don't come regularly?"
+
+"I have never seen either Germany or Switzerland before. I have scarcely
+been out of England before."
+
+"Why now"--he paused, to think briefly upon his words--"I took it for
+granted you were showing Miss Madden around."
+
+"It 's quite the other way about," she answered, with a cold little
+laugh. "It is she who is showing me around. It is her tour. I am the
+chaperone." Thorpe dwelt upon the word in his mind. He understood what
+it meant only in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness
+of the tone in which it had been uttered.
+
+"No--it didn't seem as if it were altogether--what I might call--YOUR
+tour," he ventured. They had seen much of each other these past few
+days, but it was still hard for him to make sure whether their freedom
+of intercourse had been enlarged.
+
+The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence, she commented
+upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a moment he said nothing. He went
+on then with a renewed consciousness of risk.
+
+"You mustn't be annoyed with me," he urged. "I've been travelling with
+that dear little niece of mine and her brother, so long, that I've
+got into a habit of watching to notice if the faces I see round me are
+happy. And when they're not, then I have a kind of fatherly notion of
+interfering, and seeing what's wrong."
+
+She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon doubtful
+inspiration--"By the way, speaking of fathers, I didn't know at Hadlow
+that you were the daughter of one of my Directors"--this smile froze
+upon the instant.
+
+"The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel, don't you think?"
+she remarked, "than it is from here."
+
+Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. "I have taken a great
+interest in General Kervick," he said, almost defiantly. "I am seeing to
+it that he has a comfortable income--an income suitable to a gentleman
+of his position--for the rest of his life."
+
+"He will be very glad of it," she remarked.
+
+"But I hoped that you would be glad of it too," he told her, bluntly. A
+curious sense of reliance upon his superiority in years had come to him.
+If he could make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed likely
+that she would defer to it. "I'm talking to you as I would to my niece,
+you know," he added, plausibly.
+
+She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face, as if the
+point of view took her by surprise. "I don't understand," she said. "You
+are providing an income for my father, because you wish to speak to me
+like an uncle. Is that it?"
+
+He laughed, somewhat disconsolately. "No--that isn't it," he said, and
+laughed again. "I couldn't tell, you know, that you wouldn't want to
+talk about your father." "Why, there's no reason in the world for not
+talking of him," she made haste to declare. "And if he's got something
+good in the City, I'm sure I'm as glad as anyone. He is the sort that
+ought always to have a good deal of money. I mean, it will bring out his
+more amiable qualities. He does not shine much in adversity--any more
+than I do."
+
+Thorpe felt keenly that there were fine things to be said here--but he
+had confidence in nothing that came to his tongue. "I've been a poor man
+all my life--till now," was his eventual remark.
+
+"Please don't tell me that you have been very happy in your poverty,"
+she adjured him, with the dim flicker of a returning smile. "Very likely
+there are people who are so constituted, but they are not my kind. I
+don't want to hear them tell about it. To me poverty is the horror--the
+unmentionable horror!"
+
+"There never was a day that I didn't feel THAT!" Thorpe put fervour into
+his voice. "I was never reconciled to it for a minute. I never ceased
+swearing to myself that I'd pull myself out of it. And that's what
+makes me sort of soft-hearted now toward those--toward those who haven't
+pulled themselves out of it."
+
+"Your niece says you are soft-hearted beyond example," remarked Lady
+Cressage.
+
+"Who could help being, to such a sweet little girl as she is?" demanded
+the uncle, fondly.
+
+"She is very nice," said the other. "If one may say such a thing, I
+fancy these three months with her have had an appreciable effect upon
+you. I'm sure I note a difference."
+
+"That's just what I've been saying to myself!" he told her. He was
+visibly delighted with this corroboration. "I've been alone practically
+all my life. I had no friends to speak of--I had no fit company--I
+hadn't anything but the determination to climb out of the hole. Well,
+I've done that--and I've got among the kind of people that I naturally
+like. But then there came the question of whether they would like me. I
+tell you frankly, that was what was worrying the heart out of me when I
+first met you. I like to be confessing it to you now--but you frightened
+me within an inch of my life. Well now, you see, I'm not scared of you
+at all. And of course it's because Julia's been putting me through a
+course of sprouts."
+
+The figure was lost upon Lady Cressage, but the spirit of the remarks
+seemed not unpleasant to her. "I'm sure you're full of kindness,"
+she said. "You must forget that I snapped at you--about papa." "All I
+remember about that is," he began, his eye lighting up with the thought
+that this time the opportunity should not pass unimproved, "that you
+said he didn't shine much in adversity---any more than you did. Now on
+that last point I disagree with you, straight. There wouldn't be any
+place in which you wouldn't shine."
+
+"Is that the way one talks to one's niece?" she asked him, almost
+listlessly. "Such flattery must surely be bad for the young." Her words
+were sprightly enough, but her face had clouded over. She had no heart
+for the banter.
+
+"Ah"--he half-groaned. "I only wish I knew what was the right way to
+talk to you. The real thing is that I see you're unhappy--and that gets
+on my nerve--and I should like to ask you if there wasn't something
+I could do--and ask it in such a way that you'd have to admit there
+was--and I don't know enough to do it."
+
+He had a wan smile for thanks. "But of course there is nothing," she
+replied, gently.
+
+"Oh, there must be!" he insisted. He had no longer any clear notions as
+to where his tongue might not lead him. "There must be! You said I might
+talk to you as I would to Julia."
+
+"Did I?"
+
+"Well, I'm going to, anyway," he went on stoutly, ignoring the note of
+definite dissent in her interruption. "You ARE unhappy! You spoke about
+being a chaperone. Well now, to speak plainly, if it isn't entirely
+pleasant for you with Miss Madden--why wouldn't you be a chaperone for
+Julia? I must be going to London very soon--but she can stay here, or go
+to Egypt, or wherever she likes--and of course you would do everything,
+and have everything--whatever you liked, too."
+
+"The conversation is getting upon rather impossible grounds, I'm
+afraid," she said, and then bit her lips together. Halting, she frowned
+a little in the effort of considering her further words, but there was
+nothing severe in the glance which she lifted to him as she began
+to speak. "Let us walk on. I must tell you that you misconceive the
+situation entirely. Nobody could possibly be kinder or more considerate
+than Miss Madden. Of course she is American--or rather Irish-American,
+and I'm English, and our notions and ways are not always alike. But
+that has nothing to do with it. And it is not so much that she has
+many thousands a year, and I only a few hundreds. That in itself would
+signify nothing--and if I must take help from somebody I would rather
+take it from Celia Madden than anybody else I know--but this is the
+point, Mr. Thorpe. I do not eat the bread of dependence gracefully. I
+pull wry faces over it, and I don't try very much to disguise them. That
+is my fault. Yes--oh yes, I know it is a fault--but I am as I am. And
+if Miss Madden doesn't mind--why"--she concluded with a mirthless,
+uncertain laugh--"why on earth should you?"
+
+"Ah, why should I?" he echoed, reflectively. "I should like desperately
+to tell you why. Sometime I will tell you."
+
+They walked on in silence for a brief space. Then she put out her hand
+for her wrap, and as she paused, he spread it over her shoulders.
+
+"I am amazed to think what we have been saying to each other," she said,
+buttoning the fur as they moved on again. "I am vexed with myself."
+
+"And more still with me," he suggested.
+
+"No-o--but I ought to be. You've made me talk the most shocking
+rubbish."
+
+"There we disagree again, you know. Everything you've said's been
+perfect. What you're thinking of now is that I'm not an old enough
+friend to have been allowed to hear it. But if I'm not as old a friend
+as some, I wish I could make you feel that I'm as solid a friend as
+any--as solid and as staunch and as true. I wish I could hear you say
+you believed that."
+
+"But you talk of 'friends,'" she said, in a tone not at all
+responsive--"what is meant by 'friends'? We've chanced to meet
+twice--and once we barely exchanged civilities, and this time we've been
+hotel acquaintances--hardly more, is it?--and you and your young people
+have been very polite to me--and I in a silly moment have talked to
+you more about my affairs than I should--I suppose it was because you
+mentioned my father. But 'friends' is rather a big word for that, isn't
+it?"
+
+Thorpe pouted for a dubious moment. "I can think of a bigger word
+still," he said, daringly. "It's been on the tip of my tongue more than
+once."
+
+She quickened her pace. The air had grown perceptibly colder. The
+distant mountains, visible ever and again through the bare branches,
+were of a dark and cheerless blue, and sharply defined against the sky.
+It was not yet the sunset hour, and there were no mists, but the light
+of day seemed to be going out of the heavens. He hurried on beside her
+in depressed silence.
+
+Their companions were hidden from view in a convolution of the winding
+road, but they were so near that their voices could be heard as they
+talked. Frequently the sound of laughter came backward from them.
+
+"They're jolly enough down there," he commented at last, moodily.
+
+"That's a good reason for our joining them, isn't it?" Her tone was at
+once casual and pointed.
+
+"But I don't want to join them!" he protested. "Why don't you stay with
+me--and talk?" "But you bully me so," she offered in explanation.
+
+The phrase caught his attention. Could it be that it expressed her
+real feeling? She had said, he recalled, that he had made her talk. Her
+complaint was like an admission that he could overpower her will. If
+that were true--then he had resources of masterfulness still in reserve
+sufficient to win any victory.
+
+"No--not bully you," he said slowly, as if objecting to the word rather
+than the idea. "That wouldn't be possible to me. But you don't know me
+well enough to understand me. I am the kind of man who gets the things
+he wants. Let me tell you something: When I was at Hadlow, I had never
+shot a pheasant in my life. I used to do tolerably well with a rifle,
+but I hardly knew anything about a shot-gun, and I don't suppose I'd
+ever killed more than two or three birds on the wing--and that was ages
+ago. But I took the notion that I would shoot better than anybody else
+there. I made up my mind to it--and I simply did it, that's all. I don't
+know if you remember--but I killed a good deal more than both the others
+put together. I give you that as an example. I wanted you to think that
+I was a crack shot--and so I made myself be a crack shot."
+
+"That is very interesting," she murmured. They did not seem to be
+walking quite so fast.
+
+"Don't think I want to brag about myself," he went on. "I don't fancy
+myself--in that way. I'm not specially proud of doing things--it's the
+things themselves that I care for. If some men had made a great fortune,
+they would be conceited about it. Well, I'm not. What I'm keen about is
+the way to use that fortune so that I will get the most out of it--the
+most happiness, I mean. The thing to do is to make up your mind
+carefully what it is that you want, and to put all your power and
+resolution into getting it--and the rest is easy enough. I don't think
+there's anything beyond a strong man's reach, if he only believes enough
+in himself."
+
+"But aren't you confusing two things?" she queried. The subject
+apparently interested her. "To win one's objects by sheer personal force
+is one thing. To merely secure them because one's purse is longer than
+other people's--that's quite another matter."
+
+He smiled grimly at her. "Well, I'll combine the two," he said.
+
+"Then I suppose you will be altogether irresistible," she said, lightly.
+"There will be no pheasants left for other people at all."
+
+"I don't mind being chaffed," he told her, with gravity. "So long as
+you're good-natured, you can make game of me all you like. But I'm in
+earnest, all the same. I'm not going to play the fool with my money and
+my power. I have great projects. Sometime I'll tell you about them. They
+will all be put through--every one of them. And you wouldn't object to
+talking them over with me--would you?"
+
+"My opinion on 'projects' is of no earthly value--to myself or anyone
+else."
+
+"But still you'd give me your advice if I asked it?" he persisted.
+"Especially if it was a project in which you were concerned?"
+
+After a moment's constrained silence she said to him, "You must have
+no projects, Mr. Thorpe, in which I am concerned. This talk is all very
+wide of the mark. You are not entitled to speak as if I were mixed up
+with your affairs. There is nothing whatever to warrant it."
+
+"But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there, and keep
+you there?" he asked her, with gleeful boldness. "And just ask yourself
+whether you do really want to help it. Why should you? You've seen
+enough of me to know that I can be a good friend. And I'm the kind of
+friend who amounts to something--who can and will do things for those he
+likes. What obligation are you under to turn away that kind of a friend,
+when he offers himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself."
+
+"But you are not in a position to nominate the questions that I am to
+put to myself," she said. The effort to import decision into her tone
+and manner was apparent. "That is what I desire you to understand. We
+must not talk any more about me. I am not the topic of conversation."
+
+"But first let me finish what I wanted to say," he insisted. "My talk
+won't break any bones. You'd be wrong not to listen to it--because
+it's meant to help you--to be of use to you. This is the thing, Lady
+Cressage: You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position. Like my
+friend Plowden"--he watched her face narrowly but in vain, in the dull
+light, for any change at mention of the name--"like my friend Plowden
+you have a position and title to keep up, and next to nothing to keep
+it up on. But he can go down into the City and make money--or try to. He
+can accept Directorships and tips about the market and so on, from men
+who are disposed to be good to him, and who see how he can be of use to
+them--and in that way he can do something for himself. But there is the
+difference: you can't do these things, or you think you can't, which
+is the same thing. You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by
+notice-boards, telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that
+way; that you mustn't say this thing or do the other. Now your
+friend down ahead there--Miss Madden--she doesn't take much stock
+in notice-boards. In fact, she feeds the gulls, simply because she's
+forbidden to do it. But you--you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're
+annoyed with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't I
+read you right?"
+
+She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic. There was no
+touch of expostulation in the voice with which she answered him. "I see
+what you think you mean," she said.
+
+"Think!" he responded, with self-confident emphasis. "I'm not
+'thinking.' I'm reading an open book. As I say, you're not
+contented--you're not happy; you don't try to pretend that you are.
+But all the same, though you hate it, you accept it. You think that you
+really must obey your notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought to do
+is to take a different view. Why should you put up all this barbed
+wire between yourself and your friends? It doesn't do anybody else any
+good--and it does you harm. Why, for example, should Plowden be free to
+take things from me, and you not?"
+
+She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye. "Unfortunately I
+was not asked to join your Board."
+
+He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her meditatively as
+he turned these words over in his mind. "What I'm doing for Plowden,"
+he said with slow vagueness meanwhile, "it isn't so much because he's on
+the Board. He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me at
+a time when that meant everything in the world to me--and I don't forget
+things of that sort. Besides, I like him--and it pleases me to let him
+in for a share of my good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying myself.
+Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed to let you in
+also for a share of that good fortune? You think there's a difference,
+but I tell you it's imaginary--pure moonshine. Why, the very people
+whose opinion you're afraid of--what did they do themselves when the
+South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of the earth had
+only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about
+them--and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. I knew
+one or two of the men who were in that deal--I wouldn't have them in my
+house--but it seems there wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in
+London."
+
+"Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed. "It wasn't a nice
+exhibition that society made of itself--one admits that,--but it was
+only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets,
+you know. And--I don't think I see your application, in any event. The
+craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after
+those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled
+in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?"
+
+Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little
+shake of the head. "'On a business basis,'" he repeated, as if talking
+to himself. "They like to have things 'on a business basis.'"
+
+He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well,
+in a reluctant, tentative way. "I don't understand you," she remarked,
+blankly.
+
+"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows, and
+marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy.
+"This is the question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my
+Board. You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden,
+and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke--but it had its
+meaning--at least to me. Now I want to ask you--if I decide to form
+another Company, a very small and particular Company--if I should decide
+to form it, I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
+Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess you know what I
+mean."
+
+The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle
+for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of
+confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of
+physical ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady
+Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and
+nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain
+beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the
+silence which ensued.
+
+"Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say," she
+observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her
+feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a
+certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his
+self-command. "Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you," she went
+on. "We--we have been lagging behind unconscionably. If you wish to
+please me, let us hurry forward now. And please!--no more talk at all!"
+
+"But just a word--you're not angry?"
+
+She shook her head very slightly.
+
+"And you do know that I'm your friend--your solid, twenty-four-carat
+friend?"
+
+After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper--"Yes--be
+my friend--if it amuses you,"--and led the way with precipitate steps
+down the winding road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train
+for Geneva--homeward bound.
+
+It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent
+business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced
+to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes
+the formless impression that there were other things beside business.
+Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably
+venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his
+character that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset
+him. And upset he undeniably was.
+
+They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following
+the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept
+very badly, and that they must "count him out" of their plans for the
+day. He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay
+at Territet. He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and
+preoccupied. He ate little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits
+a good deal, which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce
+him to go out either day.
+
+Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity
+synchronized with an apparent change in the attitude of their new
+friends on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent
+than definable. The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and
+affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship had somehow vanished.
+Insensibly, the two parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in
+common. There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous luncheons
+or formal dinners as a group.
+
+The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this
+morning of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the
+snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They
+made sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite,
+and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no other token
+of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the
+previous evening, of course--it lingered in their minds as a rather
+perfunctory ceremony--but this had not prevented their hoping for
+another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand
+from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously
+at each other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward
+their uncle--and perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and
+was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.
+
+"Fortunately, it is a clear day," said Julia. "We shall see Mont Blanc."
+
+Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears.
+Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.
+
+
+At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people
+had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee
+thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.
+
+"It's as they said," she observed. "You are not allowed to drive in the
+mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint
+for a model Republic--doesn't it?"
+
+"I daresay they're quite right," Lady Cressage replied, listlessly.
+"It's in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains
+would simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes--and all
+that. I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent."
+
+"And you're on the side of the Government," said the other, with a
+twinkle in her brown eyes. "Truly now--you hated the whole idea of
+driving over the Simplon."
+
+Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.
+
+"But do you like this Russian plan any better?" demanded Celia. "I wish
+for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me--and let me
+know to the uttermost just what you think." "'For once'?" queried the
+other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of
+the quotation to be marked.
+
+"Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking," Miss Madden declared.
+She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. "It is not
+you alone--Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your
+country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things
+back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe,
+would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom
+I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see
+this case in point," she pursued, with a little laugh, "I could not drag
+it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was
+a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit
+that you hated it."
+
+"But you wanted to go," objected Lady Cressage, quietly. "That was the
+important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with
+the matter."
+
+Celia's face clouded momentarily. "Those are not the kind of things I
+like to hear you say," she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. "They put
+everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you
+should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said
+it a thousand times--and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But
+I never can find out what you do want--what really will please you! You
+never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the
+things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye
+that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or
+not."
+
+The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. "That
+is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago," said
+Lady Cressage, passively--"that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But
+originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for
+two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak.
+I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of
+view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the
+responsibility of defending it is not mine."
+
+"Delightful!" cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again.
+"You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with.
+The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford--or
+passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up
+arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing--if
+I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your
+feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in
+silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and
+have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was--and it would all
+be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You
+don't tell me things!"
+
+Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve.
+"It is a constitutional defect--even national, according to you. How
+shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to
+tell you?--I forget."
+
+"The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and
+then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well
+worth while--and next Moscow--and so on to St. Petersburg, in time
+to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the
+characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the
+sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow--it seems to me it
+must be the best thing in Europe--if you can call Russia Europe.
+That's the way it presents itself to me--but then I was brought up in
+a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing--in its proper
+season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real
+winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would
+like the Russian experiment."
+
+The other laughed gently. "But if I don't know what a real winter is,
+how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am
+perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes--truly--I should like very
+much to go."
+
+Miss Madden sighed briefly. "All right," she said, but with a notable
+absence of conviction in her tone.
+
+A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another
+note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips
+over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of
+surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her
+companion.
+
+"It's from our young friend," she explained, genially--"the
+painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I
+made--that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't
+think I promised anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail.
+It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time--they
+were to go very early, weren't they?"
+
+Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. "It was 8:40, I think--fully half an
+hour ago," she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.
+
+"Curious conglomeration"--mused the other. "The boy and girl are so
+civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are
+spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They
+ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather
+effective--but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame
+monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his
+fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it
+more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves
+it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example,
+never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a
+poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what
+he had always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and
+thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out
+of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and
+temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk
+in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever
+putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous.
+I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so;
+he never looked or acted as if he thought so.--But I never stop when I
+begin talking of my father."
+
+"It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him," Lady Cressage
+put in. "One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!"
+
+Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that
+had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her
+earlier subject. "Of course there is a certain difference," she went
+on, carelessly,--"this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase
+goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated."
+
+"Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me," said the other,
+with interest. "And his people were booksellers--somewhere in London--so
+that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly
+has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the
+nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very
+well indeed--in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow
+you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that
+they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself--and he's very
+proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a
+nice effect?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Celia replied, idly. "It seemed to me that he was
+the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished
+and taught drawing-room tricks--I feel that merely in the interest
+of the fitness of things. Have you looked into his eyes--I mean when
+they've got that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred thousand
+dead men in them."
+
+"I know the look you mean," said Lady Cressage, in a low voice.
+
+"Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody," pursued Miss Madden,
+with ostensible indifference, but fixing a glance of aroused attention
+upon her companion's face, "or that he has any criminal intentions
+whatever. He behaves very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and
+nephew idolize him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. It may
+be that I'm altogether wrong about him--only I know I had the instinct
+of alarm when I caught that sort of dull glaze in his eye. I met an
+African explorer a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories
+were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. Perhaps it was this
+that put it into my head--but I have a feeling that this Thorpe is an
+exceptional sort of man, who would have the capacity in him for terrible
+things, if the necessity arose for them."
+
+"I see what you mean," the other repeated. She toyed with the
+bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively watched their
+manipulation into squares and triangles as she went on. "But may that
+not be merely the visible sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful
+character? And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances whether
+such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred thousand dead men, or
+enriches a hundred thousand lives instead? We agree, let us say, that
+this Mr. Thorpe impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality. The
+question arises, How will he use his power? On that point, we look
+for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his eye, and you draw hostile
+conclusions from it. I reply that it may mean no more than that he is
+sleepy. But, on the other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in
+his favour. He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his
+family that we have seen--persons, moreover, who have been brought up
+in ways different to his own, and who would not start, therefore, with
+prejudices in his favour. Beyond that, I know of two cases in which
+he has behaved, or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish
+generosity--and in neither case was there any claim upon him of a
+substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact, quite too much disposed
+to share his fortune with Tom, Dick, and Harry--anybody who excites
+his sympathy or gets into his affections." Having said this much, Lady
+Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. "So now," she added, with
+a flushed smile, "since you love arguments so much, how do you answer
+that?"
+
+Celia smiled back. "Oh, I don't answer it at all," she said, and her
+voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. "Your proofs overwhelm
+me. I know nothing of him--and you know so much!"
+
+Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel earnestness and
+directness of gaze. "I had a long, long talk with him--the afternoon we
+came down from Glion."
+
+Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. She
+did not return to the table, but after a brief pause came and took an
+easy-chair beside her friend, who turned to face her. "My dear Edith,"
+she said, with gravity, "I think you want to tell me about that
+talk--and so I beg you to do so. But if I'm mistaken--why then I beg you
+to do nothing of the kind."
+
+The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and
+then clasped them upon her knee. "I seem not to know what I want! What
+is the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?"
+
+"Now--now!" Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference,
+apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage
+deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.
+
+"There is really nothing to tell,"--she faltered, hesitatingly--"that
+is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it--the talk left my mind
+in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that was
+said--it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while something
+else was being talked about--but the whole experience made a most
+tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in my own
+mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me, Celia. No
+man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be
+more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people
+of--well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,--but this man, who
+is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled on without
+any special aim that one could see--he reduced my brain to a sort of
+porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him--babbling rubbish
+which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be accounted
+for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?"
+
+"Nerves," said Miss Madden, judicially.
+
+"Oh, that is meaningless," the other declared. "Anybody can say
+'nerves.' Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'"
+
+"But yours is a special case of nerves," Celia pursued, with gentle
+imperturbability. "I think I can make my meaning clear to you--though
+the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred
+dog in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will
+always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity--call
+it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in
+your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say
+it broke your nerve--but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old
+wound aches when there's a storm in the air--so your old hurt distracts
+and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather
+clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain."
+
+"Perhaps--I don't know," Edith replied, in a tone of melancholy reverie.
+"It makes a very poor creature out of me, whatever it is."
+
+"I rather lose patience, Edith," her companion admonished her, gravely.
+"Nobody has a right to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself
+to be."
+
+"But I'm not a coward," the other protested. "I could be as brave as
+anybody--as brave as you are--if a chance were given me. But of what use
+is bravery against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it. I only
+wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down, or break through
+it.--Oh yes, I know what you say! You say there is no wall--that it is
+all an illusion of mine. But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view.
+I've battered myself against it too long--too sorely, Celia!"
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. "Oh, we women all have our
+walls--our limitations--if it comes to that," she said, with a kind
+of compassionate impatience in her tone. "We are all ridiculous
+together--from the point of view of human liberty. The free woman is a
+fraud--a myth. She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. I used to
+have the most wonderful visions of what independence would mean. I
+thought that when I was absolutely my own master, with my money and my
+courage and my free mind, I would do things to astonish all mankind. But
+really the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a
+German waiter. Even that palls on one after a time. And if you were
+independent, Edith--if you had any amount of money--what difference do
+you think it would make to you? What could you do that you don't do, or
+couldn't do, now?"
+
+"Ah, now"--said the other, looking up with a thin smile--"now is an
+interval--an oasis."
+
+Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face, habitually serene in its
+expression, lost something in composure as she regarded her companion.
+"I don't know why you should say that," she observed, gently enough, but
+with an effect of reproof in her tone. "I have never put limits to the
+connection, in my own mind--and it hadn't occurred to me that you were
+doing so in yours."
+
+"But I'm not," interposed Lady Cressage.
+
+"Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you talk about an
+'interval'? What was the other word?--'oasis'--as if this were a brief
+halt for refreshments and a breathing-spell, and that presently you must
+wander forth into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine. We
+agreed that we would live together--'pool our issues,' as they say in
+America. I wanted a companion; so did you. I have never for an instant
+regretted the arrangement. Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I
+have regretted. You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen,
+and you were talented, and you seemed to like me--and I promised myself
+that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit to your other gifts--and
+in that I have failed wofully. You're not happy. I see that only too
+clearly."
+
+"I know--I'm a weariness and a bore to you," broke in the other,
+despondingly.
+
+"That is precisely what you're not," Celia went on. "We mustn't use
+words of that sort. They don't describe anything in our life at all. But
+I should be better pleased with myself if I could really put my finger
+on what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided to break up our
+establishment, I have told you that you should not go back to what you
+regard as poverty. Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy.
+As I say, I think you attach more importance to money than those who
+have tested its powers would agree to--but that's neither here nor
+there. You did not get on well on 600 pounds a year--and that is enough.
+You shall never have less than twice that amount, whether we keep
+together or not--and if it ought to be three times the amount, that
+doesn't matter.
+
+"You don't seem to realize, Edith"--she spoke with increased
+animation--"that you are my caprice. You are the possession that I am
+proudest of and fondest of. There is nothing else that appeals to me a
+hundredth part as much as you do. Since I became independent, the one
+real satisfaction I have had is in being able to do things for you--to
+have you with me, and make you share in the best that the world can
+offer. And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see I don't
+know what to do."
+
+"Oh, I know--I behave very badly!" Lady Cressage had risen, and with
+visible agitation began now to pace the room. "I deserve to be thrown
+into the lake--I know it well enough! But Celia--truly--I'm as incapable
+of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am possessed by
+devils--like the people in the New Testament. Perhaps someone will come
+along who can cast them out. I don't seem able to do it myself. I can't
+rule myself at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!"
+
+"Ah!" said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences which Edith threw
+over her shoulder as she walked appeared, upon examination, to contain a
+suggestion.
+
+"My dear child," she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence, "do you
+want to marry?"
+
+Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged a long steadfast
+glance with her friend. Then she came slowly forward. "Ah, that is what
+I don't know," she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.
+
+Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little in thought. Then, at
+some passing reflection, she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she
+also rose, and went to the mantel for another cigarette. "Now I am
+going to talk plainly," she said, with decision. "Since the subject is
+mentioned, less harm will be done by speaking out than by keeping still.
+There is a debate in your mind on the matter, isn't there?"
+
+The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more, stood at the
+window and with bowed head looked down at the lake. "Yes--I suppose it
+might be called that," she replied, in a low voice.
+
+"And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would rather not?" Celia,
+after an instant's pause, went on without waiting for an answer. "I beg
+that you won't assume my hostility to the idea, Edith. In fact, I'm not
+sure I don't think it would be the best thing for you to do. Marriage,
+a home, children--these are great things to a woman. We can say that she
+pays the price of bondage for them--but to know what that signifies, we
+must ask what her freedom has been worth to her."
+
+"Yes," interposed the other, from the window. "What have I done with my
+freedom that has been worth while?"
+
+"Not much," murmured Celia, under her breath. She moved forward, and
+stood beside Edith, with an arm round her waist. They looked together at
+the lake.
+
+"It is Lord Plowden, is it not?" asked the American, as the silence grew
+constrained.
+
+Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over her reply.
+"No," she said at last. Upon reflection, and with a dim smile flickering
+in her side-long glance at Celia, she added, "He wants to marry you, you
+know."
+
+"Leave that out of consideration," said Celia, composedly. "He has never
+said so. I think it was more his mother's idea than his, if it existed
+at all. Of course I am not marrying him, or anybody else. But I saw at
+Hadlow that you and he were--what shall I say?--old friends."
+
+"He must marry money," the other replied. In an unexpected burst of
+candour she went on: "He would have asked me to marry him if I had
+had money. There is no harm in telling you that. It was quite
+understood--oh, two years ago. And I think I wished I had the
+money--then."
+
+"And you don't wish it now?"
+
+A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After
+a little, she spoke in a musing tone: "He is going to have money of his
+own, very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him
+personally, of course, but--there is no career, no ambition, no future."
+
+"A Viscount has future enough behind him," observed Celia.
+
+"It doesn't attract me," the other repeated, vaguely. "He is handsome,
+and clever, and kind and all that--but he would never appeal to any of
+the great emotions--nor be capable of them himself He is too smooth, too
+well-balanced, too much the gentleman. That expresses it badly--but do
+you see what I mean?"
+
+Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her, in a steady,
+comprehending look.
+
+"Yes, I think I see what you mean," she said, with significance in her
+tone.
+
+Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her companion's arm.
+"But I don't know myself what I mean!" she exclaimed, despairingly, as
+she moved away. "I don't know!--I don't know!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not
+exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.
+
+"It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a'
+come out on," she told them, in salutation--and for comment they all
+glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A
+gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the
+discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but
+could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving
+across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with
+chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy
+stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic
+mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers,
+which nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.
+
+"I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go
+home," she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. "But
+it isn't three yet--it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd be
+more comfortable upstairs--"
+
+"Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us," protested Julia.
+She strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was
+unmistakable.
+
+The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her
+daughter. The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long,
+listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.
+
+"But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?" she observed, coldly.
+"You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes
+upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those
+parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?"
+
+Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old
+magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but
+his sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened
+itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.
+
+"There has been so much to do, mamma," she explained, in a clear, cool
+voice. "We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All
+the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me--and Alfred
+has his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you
+sooner--and much oftener--if we had thought you wanted us. But really,
+when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible
+for us to pretend that you were glad to see us."
+
+"Oh, I was glad enough," Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. "Why
+shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you
+expect me to shout and dance?"
+
+"But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square," Alfred
+reminded her.
+
+"That's different," she declared. "What would I be doing in Ovington
+Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy
+there. But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there;
+it would be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This
+is my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!"
+
+Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal
+countenance, hardened beyond their wont. "You talk as if there had been
+some class war declared," she said, with obvious annoyance. "You know
+that Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you
+as he is to us."
+
+"Uncle Stormont!" Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged
+with hostile sarcasm. "But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel,"
+broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. "He has a perfect right to use
+the one he likes best."
+
+"Oh, I don't dispute his right," she replied, once more in her
+passionless monotone. "Everybody can call themselves whatever they
+please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's
+name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have
+your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me--but
+they're all right for you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is
+that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full
+of money to enable you to make the most of them. If I were religious I
+should call that providential."
+
+"And that's what we DO call it," put in Julia, with vivacity. "And why
+should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of
+it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all.
+Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself--at least for
+the present. But when Uncle St--when uncle says there's more than enough
+money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things
+for you--why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow
+Alfred to do things for me."
+
+"That you never did," interposed the young man, gayly. "I'll say that
+for you, Jule."
+
+"And never will," she assured him, with cheerful decision. "But
+no--mamma--can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us
+to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford,
+from the time we were of no age at all--and when uncle's money came you
+sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we
+behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason
+to suppose that you would be--I won't say proud, but at least well
+satisfied with us--and then it turned out that you didn't like us at
+all."
+
+"I never said anything of the sort," the mother declared, with a touch
+of animation.
+
+"Oh no--you never said it," Julia admitted, "but what else can we think
+you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy
+yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that--and
+I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go----"
+
+"But I did want you to go," Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
+
+"Well, then, when I come back--when we come back, and tell you what
+splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken
+a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you
+won't even come and look at the house!"
+
+"But I don't want to see it," the mother retorted; obstinately.
+
+"Well, then, you needn't!" said Alfred, rising. "Nobody will ask you
+again." "Oh yes they will," urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one
+to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to
+mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her
+earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney
+habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then
+politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of
+gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days
+of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed
+distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone
+accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper.
+That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected
+everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own
+will of everybody--and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the
+fact that he was a Thorpe.
+
+After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best of
+Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively peaceful times
+in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a
+recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and
+her father--a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a
+pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as
+an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of
+unsubstantial memories--Julia and this father had stood upon one side
+of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable
+persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
+
+Alfred and his mother were Thorpes--that is to say, people who
+necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none
+of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their
+surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath,
+however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a
+potential existence--and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that
+no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than
+these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was
+concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe
+temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument,
+immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried
+the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her
+soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent
+whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.
+
+"Oh yes they will," she repeated, and warned her brother into the
+background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. "We are your
+children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure
+that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be
+absurd to let anything come between you and us."
+
+"How could I help letting it come?" demanded the mother, listlessly
+argumentative. "You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was
+nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and
+live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what
+I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into
+his own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your
+education and your ideas--and what more do you want? Why should you come
+bothering me?"
+
+"How unjust you are, mamma!" cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her
+bright glance.
+
+The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening
+herself, looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually
+grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the
+fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed
+restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse
+in her voice as she spoke:
+
+"If you ever have children of your own," she said, "and you slave your
+life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your
+betters, and they act accordingly--then you'll understand. But you don't
+understand now--and there's no good our talking any more about it. Come
+in whenever it's convenient--and you feel like it. I must go back to my
+books now."
+
+She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter.
+Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some
+murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss
+upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
+
+Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward
+beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless,
+ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the
+glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with
+increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner.
+At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet,
+and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.
+
+"Bring everything in!" she called to the boy, and helped out his
+apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.
+
+Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets
+from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from
+without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the
+oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.
+
+"I think you may go home now," she said to him, with the laconic
+abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. "You have a home, haven't
+you?"
+
+Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made
+about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job,
+he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion
+he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.
+
+"Got a mother?" she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
+
+"And do you think yourself better than she is?"
+
+The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious
+perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he
+grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the
+fell acuteness of the Dials. "I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't," he answered,
+in swift, rasping accents. "She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a
+fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave--" "Go home!" she bade him,
+peremptorily--and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the
+shop.
+
+Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book--the wretched
+day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history--but loitered
+about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the
+position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others.
+Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked
+street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters
+down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much
+more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters--for what
+reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were
+displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane
+to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal
+breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the
+door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall
+forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent
+to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise,
+she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway,
+preparatory to entering the shop.
+
+It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing
+face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There
+was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm
+round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder,
+she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
+
+Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. "Do
+mind what you're about!" she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
+
+"Shut up the place!" he answered, with lordly geniality. "I've walked
+all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion--I couldn't
+have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a
+talk. God! What things I've got to tell you!"
+
+"There isn't any fire down here," she said, apologetically, as they
+edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. "The old
+fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I
+have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find
+it too cold--do you?--with your coat on? Or would you rather come
+upstairs?"
+
+"Never mind the cold," he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before
+the desk. "I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've
+done today?"
+
+Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did
+now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light.
+His strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace.
+It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at
+her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour,
+she discerned a new authority.
+
+The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the
+countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy
+expression which had been their complement. He was all vigour,
+readiness, confidence, now. She deemed him almost handsome, this
+curious, changeable brother of hers, as he beat with his fist in a
+measured way upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened his
+commanding gaze upon her.
+
+"We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day," he went on. "This
+is the twenty-eighth of February. A fortnight ago today was the first
+settlement. I wasn't here, but Semple was--and the working of it is all
+in his hands. He kept as still as a mouse that first day. They had to
+deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make
+any fuss. The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were
+caught in a trap. We didn't even put the price up to par. They had to
+come to Semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable
+just at the moment, and what would he carry them over at? That means,
+to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. He was as smooth
+as sweet-oil with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without
+any charge at all. But today it was a little different. The price was up
+ten shillings above par. That is to say, Semple arranged with a jobber,
+on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound
+shares. That offer fixed the making-up price. So then, when they were
+still without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had
+to pay ten shillings' difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares,
+plus the difference between par and the prices they'd sold at. That
+makes within a few hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's
+haul. D'ye see?"
+
+She nodded at him, expressively. Through previous talks she had really
+obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than
+she would have cared to confess.
+
+"Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets," he proceeded
+with a steady glow in his eyes. "A fortnight hence, that is March 14th,
+we ring the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's
+office and settle a second time. Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber
+makes the price for Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have
+to pay us in differences. It is for us to say what that price shall be.
+We'll decide on that when the time comes. We most probably will just put
+it up another ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds.
+It's best in the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small rises like
+that, in order not to frighten anybody. So Semple says, at any rate."
+
+"But why not frighten them?" Louisa asked. "I thought you wanted to
+frighten them. You were full of that idea a while ago."
+
+He smiled genially. "I've learned some new wrinkles since then. We'll
+frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. But at the
+start we just go easy. If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there
+would be a dead scare among the jobbers. They'd be afraid to sell or
+name a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares in hand. And
+there are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. Presently, of
+course, we shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some
+actual dealings. Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to
+the general public will come into the market too. But of course you see
+that all such shares will simply go through one operation before they
+come back to us. Some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will
+snap them up and bring them straight to Semple, to get free from the
+fortnightly tax we are levying on them. In that way we shall eventually
+let out say half of these fourteen 'shorts,' or perhaps more than half."
+
+"What do you want to do that for?" The sister's grey eyes had caught a
+metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. "Why let anybody out?
+Why can't you go on taking their money for ever?"
+
+Thorpe nodded complacently. "Yes--that's what I asked too. It seemed to
+me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them
+there. But when you come to reflect--you can't get more out of a man
+than there is in him. If you press him too hard, he can always go
+bankrupt--and then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose
+everything that you counted on making out of him. So, after a certain
+point, each one of the fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt
+with on a different footing. We shall have to watch them all, and study
+their resources, as tipsters watch horses in the paddock.
+
+"You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds
+better than others could lose ten thousand. All that we have to know. We
+can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose
+his place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. Well,
+our business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start
+with. Then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another,
+till we see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. Then we'll let
+him out. See?"
+
+"It's cruel, isn't it?" she commented, calmly meditative, after a little
+pause.
+
+"Everything in the City is cruel," he assured her with a light tone.
+"All speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I
+estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over
+to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand
+pounds--maybe eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever
+earned a single sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of
+it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on
+almost indefinitely. There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been
+through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who
+had done some honest work for it parted company with it. Well--money
+like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long
+as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still
+comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain: they don't
+cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept
+it--and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings
+to recoup themselves on. That's the way the City goes."
+
+Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness.
+As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on
+the desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them
+in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky
+hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
+
+"That's the kind of hand," he began again, thoughtfully, "that breaks
+the Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used
+to watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining
+them. They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers
+are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's
+feelers. But there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most
+of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move.
+It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull,
+and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes
+them by the throat"--he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the
+thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful
+muscular tension--"when THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel
+that the grip means business--my God! what good are they?"
+
+He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with
+a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled
+something to her mind.
+
+"There was a man in here asking about you today," she remarked, in a
+casual fashion. "Said he was an old friend of yours."
+
+"Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now," he observed with beaming
+indifference. "I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and
+dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter
+for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I
+couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will
+write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze
+really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in,
+they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the
+social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something
+tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth,
+d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with
+nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square--that'll
+be good enough for me. By the way--you haven't been out to see us yet.
+We're all settled now. You must come at once--why not with me, now?"
+
+Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among
+some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to
+lift the lid and search about for something inside.
+
+"He left a card for you," she said, as she groped among the desk's
+contents. "I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it."
+
+"Oh, damn him, and his card too," Thorpe protested easily. "I don't want
+to see either of them."
+
+"He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He
+seemed to act as if you'd want to see him--but I didn't know. I didn't
+tell him your address."
+
+Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest,
+but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention.
+He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked
+sharply up at his sister.
+
+"What was his name?" he asked with abruptness.
+
+"I don't in the least remember," she made answer, holding the desk-top
+up, but temporarily suspending her search. "He was a little man,
+five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair--a kind of
+Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he
+remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got
+back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know
+what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether
+you were in England or not!"
+
+Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of
+green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head.
+"You must find that card!" he told her now, with a vague severity in
+his voice. "I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's
+written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was
+Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where
+she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or
+corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've
+got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under
+their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!"
+
+"Oh, I have a good few other things to do," she reminded him, as she
+fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. "I can put my hand on
+any one of four thousand books in stock," she mildly boasted over her
+shoulder, "and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell
+if a single book is missing--and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever
+knew to do that."
+
+"Oh of course, you're an exception," he admitted, under a sense of
+justice. "But I wish you'd find the card."
+
+"I know where it is," she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the
+desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she
+returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. "I'd stuck
+it in the little mirror over the washstand," she explained.
+
+He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it
+under the gas-light. "Where is Montague Street?" he asked, with rough
+directness.
+
+"In Bloomsbury--alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street--I
+don't know how many others there may be."
+
+Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat.
+"Yes--Bloomsbury," he said hurriedly. "That would be his form. And you
+say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts--nothing about the
+Company, eh?" He looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence
+of this stranger had excited him a good deal.
+
+"No," she assured him, reflectively; "no, I'm sure he didn't. From what
+he said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere
+else, for that matter, I should say."
+
+Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look.
+"No--he's a shade off in the upper story," he told her in a confidential
+tone. "Still, it's important that I should see him,"--and with only a
+hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
+
+By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the
+pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella
+for a cab.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+"We've got a spare room here, haven't we?" Thorpe asked his niece, when
+she came out to greet him in the hall of their new home in Ovington
+Square. He spoke with palpable eagerness before even unbuttoning his
+damp great-coat, or putting off his hat. "I mean it's all in working
+order ready for use?"
+
+"Why yes, uncle," Julia answered, after a moment's thought. "Is someone
+coming?"
+
+"I think so," he replied, with a grunt of relief. He seemed increasingly
+pleased with the project he had in mind, as she helped him off with his
+things. The smile he gave her, when she playfully took his arm to lead
+him into the adjoining library, was clearly but a part of the satisfied
+grin with which he was considering some development in his own affairs.
+
+He got into his slippers and into the easy-chair before the bright fire
+and lit a cigar with a contented air.
+
+"Well, my little girl?" he said, with genial inconsequence, and smiled
+again at her, where she stood beside the mantel.
+
+"It will be such a lark to play the hostess to a stranger!" she
+exclaimed. "When is he coming?--I suppose it is a 'he,'" she added, less
+buoyantly.
+
+"Oh--that fellow," Thorpe said, as if he had been thinking of something
+else. "Well--I can't tell just when he will turn up. I only learned he
+was in town--or in England--a couple of hours ago. I haven't seen him
+yet at all. I drove round to his lodgings, near the British Museum,
+but he wasn't there. He only comes there to sleep, but they told me he
+turned in early--by nine o'clock or so. Then I went round to a hotel and
+wrote a note for him, and took it back to his lodgings, and left it for
+him. I told him to pack up his things as soon as he got it, and drive
+here, and make this his home--for the time being at least."
+
+"Then it's some old friend of yours?" said the girl. "I know I shall
+like him."
+
+Thorpe laughed somewhat uneasily. "Well--yes--he's a kind of a friend of
+mine," he said, with a note of hesitation in his voice. "I don't know,
+though, that you'll think much of him. He aint what you'd call a ladies'
+man."
+
+He laughed again at some thought the words conjured up. "He's a curious,
+simple old party, who'd just like a comfortable corner somewhere by
+himself, and wouldn't expect to be talked to or entertained at all.
+If he does come, he'll keep to himself pretty well. He wouldn't be
+any company for you. I mean,--for you or Alfred either. I think he's
+a Canadian or West Indian,--British subject, at all events,--but he's
+lived all his life in the West, and he wouldn't know what to do in
+a drawing-room, or that sort of thing. You'd better just not pay any
+attention to him. Pass the time of day, of course, but that's all."
+
+Julia's alert, small-featured face expressed some vague disappointment
+at what she heard, but her words were cheerful enough. "Oh of
+course--whatever he likes best," she said. "I will tell Potter to make
+everything ready. I suppose there's no chance of his being here in time
+for dinner?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head, and then lifted his brows over some new
+perplexity. "I guess he'd want to eat his meals out, anyway," he said,
+after some thought. "I don't seem to remember much about him in
+that respect--of course, everything was so different in camp out in
+Mexico--but I daresay he wouldn't be much of an ornament at the table.
+However, that'll be all right. He's as easy to manage as a rabbit. If I
+told him to eat on the roof, he'd do it without a murmur. You see it's
+this way, Julia: he's a scientific man--a kind of geologist, and mining
+expert and rubber expert--and chemical expert and all sort of things. I
+suppose he must have gone through college--very likely he'll turn out to
+have better manners than I was giving him credit for. I've only seen him
+in the rough, so to speak. We weren't at all intimate then,--but we had
+dealings together, and there are certain important reasons why I should
+keep close in touch with him while he's here in London. But I'll try and
+do that without letting you be bothered." "What an idea!" cried Julia.
+"As if that wasn't what we had the house for--to see the people you want
+to see."
+
+Her uncle smiled rather ruefully, and looked in a rather dubious way at
+his cigar. "Between you and me and the lamp-post, Jule," he said, with a
+slow, whimsical drawl, "there isn't a fellow in the world that I wanted
+to see less than I did him. But since he's here--why, we've got to make
+the best of it."
+
+After dinner, Thorpe suffered the youngsters to go up to the
+drawing-room in the tacit understanding that he should probably not see
+them again that night. He betook himself then once more to the library,
+as it was called--the little, cozy, dark-panelled room off the hall,
+where the owner of the house had left two locked bookcases, and where
+Thorpe himself had installed a writing-desk and a diminutive safe for
+his papers. The chief purpose of the small apartment, however, was
+indicated by the two big, round, low-seated easy-chairs before the
+hearth, and by the cigar boxes and spirit-stand and tumblers visible
+behind the glass of the cabinet against the wall. Thorpe himself
+called the room his "snuggery," and spent many hours there in slippered
+comfort, smoking and gazing contentedly into the fire. Sometimes Julia
+read to him, as he sat thus at his ease, but then he almost invariably
+went to sleep.
+
+Now, when he had poured out some whiskey and water and lit a cigar, the
+lounging chairs somehow did not attract him. He moved about aimlessly in
+the circumscribed space, his hands in his pockets, his burly shoulders
+rounded, his face dulled and heavy as with a depression of doubt. The
+sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to his ears. Often he
+ascended to the drawing-room to hear Julia play--and more often still,
+with all the doors open, he enjoyed the mellowed murmur of her music
+here at his ease in the big chair. But tonight he had no joy in the
+noise. More than once, as he slouched restlessly round the room, the
+notion of asking her to stop suggested itself, but he forbore to put it
+into action. Once he busied himself for a time in kneeling before his
+safe, and scrutinizing in detail the papers in one of the bundles it
+contained.
+
+At last--it was after ten o'clock, and the music above had ceased--the
+welcome sounds of cab-wheels without, and then of the door-bell, came to
+dispel his fidgeting suspense. On the instant he straightened himself,
+and his face rearranged its expression. He fastened upon the door of the
+room the controlled, calm glance of one who is easily confident about
+what is to happen.
+
+"Quaker-looking" was not an inapt phrase for the person whom the maid
+ushered into the room through this door. He was a small, thin, elderly
+man, bowed of figure and shuffling in gait. His coat and large,
+low-crowned hat, though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an
+indefinable sense of some theological standard, or pretence to such
+a standard. His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet
+meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by
+the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old
+village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid
+books. Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not
+altogether unclerical in their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed,
+as he stood blinking in the electric light of the strange, warm
+apartment--a helpless, worn old creature, inured through long years to
+bleak adverse winds, hoping now for nothing better in this world than
+present shelter.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Thorpe," he said, after a moment, with nervous
+formality. "This is unexpectedly kind of you, sir."
+
+"Why--not at all!" said Thorpe, shaking him cordially by the hand. "What
+have we got houses for, but to put up our old friends? And how are you,
+anyway? You've brought your belongings, have you? That's right!" He
+glanced into the hall, to make sure that they were being taken upstairs,
+and then closed the door. "I suppose you've dined. Take off your hat and
+coat! Make yourself at home. That's it--take the big chair, there--so!
+And now let's have a look at you. Well, Tavender, my man, you haven't
+grown any younger. But I suppose none of us do. And what'll you have to
+drink? I take plain water in mine, but there's soda if you prefer it.
+And which shall it be--Irish or Scotch?"
+
+Mr. Tavender's countenance revealed the extremity of his surprise and
+confusion at the warmth of this welcome. It apparently awed him as well,
+for though he shrank into a corner of the huge chair, he painstakingly
+abstained from resting his head against its back. Uncovered, this head
+gained a certain dignity of effect from the fashion in which the
+thin, iron-grey hair, parted in the middle, fell away from the full,
+intellectual temples, and curled in meek locks upon his collar. A vague
+resemblance to the type of Wesley--or was it Froebel?--might have hinted
+itself to the observer's mind.
+
+Thorpe's thoughts, however, were not upon types. "Well"--he said, from
+the opposite chair, in his roundest, heartiest voice, when the other
+had with diffidence suffered himself to be served, and had deferentially
+lighted on one side the big cigar pressed upon him--"Well--and how's the
+world been using you?"
+
+"Not very handsomely, Mr. Thorpe," the other responded, in a hushed,
+constrained tone.
+
+"Oh, chuck the Misters!" Thorpe bade him. "Aren't we old pals, man?
+You're plain Tavender, and I'm plain Thorpe."
+
+"You're very kind," murmured Tavender, still abashed. For some
+minutes he continued to reply dolefully, and with a kind of shamefaced
+reluctance, to the questions piled upon him. He was in evil luck:
+nothing had gone well with him; it had been with the greatest difficulty
+that he had scraped together enough to get back to London on the chance
+of obtaining some expert commission; practically he possessed nothing
+in the world beyond the clothes on his back, and the contents of two old
+carpet-bags--these admissions, by degrees, were wormed from him.
+
+"But have you parted with the concession, then, that you bought from
+me?" Thorpe suddenly asked him. "Help yourself to some more whiskey!"
+
+Tavender sighed as he tipped the decanter. "It isn't any good," he
+answered, sadly. "The Government repudiates it--that is, the Central
+Government at Mexico. Of course, I never blamed you. I bought it with my
+eyes open, and you sold it in perfect good faith. I never doubted that
+at all. But it's not worth the paper it's written on--that's certain.
+It's that that busted me--that, and some other things."
+
+"Well--well!" said Thorpe, blankly. His astonishment was obviously
+genuine, and for a little it kept him silent, while he pondered the
+novel aspects of the situation thus disclosed. Then his eyes brightened,
+as a new path outlined itself.
+
+"I suppose you've got the papers?--the concession and my transfer to you
+and all that?" he asked, casually.
+
+"Oh, yes," replied Tavender. He added, with a gleam of returning
+self-command--"That's all I have got."
+
+"Let's see--what was it you paid me?--Three thousand eight hundred
+pounds, wasn't it?"
+
+Tavender made a calculation in mental arithmetic. "Yes, something like
+that. Just under nineteen thousand dollars," he said.
+
+"Well," remarked Thorpe, with slow emphasis, "I won't allow you to
+suffer that way by me. I'll buy it back from you at the same price you
+paid for it."
+
+Tavender, beginning to tremble, jerked himself upright in his chair,
+and stared through his spectacles at his astounding host. "You say"--he
+gasped--"you say you'll buy it back!"
+
+"Certainly," said Thorpe. "That's what I said."
+
+"I--I never heard of such a thing!" the other faltered with increasing
+agitation. "No--you can't mean it. It isn't common sense!"
+
+"It's common decency," replied the big man, in his most commanding
+manner. "It's life and death to you--and it doesn't matter a flea-bite
+to me. So, since you came to grief through me, why shouldn't I do the
+fair thing, and put you back on your legs again?"
+
+Tavender, staring now at those shrunken legs of his, breathed heavily.
+The thing overwhelmed him. Once or twice he lifted his head and essayed
+to speak, but no speech came to his thin lips. He moistened them
+eventually with a long deliberate pull at his glass.
+
+"This much ought to be understood, however," Thorpe resumed, reflecting
+upon his words as he went along. "If I'm to buy back a dead horse, like
+that, it's only reasonable that there should be conditions. I suppose
+you've seen by this time that even if this concession of ours was
+recognized by the Government there wouldn't be any money in it to speak
+of. I didn't realize that two years ago, any more than you did, but it's
+plain enough now. The trade has proved it. A property of rubber trees
+has no real value--so long as there's a wilderness of rubber trees all
+round that's everybody's property. How can a man pay even the interest
+on his purchase money, supposing he's bought a rubber plantation, when
+he has to compete with people who've paid no purchase money at all, but
+just get out as much as they like from the free forest? You must know
+that that is so."
+
+Tavender nodded eloquently. "Oh yes, I know that is so. You can prove it
+by me."
+
+Thorpe grinned a little. "As it happens, that aint what I need to have
+you prove," he said, dryly. "Now WE know that a rubber property is no
+good--but London doesn't know it. Everybody here thinks that it's a
+great business to own rubber trees. Why, man alive, do you know"--the
+audacity of the example it had occurred to him to cite brought a
+gratified twinkle to his eyes as he went on--"do you know that a man
+here last year actually sold a rubber plantation for four hundred
+thousand pounds--two millions of dollars! Not in cash, of course, but
+in shares that he could do something with--and before he's done with
+it, I'm told, he's going to make twice that amount of money out of it.
+That'll show you what London is like."
+
+"Yes--I suppose they do those things," remarked Tavender, vaguely.
+
+"Well--my point is that perhaps I can do something or other with this
+concession of yours here. I may even be able to get my money back on it.
+At any rate I'll take my chances on it--so that at least you shan't lose
+anything by it. Of course, if you'd rather try and put it on the market
+yourself, why go ahead!" There was a wistful pathos in the way Tavender
+shook his head. "Big money doesn't mean anything to me any more," he
+said, wearily. "I'm too old and I'm too tired. Why--four--five--yes,
+half a dozen times I've had enough money to last me comfortably all my
+life--and every time I've used it as bait to catch bigger money with,
+and lost it all. I don't do that any more! I've got something the matter
+with me internally that takes the nerve all out of me. The doctors don't
+agree about it, but whatever its name is I've got it for keeps. Probably
+I shan't live very long"--Thorpe recalled that the old man had always
+taken a gloomy view of his health after the third glass--"and if you
+want to pay me the nineteen thousand dollars, or whatever it is, why I
+shall say 'God bless you,' and be more than contented."
+
+"Oh, there's something more to it than that," observed Thorpe, with an
+added element of business-like briskness in his tone. "If I let you out
+in this way--something, of course, you could never have dreamed would
+happen--you must do some things for me. I should want you, for example,
+to go back to Mexico at once. Of course, I'd pay your expenses out. Or
+say, I'd give you a round four thousand pounds to cover that and some
+other things too. You wouldn't object to that, would you?"
+
+The man who, two hours before, had confronted existence with the change
+of his last five-pound note in his pocket, did not hesitate now. "Oh
+no, that would be all right," with reviving animation, he declared. He
+helped himself again from the cut-glass decanter. "What would you want
+me to do there?"
+
+"Oh, a report on the concession for a starter," Thorpe answered,
+with careful indifference. "I suppose they still know your name as an
+authority. I could make that all right anyway. But one thing I ought
+to speak of--it might be rather important--I wouldn't like to have you
+mention to anybody that the concession has at any time been yours. That
+might tend to weaken the value of your report, don't you see? Let it be
+supposed that the concession has been my property from the start. You
+catch my point, don't you? There never was any such thing as a transfer
+of it to you. It's always been mine!"
+
+Tavender gave his benefactor a purblind sort of wink. "Always belonged
+to you? Why of course it did," he said cheerfully.
+
+The other breathed a cautious prolonged sigh of relief "You'd better
+light a fresh one, hadn't you?" he asked, observing with a kind of
+contemptuous tolerance the old man's efforts to ignite a cigar which had
+more than once unrolled like a carpenter's shaving in his unaccustomed
+fingers, and was now shapelessly defiant of both draught and suction.
+Tavender laughed to himself silently as he took a new cigar, and
+puffed at the match held by his companion. The air of innocence and
+long-suffering meekness was falling rapidly away from him. He put his
+shabby boots out confidently to the fender and made gestures with his
+glass as he talked.
+
+"My mistake," he declared, in insistent tones, "was in not turning down
+science thirty years ago and going in bodily for business. Then I should
+have made my pile as you seem to have done. But I tried to do something
+of both. Half the year I was assaying crushings, or running a level, or
+analyzing sugars, for a salary, and the other half I was trying to do a
+gamble with that salary on the strength of what I'd learned. You can't
+ring the bell that way. You've got to be either a pig or a pup. You
+can't do both. Now, for instance, if I'd come to London when you did,
+and brought my money with me instead of buying your concession with
+it----"
+
+"Why, what good do you suppose you would have done?" Thorpe interrupted
+him with good-natured brusqueness. "You'd have had it taken from you
+in a fortnight! Why, man, do you know what London is? You'd have had no
+more chance here than a naked nigger in a swamp-full of alligators."
+
+"You seem to have hit it off," the other objected. "This is as fine a
+house as I was ever in."
+
+"With me it's different," Thorpe replied, carelessly. "I have the talent
+for money-making. I'm a man in armour. The 'gators can't bite me, nor
+yet the rattle-snakes."
+
+"Yes--men are made up differently," Tavender assented, with
+philosophical gravity. Then he lurched gently in the over-large chair,
+and fixed an intent gaze upon his host. "What did you make your money
+in?" he demanded, not with entire distinctness of enunciation. "It
+wasn't rubber, was it?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head. "There's no money in rubber. I'm entirely in
+finance--on the Stock Exchange--dealing in differences," he replied,
+with a serious face.
+
+The explanation seemed wholly acceptable to Tavender. He mused upon it
+placidly for a time, with his reverend head pillowed askew against the
+corner of the chair. Then he let his cigar drop, and closed his eyes.
+
+The master of the house bent forward, and noiselessly helped himself to
+another glass of whiskey and water. Then, sinking back again, he eyed
+his odd guest meditatively as he sipped the drink. He said to himself
+that in all the miraculous run of luck which the year had brought him,
+this was the most extraordinary manifestation of the lot. It had been
+so easy to ignore the existence of this tiresome and fatuous old man, so
+long as he was in remote Mexico, that he had practically forgotten him.
+But he should not soon forget the frightened shock with which he had
+learned of his presence in London, that afternoon. For a minute or two,
+there in his sister's book-shop, it had seemed as if he were falling
+through the air--as if the substantial earth had crumbled away from
+under him. But then his nerve had returned to him, his resourceful brain
+had reasserted itself. With ready shrewdness he had gone out, and met
+the emergency, and made it the servant of his own purposes.
+
+He could be glad now, unreservedly glad, that Tavender had come to
+London, that things had turned out as they had. In truth, he stood now
+for the first time on solid ground. When he thought of it, now, the risk
+he had been running all these months gave him a little sinking of the
+heart. Upon reflection, the performance of having sold the same property
+first to Tavender in Mexico and then to the Rubber Consols Company in
+London might be subject to injurious comment, or worse. The fact that it
+was not a real property to begin with had no place in his thoughts.
+It was a concession--and concessions were immemorially worth what they
+would fetch. But the other thing might have been so awkward--and now it
+was all right!
+
+For an hour and more, till the fire burnt itself out and the guest's
+snoring became too active a nuisance, Thorpe sat lost in this
+congratulatory reverie. Then he rose, and sharply shaking Tavender into
+a semblance of consciousness, led him upstairs and put him to bed.
+
+Three days later he personally saw Tavender off at Waterloo station by
+the steamer-train, en route for Southampton and New York. The old man
+was in childlike good spirits, looking more ecclesiastical than ever
+in the new clothes he had been enabled to buy. He visibly purred with
+content whenever his dim eyes caught sight of the new valise and steamer
+trunk, which belonged to him, on the busy platform.
+
+"You've been very kind to me, Thorpe," he said more than once, as they
+stood together beside the open door of the compartment. "I was never
+so hospitably treated before in my life. Your attention to me has been
+wonderful. I call you a true friend."
+
+"Oh, that's all right! Glad to do it," replied the other, lightly. In
+truth he had not let Tavender stray once out of his sight during those
+three days. He had dragged him tirelessly about London, showing him the
+sights from South Kensington Museum to the Tower, shopping with him,
+resting in old taverns with him, breakfasting, lunching, aud dining
+with him--in the indefatigable resolution that he should strike up
+no dangerous gossiping acquaintance with strangers. The task had been
+tiresome in the extreme--but it had been very well worth while.
+
+"One thing I'm rather sorry about," Tavender remarked, in apologetic
+parenthesis--"I ought to have gone down and seen that brother-in-law of
+mine in Kent. He's been very good to me, and I'm not treating him very
+well. I wrote to tell him I was coming--but since then I haven't had
+a minute to myself. However, I can write to him and explain how it
+happened. And probably I'll be over again sometime."
+
+"Why, of course," said Thorpe, absently. The allusion to the
+brother-in-law in Kent had escaped his notice, so intent was he upon a
+new congeries of projects taking vague shape in his mind.
+
+"Think of yourself as my man out there," he said now, slowly, following
+the clue of his thoughts. "There may be big things to do. Write to me as
+often as you can. Tell me everything that's going on. Money will be no
+object to me--you can have as much as you like--if things turn up out
+there that are worth taking up. But mind you say nothing about me--or
+any connection you've ever had with me. You'll get a letter from the
+Secretary of a Company and the Chairman asking for a report on a certain
+property, and naming a fee. You simply make a good report--on its
+merits. You say nothing about anything else--about me, or the history of
+the concession, or its validity, or anything. I mustn't be alluded to in
+any way. You quite understand that?"
+
+"Trust me!" said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.
+
+It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched the train draw out
+of the station.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy
+or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it
+serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits
+eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial
+papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the City
+during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the
+moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant
+German pine forests.
+
+To the great mass of City people; this August in question began in a
+normal enough fashion. To one little group of operators, however, and to
+the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose
+interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a
+season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was
+going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a massacre. Even
+to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were principals in this
+fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond
+the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives.
+The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still
+less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The "press"
+seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's
+mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the
+other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing.
+The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in
+itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had
+been bribed to ignore. It was an assassination.
+
+Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement
+that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this
+stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds
+for one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not
+at all. Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough
+to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the
+figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were
+coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the identity
+of these people. Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal
+columns of the afternoon papers about a "Rubber King" of the name of
+Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so
+many "kings" that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the
+popular eye.
+
+City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this
+"Rubber King." He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously
+filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did
+this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.
+There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an
+exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom,
+so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters
+and touts. They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits
+of his Rubber corner could fill it. To know such a man, however, could
+not but be useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin
+Friars on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other
+topics.
+
+As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was
+apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the
+possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed
+at by those who did not turn away in cold silence. Of the fourteen men
+who had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and
+Semple, all the conspicuous ones belonged to the class of "wreckers," a
+class which does not endear itself to Capel Court.
+
+Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men
+of great wealth, but they had systematically amassed these fortunes by
+strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and
+toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they
+had been given a legitimate chance to live. Their system was legal
+enough, in the eyes alike of the law and of the Stock Exchange rules.
+They had an undoubted right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and
+bring it down, and feed to the bone upon it. But the exercise of this
+right did not make them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their
+victims. When word first went round, on the last day of February, that
+a lamb had unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident
+wolves, and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell
+into a "corner," it was received on all sides with a gratified smile.
+
+Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once more tragic and
+more satisfactory. Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others
+were in the cul de sac guarded by this surprising and bloody-minded
+lamb. Most of the names were well-known as those of "wreckers." In this
+category belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, Ascher, and
+Mendel, and if Harding, Carpenter, and Vesey could not be so confidently
+classified, at least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy.
+Two other names mentioned, those of Norfell and Pinney, were practically
+unknown.
+
+There was some surprise, however, at the statement that the old and
+respected and extremely conservative firm of Fromentin Bros. was
+entangled in the thing. Egyptian bonds, minor Levantine loans, discounts
+in the Arabian and Persian trades--these had been specialties of the
+Fromentins for many years. Who could have expected to find them caught
+among the "shorts" in Mexican rubber? It was Mexico, wasn't it, that
+these Rubber Consols purported to be connected with?
+
+Thorpe's Company, upon its commercial merits, had not been considered
+at all by the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, at the time of its
+flotation. Men vaguely and with difficulty recalled the fact of its
+prospectus, when the "corner" in its shares was first talked about.
+They looked it up in their lists and files, later on, but its terms said
+nothing to them. Nobody discussed the value of the assets owned by this
+Company, or the probability of its paying a dividend--even when the
+price bid for its shares was making the most sensational upward leaps.
+How Thorpe stood with his shareholders, or whether he had any genuine
+shareholders behind him at all, was seen by the keen eyes of Capel Court
+to be beside the question. Very likely it was a queer affair, if the
+truth were known--but at least it had substance enough in it to be
+giving the "wreckers" a lively time.
+
+By the end of July it was understood that the fight was better worth
+watching than anything that had been seen in a long time. The only
+trouble was that there was so little to see. The papers said nothing.
+The sufferers were the reverse of garrulous. The little red Scotchman,
+Semple, who was the visible avenging sword of the "corner," was more
+imperturbably silent than anybody else. His fellow-members in the
+"House" watched him now, however, with a new respect. They discovered
+unsuspected elements of power in his thin, tight mouth, in the direct,
+cold glances of his brown-grey eyes, in the very way he carried his head
+and wore his hat. He came to be pointed out, and nodded about behind his
+back, more than anyone else in the "House," and important men sought his
+acquaintance, with an awkward show of civility, who were notorious for
+their rude exclusiveness.
+
+It might be, of course, that his "corner" would break under him at any
+fortnightly settlement, but already he had carried it much further than
+such things often went, and the planning of the coup had been beyond
+doubt Napoleonic.
+
+Had this small sandy Scot planned it, or was he merely the weapon in
+Thorpe's hand? Both views had their supporters on the Exchange, but
+after the wrench of August 1st, when with an abrupt eighty-shilling
+rise the price of Rubber Consols stood at 15 pounds, and it was to
+be computed that Semple had received on that single day nearly 75,000
+pounds in differences and "backwardation," a story was set afloat which
+gave Thorpe the undivided credit of the invention. It was related as
+coming from his own lips that he had schemed it all out to be revenged
+upon a group of Jewish operators, against whom he had a grievance. In
+confirmation of this tale, it was pointed out that, of the seven men
+still held pinned in the fatal "corner," six were Jews--and this did,
+upon first glance, look significant. But then it was objected, upon
+reflection, that Blaustein and Ascher had both been permitted to make
+their escape, and this hardly justified the theory of an implacable
+anti-Semitic vendetta. The objection seemed reasonable, but it was met
+in turn by the point that Blaustein and Ascher had been bled white,
+as Bismarck's phrase went, before they were released, whereas the five
+Christians had been liberated with relatively moderate fines. Upon the
+whole, a certain odour of the Judenhetze clung thereafter about the
+"corner" in Rubber Consols.
+
+On an afternoon of the following week, Mr. Stormont Thorpe was alone in
+the Board Room of the offices in Austin Friars. He had risen from the
+great roller-topped desk over between the windows, and walked now with
+a lethargic, tired step to and fro before the empty fireplace, yawning
+more than once, and stretching out his arms in the supreme gesture of
+fatigue. After a dozen listless rounds, something occurred to him. He
+moved with a certain directness of purpose to the cabinet in the corner,
+unlocked it, and poured out for himself a tumbler of brandy and soda.
+He drank it without a pause, then turned again, and began pacing up and
+down as before, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent in thought.
+
+The intervening six months had effected visible changes in the outer
+man. One noted most readily that the face had grown fuller in its
+lower parts, and was far less browned than formerly. The large, heavy
+countenance, with its square jaws masked now under increased flesh, its
+beginnings of a double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect of pallor,
+was no longer lacking in individual distinction. It was palpably the
+visage of a dictator. The moustache had been cut down to military
+brevity, and the line of mouth below it was eloquent of rough power. The
+steady grey eyes, seemingly smaller yet more conspicuous than before,
+revealed in their glance new elements of secretiveness, of strategy
+supported by abundant and confident personal force.
+
+The man himself seemed scarcely to have grown stouter. He held himself
+more compactly, as it were; seemed more the master of all his physical
+expressions. He was dressed like a magnate who was also a person of
+taste. There was a flower in the lapel of his well-shaped frock-coat,
+and the rustle of his starched and spotless white waistcoat murmured
+pleasantly of refined toilets.
+
+"The Marquis of Chaldon--and a gentleman, with him."
+
+The announcement, from a clerk who had noiselessly opened the door,
+imposed itself with decorum upon Thorpe's reverie.
+
+"Who is the gentleman with him?" Thorpe began austerely to ask, after
+an instant's hesitation. But this briefest of delays had brought the
+callers into plain view behind the clerk, and with a slight gesture the
+master assented to their entrance.
+
+This large apartment was no longer called the Board Room by anybody. By
+tacit processes, it had become Mr. Thorpe's room. Not even the titular
+Chairman of the Company, the renowned and eminent Lord Chaldon,
+ex-Ambassador and ex-Viceroy, entered this chamber now with any
+assumption of proprietorship in it. No hint of a recollection that there
+were such things as the Company and the Board, or that he was nominally
+the head of both, expressed itself in his Lordship's demeanour as he
+advanced, his hand a little extended.
+
+The noble Chairman was white of beard and hair, and extremely courteous
+of manner--a small, carefully-clad, gracious old gentleman, whose
+mild pink countenance had, with years of anxiety about ways and
+means, disposed itself in lines which produced a chronic expression of
+solicitude. A nervous affection of the eyelids lent to this look, at
+intervals, a beseeching quality which embarrassed the beholder. All
+men had liked him, and spoken well of him throughout his long and
+hard-worked career. Thorpe was very fond of him indeed, and put a
+respectful cordiality into his grasp of the proffered hand. Then he
+looked, with a certain thinly-veiled bluntness of enquiry, past the
+Marquis to his companion.
+
+"You were very kind to give me the appointment," said Lord Chaldon, with
+a little purring gloss of affability upon the earnestness of his tone.
+"I wish very much to introduce to you my friend, my old friend I may
+say, Monsieur Alexandre Fromentin. We slept together under the same
+tent, in the Persian country beyond Bagdad--oh, it must have been quite
+forty years ago. We were youngsters looking to win our first spurs
+then--I in my line, he in his. And often since we have renewed that old
+friendship--at many different places--India, and Constantinople, and
+Egypt. I wish heartily to commend him to your--your kindness."
+
+Thorpe had perfunctorily shaken hands with the stranger--a tall,
+slender, sharp-faced, clean-shaven, narrow-shouldered man, who by these
+accounts of his years ought not to have such excessively black hair. He
+bowed in a foreign fashion, and uttered some words which Thorpe, though
+he recognized them as English in intent, failed to follow. The voice
+was that of an elderly man, and at a second glance there were plenty
+of proofs that he might have been older than the Marquis, out there in
+Persia, forty years ago. But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their
+hair, and he offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the table toward
+his desk, with a certain reserve of manner. Seating himself in the
+revolving chair at the desk itself, he put the tips of his fingers
+together, and looked this gentleman with the Continental name and
+experience in the face.
+
+"Is there something you wish me to do?" he asked, passively facilitating
+the opening of conversation.
+
+"Ah, my God! 'Something'!"--repeated the other, with a fluttering
+gesture of his hands over his thin, pointed knees--"everything, Mr.
+Thorpe!"
+
+"That's a tolerably large order, isn't it?" Thorpe asked, calmly, moving
+a slow, inscrutable glance from one to the other of his callers.
+
+"I could ask for nothing that would be a greater personal favour--and
+kindness"--Lord Chaldon interposed. His tone bore the stress of
+sincerity.
+
+"That means a great deal to me, as you know, my Lord," replied Thorpe,
+"but I don't in the least understand--what is it that your friend
+wants?"
+
+"Only that I shall not be buried in a bankrupt's grave," the suppliant
+answered, with a kind of embittered eagerness of utterance. "That I
+shall not see disgraced the honoured name that my father and his father
+bequeathed to my care!"
+
+Thorpe's large, composed countenance betrayed a certain perplexity.
+"There must be a mistake," he observed. "I don't even know this name of
+yours. I never heard it before."
+
+The other's mobile face twisted itself in a grimace of incredulity. He
+had a conspicuously wide mouth, and its trick of sidelong extension at
+this moment was very unpleasant. "Ah, Herr Je! He never heard it," he
+ejaculated, turning nervously to the Marquis. "Would to the good God you
+never had!" he told Thorpe, with suppressed excitement.
+
+Lord Chaldon, his own voice shaken a little, interposed with an
+explanation. "My friend is the head--the respected head--of the firm of
+Fromentin Brothers. I think you have--have dealings with them."
+
+Thorpe, after a furtive instant of bewilderment, opened his mouth.
+"Oh! I see," he said. "I know what you mean now. With the French
+pronunciation, I didn't recognize the name. I've always heard it called
+'Fromen'-tin' here in London. Oh, yes, of course--Fromen'tin Brothers."
+
+His lips shut tight again at this. The listeners had caught no helpful
+clue from the tone of his words. They exchanged a glance, and then M.
+Fromentin spoke.
+
+"Mr. Thorpe," he began, slowly, with an obvious effort at
+self-repression. "It is a very simple story. Our house is an old one.
+My father's grandfather organized the finance of the commissariat of
+General Bonaparte in Egypt. He created the small beginnings of the
+carpet and rug importation from Asia Minor. His son, and in turn his
+son, followed him. They became bankers as well as importers. They
+helped very greatly to develop the trade of the Levant. They were not
+avaricious men, or usurers. It is not in our blood. Your Chairman, Lord
+Chaldon, who honours me so highly by calling me his friend--he will
+assure you that we have a good name in the East. Our banks have
+befriended the people, and never oppressed or injured them. For that
+reason--I will say perhaps for that reason--we have never become a very
+rich house. It is possible to name bankers who have made large fortunes
+out of Egypt. It was different with us. Lord Chaldon will tell you
+that of our own free will--my two brothers and I--of our own choice we
+consented to lose a fifth of all our possessions, rather than coin into
+gold by force the tears and blood of the wretched fellaheen."
+
+"Yes--I have never known a more honourable or humane action," put in the
+Marquis, fervently.
+
+"And then my brothers die--Polydor, who lived mostly at Smyrna, and
+whose estate was withdrawn from the business by his widow, and Augustin,
+who lived here in London after 1870, and died--it is now six years ago.
+He left a son, Robert, who is my nephew, and my partner. He is now of
+an age--perhaps thirty years. He was a small child when he came to
+London--he has become more English than the English themselves. His
+activity and industry are very great; he forms plans of such magnitude
+and numbers that they would compel his grandfather to turn in his
+coffin. I am in indifferent health. I live much at Homburg and Marienbad
+and at Cairo. Practically speaking, I have retired from business. There
+remain branches of our house--in several places--but the London house
+has become the centre of all things--and Robert has become the London
+house. This I make plain to your mind, do I, Mr. Thorpe?"
+
+The other, with his chin sunk within the collar of his white waistcoat,
+and scrutinizing the narrator with a steadfast though impassive glance,
+made the faintest possible nod of assent.
+
+"I had great confidence in Robert," the old man went on. His eyes were
+dimming with tears, and his voice quavered uncertainly. "His plans
+seemed wise, even if they risked more than formerly. The conditions of
+business are wholly altered since my youth--and it was best, I thought,
+to make Robert free to act under these conditions, which he understood
+much better than I could pretend to do. Thus it was that when he said it
+was necessary for Fromentin Brothers to belong to the Stock Exchange,
+I did not object. He was active and bold and clever, and he was in the
+thick of the fight. Therefore he should be the judge in all things. And
+that is our ruin. In the time of the South African excitement, he won a
+great deal of money. Then he lost it all and more. Then gambling began,
+and his fortunes went now up, now down, but always, as his books show to
+me now--sinking a little on the average. He grew more adventurous--more
+careless. He put many small counters upon different numbers on the
+table. You know what I mean? And in an accursed moment, because other
+gamblers were doing the same, he sold two thousand of your shares,
+without having them in his hands. Voila! He wishes now to put a bullet
+through his brain. He proposes that as the fitting end of Fromentin
+Freres."
+
+Thorpe, his chin on his breast, continued to regard the melancholy
+figure opposite with a moody eye. It seemed a long minute before he
+broke the tense silence by a sigh of discomfort. "I do not discuss these
+things with anybody," he said then, coldly. "If I had known who you
+were, I don't think you'd have got in."
+
+The Marquis of Chaldon intuitively straightened himself in his chair,
+and turned toward the speaker a glance of distressed surprise.
+
+"Or no--I beg your pardon," Thorpe hastened to add, upon the instant
+hint of this look--"that doesn't convey my meaning. Of course, our
+Chairman brings whom he pleases. His friends--as a matter of course--are
+our friends. What I should have said was that if this had been mentioned
+beforehand to me, I should have explained that it wasn't possible to
+discuss that particular business."
+
+"But--pardon me"--said Lord Chaldon, in a quiet, very gentle, yet
+insistent voice, which seemed now to recall to its listeners the fact
+that sovereigns and chancellors had in their day had attentive ears for
+its tones--"pardon me, but why should it not be possible?"
+
+Thorpe frowned doubtfully, and shifted his position in his chair. "What
+could I say, if it were discussed?" he made vague retort. "I'm merely
+one of the Directors. You are our Chairman, but you see he hasn't found
+it of any use to discuss it with you. There are hard and fast rules
+about these things. They run their natural course. You are not a
+business man, my Lord----"
+
+"Oh, I think I may be called a 'business man,'" interposed the nobleman,
+suavely. "They would tell you so in Calcutta, I think, and in Cairo too.
+When one considers it, I have transacted a great deal of business--on
+the behalf of other people. And if you will permit me--I do not impute
+indirection, of course--but your remark seems to require a footnote. It
+is true that I am Chairman of the Board on which you are a Director--but
+it is not quite the whole truth. I as Chairman know absolutely nothing
+about this matter. As I understand the situation, it is not in your
+capacity as a Director that you know anything about it either. Yet----"
+
+He paused, as if suddenly conscious of some impropriety in this
+domestic frankness before a third party, and Thorpe pounced through his
+well-mannered hesitation with the swiftness of a bird of prey.
+
+"Let me suggest," he said roundly, lifting his head and poising a
+hand to hold attention, while he thought upon what it was he should
+suggest--"this is what I would say. It seems rather irregular, doesn't
+it? to debate the matter in the presence of an outsider. You see it
+yourself. That is partly what I meant. Now I have met Mr. Fromentin," he
+gave the name its English vowels with an obstinate emphasis, "and I have
+heard his statement. You have heard it too. If he wishes to lay more
+facts before us, why, well and good. But then I would suggest that
+he leave the matter in our hands, to discuss and look into between
+ourselves. That seems to you the proper course, doesn't it, Lord
+Chaldon?"
+
+The French banker had been studying with strained acuteness the big
+lymphatic mask of the Director, with sundry sharp glances aside at the
+Chairman. The nervous changes on his alert, meagre old face showed
+how intently he followed every phase of their talk. A certain sardonic
+perception of evil in the air curled on his lip when he saw the Marquis
+accede with a bow and wave of the hand to Thorpe's proposition. Then he
+made his bow in turn, and put the best face possible upon the matter.
+
+"Naturally I consult your convenience--and the proprieties," he said,
+with an effect of proud humility. "There are but a few other facts to
+submit. My nephew has already paid, in differences upon those accursed
+two thousand shares, a sum of nearly 30,000 pounds. I have the figures
+in my pocket--but they are fixed in my head as well. Twenty-eight
+thousand five hundred, those differences already amount to, not to speak
+of interest. At the last settlement, August 1st, the price per share was
+15 pounds. That would make 30,000 pounds more, if we bought now--or a
+total of practically 60,000 pounds. Eh bien! I beg for the privilege of
+being allowed to buy these shares now. It is an unpleasant confession
+to make, but the firm of Fromentin Freres will be made very poor by this
+loss of 60,000 pounds. It was not always so, but it is so now. My nephew
+Robert has brought it into that condition. You see my shame at this
+admission. With all my own means, and with his sister's marriage
+portion, we can make up this sum of 30,000 pounds, and still enable
+the firm to remain in existence. I have gone over the books very
+painstakingly, since I arrived in London. It can be kept afloat, and
+it can be brought back to safe and moderately profitable courses--if
+nothing worse happens. With another six weeks like the last, this
+will not be at all possible. We shall have the cup of dishonour thrust
+between our teeth. That will be the end of everything."
+
+M. Fromentin finished in tremulous, grave tones. After looking with
+blurred eyes for a moment into Thorpe's face, he bowed his head, and
+softly swayed the knees upon which his thin, dark hands maintained their
+clutch. Not even the revelation of hair quite white at the roots, unduly
+widening the track of parting on the top of his dyed head, could rob
+this movement of its mournful dignity.
+
+Thorpe, after a moment's pause, took a pencil and paper from the desk,
+and made a calculation. He bit his lips and frowned at the sight of
+these figures, and set down some others, which seemed to please him no
+more. Then, with a sudden gesture as of impatience, he rose to his feet.
+
+"How much is that sister's marriage portion you spoke of?" he asked,
+rather brusquely.
+
+The French gentleman had also risen. He looked with an air of
+astonishment at his questioner, and then hardened his face. "I apologize
+for mentioning it," he said, with brevity. "One does not speak of family
+affairs."
+
+"I asked you how much it was," pursued Thorpe, in a masterful tone. "A
+man doesn't want to rob a girl of her marriage portion."
+
+"I think I must not answer you," the other replied, hesitatingly. "It
+was the fault of my emotion to introduce the subject. Pray leave the
+young lady out of account."
+
+"Then I've nothing more to say," Thorpe declared, and seated himself
+again with superfluous energy. He scowled for a little at the disorder
+of his desk, and then flung forth an angry explanation. "If you evade
+fair questions like that, how can you expect that I will go out of my
+way to help you?"
+
+"Oh, permit me, Mr. Thorpe"--the Marquis intervened soothingly--"I think
+you misapprehend. My friend, I am sure, wished to evade nothing. He
+had the idea that he was at fault in--in alluding to a purely domestic
+matter as--as a--what shall I say?--as a plea for your consideration."
+He turned to the old banker. "You will not refuse to mention the sum to
+me, will you, my friend?"
+
+M. Fromentin shrugged his shoulders. "It is ten thousand pounds," he
+replied, almost curtly.
+
+Thorpe was seemingly mollified. "Very well, then," he said. "I will sell
+you 2,000 shares at ten pounds."
+
+The others exchanged a wondering look.
+
+"Monsieur," the banker stammered--"I see your meaning. You will forgive
+me--it is very well meant indeed by you--but it was not my proposition.
+The market-price is fifteen pounds--and we were prepared to pay it."
+Thorpe laughed in a peremptory, gusty way. "But you can't pay more than
+I ask!" he told him, with rough geniality. "Come, if I let you and your
+nephew in out of the cold, what kind of men-folk would you be to insist
+that your niece should be left outside? As I said, I don't want her
+money. I don't want any woman's money. If I'm going to be nice to the
+rest of the family, what's the objection to my being nice to her?"
+
+"Monsieur," said the Frenchman, after an instant's reflection, "I offer
+none. I did not at the moment perceive the spirit of your words, but
+I recognize now that it was delicacy itself. I tender you the most
+profound thanks--for ALL the family."
+
+After some further conversation the elder Fromentin took his departure.
+Lord Chaldon apparently proposed to accompany him, but Thorpe begged him
+to remain, and he put aside his hat once more and resumed his seat.
+
+Thorpe walked about a little, with his hands in his pockets, in a
+restless way. "If it isn't unpleasant to you, I think I'll light a
+cigar," he said suddenly, and moved over to the cabinet. He poured out a
+drink of neat brandy, as well, and furtively swallowed it. Then he came
+back, preceded by a cloud of smoke.
+
+"It went terribly against the grain," he said, with a rueful laugh. "I'd
+sworn to let no Jew off with an inch of hide left on him--and here three
+of them have been wheedled out of my grip already."
+
+"Jews?" exclaimed the Marquis, much puzzled. "Did you--did you think
+Fromentin was a Jew? God bless me! he's no more one than I am! Why, not
+even so much, for there IS a Herschell in my pedigree. Why, dear man,
+they were Crusaders!"
+
+Thorpe smiled somewhat sheepishly. "I never noticed much," he said. "It
+was a foreign-looking name. I took it for granted."
+
+Lord Chaldon bent his brows a little. "Yes-s"--he murmured,
+meditatively. "I've heard it mentioned that your enterprise was
+suspected of an anti-Semitic twist. Do you mind my talking a little with
+you about that?"
+
+"Oh, not at all," the other answered with languid acquiescence, as he
+seated himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+"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.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+AUGUST wore itself out in parched tedium, and a September began which
+seemed even more unbearable in town,--and still Thorpe did not get away
+from London.
+
+So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance, and the receipt
+of innumerable letters from a restless and fussy steward whom he had
+not yet seen, went as evidence, he knew himself to be the tenant in
+possession of a great shooting in Morayshire. He had several photographs
+of what was called the lodge, but looked like something between a
+mansion and a baronial castle, on the mantel of the Board Room. The
+reflection that this sumptuous residence had been his for a month, and
+that it daily stood waiting for him, furnished and swept and provisioned
+for his coming, did nothing to help the passing of time in the hot,
+fagged City. More than once he had said resolutely that, on the morrow,
+or at the worst the next day, he would go--but in the event he had
+not gone. In the last week of August he had proceeded to the length of
+sending his niece and nephew Northward, and shutting up the house in
+Ovington Square, and betaking himself to the Savoy Hotel. This had
+appeared at the time to be almost equivalent to his getting away
+himself,--to be at least a first stage in the progress of his own
+journey. But at the hotel he had stuck fast,--and now, on the tenth of
+September, was no nearer the moors and the deer-forest than he had been
+a month before.
+
+A novel sense of loneliness,--of the fatuity of present
+existence,--weighed grievously upon him. The ladies of Grafton Street
+had left town upon a comprehensive itinerary of visits which included
+the Malvern country, and a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in
+Westmoreland. There was nothing very definite about the date of their
+coming to him in Scotland. The lady who had consented to marry him had,
+somehow, omitted to promise that she would write to him. An arrangement
+existed, instead, by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond,
+and to fix between themselves the details of the visit to Morayshire.
+
+Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement.
+He was conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and
+there was nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive
+love-letters seem unnatural. The absence of moonshine, at least during
+this preliminary season, had been quite taken for granted between them,
+and he did not complain even to himself. There was even a kind of
+proud satisfaction for him in the thought that, though he had all but
+completed the purchase of the noble Pellesley estate for Edith Cressage,
+he had never yet kissed her. The reserve he imposed upon himself gave
+him a certain aristocratic fineness in his own eyes. It was the means by
+which he could feel himself to be most nearly her equal. But he remained
+very lonely in London, none the less.
+
+It is true that a great deal of society was continually offered to him,
+and even thrust upon him. In the popular phrase, London was empty,
+but there seemed to be more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont
+Thorpe' s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre or
+card or river parties. He clung sullenly to his rule of going
+nowhere, but it was not so simple a matter to evade the civilities and
+importunities of those who were stopping at the hotel, or who came there
+to waylay him at the entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant. He
+could not always refuse to sit down at tables when attractively-dressed
+and vivacious women made room for him, or to linger over cigars and wine
+with their husbands and escorts later on.
+
+An incessant and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups
+of interested people who were rarely at the pains to dissemble their
+aims. He formed a manner for the reception of these advances, compounded
+of joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality, which nobody, to his face
+at least, resented. If women winced under his mocking rudenesses of
+speech and smile, if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of
+his refusal to let them inside his guard, they sedulously kept it from
+him. The consciousness that everybody was afraid of him,--that everybody
+would kneel to him, and meekly take insult and ignominy from him, if
+only hope remained to them of getting something out of him,--hardened
+like a crust upon his mind.
+
+It was impossible to get a sense of companionship from people who
+cringed to him, and swallowed his affronts and cackled at his jokes
+with equal docility. Sometimes he had a passing amusement in the rough
+pleasantries and cruelties which they drew from him. There were two or
+three bright Jewish women, more gayly clever and impudent, perhaps, than
+beautiful, with whom he found it genuine fun to talk, and concerning
+whom he was perpetually conceiving projects which could not have been
+discussed with their husbands, and as perpetually doing nothing to
+test their feasibility. But these diversions were in their essence
+unsubstantial. There was not even the semblance of a real friendship
+among them,--and loneliness became an increasing burden.
+
+His sister at the old book-shop exasperated him nowadays to a degree
+which often provoked within him the resolution to have done with her.
+He had a score of projects for her betterment, each capable of as many
+variations and eager adaptations to suit her fancy, but to them all and
+sundry she opposed a barrier of stupidly passive negation. There was
+nothing she wanted done for her. She would not exchange the work she had
+been brought up in for a life of idleness. She did not want, and would
+not know what to do with, a bigger shop than she had. An augmentation of
+her capital would be of no use, because there was no room in the crowded
+little shop for a larger stock than it contained. She was entirely
+satisfied with the dingy home overhead, and declined to think even of
+moving elsewhere. Over and over again she met his propositions with a
+saying which he could recall having particularly hated on their father's
+lips,--"It's ill teaching an old dog new tricks."
+
+"You ought to have them taught you with a stick," he had told her
+roundly, on the last occasion.
+
+She had merely shrugged her gaunt shoulders at him. "You think you can
+bully everybody and make them crawl to you,--but there's no good your
+trying it on with me," she had told him, and he had pushed his way out
+of the shop almost stamping his feet. It was clear to him at that moment
+that he would never darken her door again.
+
+Yet now, on this afternoon of the tenth, as he lounged with a cigar and
+a City paper in his apartment at the hotel after luncheon, wondering
+whether it were too hot to issue forth for a walk to the Park, the
+irrelevant idea of going round to see his sister kept coming into his
+mind. He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the paper,--but
+off it slipped again to the old book-shop, and to that curious,
+cross-grained figure, its mistress. He abandoned himself to thinking
+about her--and discovered that a certain unique quality in her
+challenged his admiration. She was the only absolutely disinterested
+person he knew--the only creature in the world, apparently, who did not
+desire to make something out of him. She was not at all well-off,--was
+indeed rather poor than otherwise,--and here was her only brother a
+millionaire, and in her dumb way she had a sisterly affection for him,
+and yet she could not be argued or cajoled into touching a penny of his
+money. Surely there could be no other woman like her.
+
+Thorpe realized that it was a distinction to have such a sister,--and
+behind this thought rose obscurely the suggestion that there must be
+wonderful blood in a race which had produced such a daughter. And for
+that matter, such a son too! He lifted his head, and looked abstractedly
+before him, as if he were gazing at some apotheosis of himself in a
+mirror.
+
+He beheld all at once something concrete and personal, obtruded into the
+heart of his reverie, the sight of which dimly astounded him. For the
+moment, with opened lips he stared at it,--then slowly brought himself
+to comprehend what had happened. An old man had by some oversight of
+the hotel servants been allowed to enter the room unannounced. He had
+wandered in noiselessly, and had moved in a purblind fashion to the
+centre of the apartment. The vagueness of the expression on his face and
+of his movements hinted at a vacant mind or too much drink,--but Thorpe
+gave no thought to either hypothesis. The face itself--no--yes--it was
+the face of old Tavender.
+
+"In the name of God! What are you doing here?" Thorpe gasped at this
+extraordinary apparition. Still staring, he began to push back his chair
+and put his weight upon his feet.
+
+"Well--Thorpe"--the other began, thrusting forward his head to look
+through his spectacles--"so it is you, after all. I didn't know whether
+I was going to find you or not. This place has got so many turns and
+twists to it----"
+
+"But good heavens!" interposed the bewildered Thorpe. He had risen to
+his feet. He mechanically took the hand which the other had extended to
+him. "What in hell"--he began, and broke off again. The aroma of alcohol
+on the air caught his sense, and his mind stopped at the perception that
+Tavender was more or less drunk. He strove to spur it forward, to compel
+it to encompass the meanings of this new crisis, but almost in vain.
+
+"Thought I'd look you up," said the old man, buoyantly. "Nobody in
+London I'd rather see than you. How are you, anyway?"
+
+"What did you come over for? When did you get here?" Thorpe put the
+questions automatically. His self-control was returning to him; his
+capable brain pushed forward now under something like disciplined
+direction.
+
+"Why I guess I owe it all to you," replied Tavender. Traces of the old
+Quaker effect which had been so characteristic of him still hung about
+his garb and mien, but there shone a new assurance on his benignant,
+rubicund face. Prosperity had visibly liberalized and enheartened him.
+He shook Thorpe's hand again. "Yes, sir--it must have been all through
+you!" he repeated. "I got my cable three weeks ago--'Hasten to
+London, urgent business, expenses and liberal fee guaranteed, Rubber
+Consols'--that's what the cable said, that is, the first one and of
+course you're the man that introduced me to those rubber people. And so
+don't you see I owe it all to you?"
+
+His insistence upon his obligation was suddenly almost tearful. Thorpe
+thought hard as he replied: "Oh--that's all right. I'm very glad indeed
+to have helped you along. And so you came over for the Rubber Consols
+people, eh? Well--that's good. Seen 'em yet? You haven't told me when
+you landed."
+
+"Came up from Southampton this morning. My brother-in-law was down
+there to meet me. We came up to London together." "Your brother-in-law,"
+observed Thorpe, meditatively. Some shadowy, remote impression of
+having forgotten something troubled his mind for an instant. "Is your
+brother-in-law in the rubber business?"
+
+"Extraor'nary thing," explained Tavender, beamingly, "he don't know
+no more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon. I asked him
+today--but he couldn't tell me anything about the business--what it was
+I'd been sent for, or anything."
+
+"But he--he knew you'd been sent for," Thorpe commented upon brief
+reflection.
+
+"Why, he sent the second cable himself----"
+
+"What second cable?"
+
+"Why it was the next day,--or maybe it was sent that same night, and
+not delivered till morning,--I got another cable, this time from my
+brother-in-law, telling me to cable him what ship I sailed on and when.
+So of course he knew all about it--but now he says he don't. He's a
+curious sort of fellow, anyway."
+
+"But how is he mixed up in it?" demanded Thorpe, impatiently.
+
+"Well, as nearly as I can figure it out, he works for one of the men
+that's at the head of this rubber company. It appears that he happened
+to show this man--he's a man of title, by the way--a letter I wrote to
+him last spring, when I got back to Mexico--and so in that way this man,
+when he wanted me to come over, just told Gafferson to cable to me."
+
+"Gafferson," Thorpe repeated, very slowly, and with almost an effect
+of listlessness. He was conscious of no surprise; it was as if he
+had divined all along the sinister shadows of Lord Plowden and Lord
+Plowden's gardener, lurking in the obscurity behind this egregious old
+ass of a Tavender.
+
+"He's a tremendous horticultural sharp," said the other. "Probably
+you've heard tell of him. He's taken medals for new flowers and things
+till you can't rest. He's over at--what do you call it?--the Royal
+Aquarium, now, to see the Dahlia Show. I went over there with him, but
+it didn't seem to be my kind of a show, and so I left him there, and
+I'm to look in again for him at 5:30. I'm going down to his place in the
+country with him tonight, to meet his boss--the nobleman I spoke of."
+
+"That's nice," Thorpe commented, slowly. "I envy anybody who can get
+into the country these days. But how did you know I was here?" "The
+woman in the book-store told me--I went there the first thing. You might
+be sure I'd look you up. Nobody was ever a better friend than you've
+been to me, Thorpe. And do you know what I want you to do? I want you to
+come right bang out, now, and have a drink with me."
+
+"I was thinking of something of the sort myself," the big man replied.
+"I'll get my hat, and be with you in a minute."
+
+In the next room he relinquished his countenance to a frown of fierce
+perplexity. More than a minute passed in this scowling preoccupation.
+Then his face lightened with the relief of an idea, and he stepped
+confidently back into the parlour.
+
+"Come along," he said, jovially. "We'll have a drink downstairs, and
+then we'll drive up to Hanover Square and see if we can't find a friend
+of mine at his club."
+
+In the office below he stopped long enough to secure a considerable
+roll of bank-notes in exchange for a cheque. A little later, a hansom
+deposited the couple at the door of the Asian Club, and Thorpe, in the
+outer hallway of this institution, clicked his teeth in satisfaction at
+the news that General Kervick was on the premises.
+
+The General, having been found by a boy and brought down, extended
+to his guests a hospitality which was none the less urbane for the
+evidences of surprise with which it was seasoned. He concealed so
+indifferently his inability to account for Tavender, that the anxious
+Thorpe grew annoyed with him, but happily Tavender's perceptions were
+less subtle. He gazed about him in his dim-eyed way with childlike
+interest, and babbled cheerfully over his liquor. He had not been
+inside a London club before, and his glimpse of the reading-room, where,
+isolated, purple-faced, retired old Empire-makers sat snorting in the
+silence, their gouty feet propped up on foot-rests, their white brows
+scowling over the pages of French novels, particularly impressed him. It
+was a new and halcyon vision of the way to spend one's declining years.
+And the big smoking-room--where the leather cushions were so low and
+so soft, and the connection between the bells and the waiters was so
+efficient--that was even better.
+
+Thorpe presently made an excuse for taking Kervick apart. "I brought
+this old jackass here for a purpose," he said in low, gravely mandatory
+tones. "He thinks he's got an appointment at 5:30 this afternoon--but
+he's wrong. He hasn't. He's not going to have any appointment at
+all--for a long time yet. I want you to get him drunk, there where he
+sits, and then take him away with you, and get him drunker still, and
+then take a train with him somewhere--any station but Charing Cross or
+that line--and I don't care where you land with him--Scotland or Ireland
+or France--whatever you like. Here's some money for you--and you can
+write to me for more. I don't care what you say to him--make up any yarn
+you like--only keep him pacified, and keep him away from London, and
+don't let a living soul talk to him--till I give you the word. You'll
+let me know where you are. I'll get away now--and mind, General, a good
+deal depends on the way you please me in this thing."
+
+The soldier's richly-florid face and intent, bulging blue eyes expressed
+vivid comprehension. He nodded with eloquence as he slipped the notes
+into his trousers pocket. "Absolutely," he murmured with martial
+brevity, from under his white, tight moustache.
+
+With only a vague word or two of meaningless explanation to Tavender,
+Thorpe took his departure, and walked back to the hotel. From what he
+had learned and surmised, it was not difficult to put the pieces of
+the puzzle together. This ridiculous old fool, he remembered now, had
+reproached himself, when he was in England before, for his uncivil
+neglect of his brother-in-law. By some absurd chance, this damned
+brother-in-law happened to be Gafferson. It was clear enough that, when
+he returned to Mexico, Tavender had written to Gafferson, explaining
+the unexpected pressure of business which had taken up all his time in
+England. Probably he had been idiot enough to relate what he of course
+regarded as the most wonderful piece of good news--how the worthless
+concession he had been deluded into buying had been bought back from
+him. As likely as not he had even identified the concession, and given
+Thorpe's name as that of the man who had first impoverished and then
+mysteriously enriched him. At all events, he had clearly mentioned that
+he had a commission to report upon the Rubber Consols property, and
+had said enough else to create the impression that there were criminal
+secrets connected with its sale to the London Company. The rest was
+easy. Gafferson, knowing Lord Plowden's relation to the Company, had
+shown him Tavender's letter. Lord Plowden, meditating upon it, had seen
+a way to be nasty--and had vindictively plunged into it. He had brought
+Tavender from Mexico to London, to use him as a weapon. All this was as
+obvious as the nose on one's face.
+
+But a weapon for what? Thorpe, as this question put itself in his mind,
+halted before a shop-window full of soft-hued silk fabrics, to muse upon
+an answer. The delicate tints and surfaces of what was before his eyes
+seemed somehow to connect themselves with the subject. Plowden himself
+was delicately-tinted and refined of texture. Vindictiveness was too
+plain and coarse an emotion to sway such a complicated and polished
+organism. He reasoned it out, as he stood with lack-lustre gaze before
+the plate-glass front, aloof among a throng of eager and talkative women
+who pressed around him--that Plowden would not have spent his money on
+a mere impulse of mischief-making. He would be counting upon something
+more tangible than revenge--something that could be counted and weighed
+and converted into a bank-balance. He smiled when he reached this
+conclusion--greatly surprising and confusing a matronly lady into
+whose correct face he chanced to be looking at the instant--and turning
+slowly, continued his walk.
+
+At the office of the hotel, he much regretted not having driven instead,
+for he learned that Semple had twice telephoned from the City for him.
+It was late in the afternoon--he noted with satisfaction that the
+clock showed it to be already past the hour of the Tavender-Gafferson
+appointment,--but he had Semple's office called up, upon the chance that
+someone might be there. The clerk had not consumed more than ten minutes
+in the preliminaries of finding out that no one was there--Thorpe
+meanwhile passing savage comments to the other clerks about the British
+official conception of the telephone as an instrument of discipline and
+humiliation--when Semple himself appeared in the doorway.
+
+The Broker gave an exclamation of relief at seeing Thorpe, and then,
+apparently indifferent to the display of excitement he was exhibiting,
+drew him aside.
+
+"Come somewhere where we can talk," he whispered nervously.
+
+Thorpe had never seen the little Scotchman in such a flurry. "We'll go
+up to my rooms," he said, and led the way to the lift.
+
+Upstairs, Semple bolted the door of the sitting-room behind them, and
+satisfied himself that there was no one in the adjoining bedroom. Then,
+unburdening himself with another sigh, he tossed aside his hat, and
+looked keenly up at the big man. "There's the devil to pay," he said
+briefly.
+
+Thorpe had a fleeting pride in the lethargic, composed front he was able
+to present. "All right," he said with forced placidity. "If he's got to
+be paid, we'll pay him." He continued to smile a little.
+
+"It's nah joke," the other hastened to warn him. "I have it from two
+different quarters. An application has been made to the Stock Exchange
+Committee, this afternoon, to intervene and stop our business, on the
+ground of fraud. It comes verra straight to me."
+
+Thorpe regarded his Broker contemplatively. The news fitted with
+precision into what he had previously known; it was rendered altogether
+harmless by the precautions he had already taken. "Well, keep your hair
+on," he said, quietly. "If there were fifty applications, they wouldn't
+matter the worth of that soda-water cork. Won't you have a drink?"
+
+Semple, upon reflection, said he would. The unmoved equipoise of the big
+man visibly reassured him. He sipped at his bubbling tumbler and smacked
+his thin lips. "Man, I've had an awful fright," he said at last, in the
+tone of one whose ease of mind is returning.
+
+"I gave you credit for more nerve," observed the other, eyeing him in
+not unkindly fashion over his glass. "You've been so plumb full of sand
+all the while--I didn't think you'd weaken now. Why, we're within two
+days of home, now--and for you to get rattled at this late hour--you
+ought to be ashamed of yourself."
+
+The Scotchman looked into the bottom of his glass, as he turned it
+thoughtfully round. "I'm relieved to see the way you take it," he said,
+after a pause. With increased hesitation he went dryly on: "I've never
+enquired minutely into the circumstances of the flotation. It has not
+seemed to be my business to do so, and upon advice I may say that the
+Committee would not hold that such was my business. My position is quite
+clear, upon that point."
+
+"Oh, perfectly," Thorpe assented. "It couldn't possibly be any of your
+business--either then, or now." He gave a significant touch of emphasis
+to these last two words.
+
+"Precisely," said Semple, with a glance of swift comprehension. "You
+must not think I am asking any intrusive questions. If you tell me
+that--that there is no ground for uneasiness--I am verra pleased indeed
+to accept the assurance. That is ample information for my purposes."
+
+"You can take it from me," Thorpe told him. He picked up a red book from
+a side table, and turned over its pages with his thick thumb. "This
+is what Rule 59 says," he went on: "'NO APPLICATION WHICH HAS FOR ITS
+OBJECT TO ANNUL ANY BARGAIN IN THE STOCK EXCHANGE SHALL BE ENTERTAINED
+BY THE COMMITTEE, UNLESS UPON A SPECIFIC ALLEGATION OF FRAUD OR WILFUL
+MISREPRESENTATION.' Shall be entertained, d'ye see? They can't even
+consider anything of the sort, because it says 'specific,' and I tell
+you plainly that anything 'specific' is entirely out of the question."
+
+The Broker lifted his sandy brows in momentary apprehension. "If it
+turns upon the precise definition of a word," he remarked, doubtingly.
+
+"Ah, yes,--but it doesn't," Thorpe reassured him. "See here--I'll tell
+you something. You're not asking any questions. That's as it should be.
+And I'm not forcing information upon you which you don't need in your
+business. That's as it should be, too. But in between these two, there's
+a certain margin of facts that there's no harm in your knowing. A scheme
+to blackmail me is on foot. It's rather a fool-scheme, if you ask me,
+but it might have been a nuisance if it had been sprung on us unawares.
+It happened, however, that I twigged this scheme about two hours ago. It
+was the damnedest bit of luck you ever heard of----"
+
+"You don't have luck," put in Semple, appreciatively. "Other men have
+luck. You have something else--I don't give it a name."
+
+Thorpe smiled upon him, and went on. "I twigged it, anyway. I went out,
+and I drove the biggest kind of spike through that fool-scheme--plumb
+through its heart. Tomorrow a certain man will come to me--oh, I could
+almost tell you the kind of neck-tie he'll wear--and he'll put up his
+bluff to me, and I'll hear him out--and then--then I'll let the floor
+drop out from under him."
+
+"Aye!" said Semple, with relish.
+
+"Stay and dine with me tonight," Thorpe impulsively suggested, "and
+we'll go to some Music Hall afterward. There's a knock-about pantomime
+outfit at the Canterbury--Martinetti I think the name is--that's damned
+good. You get plenty of laugh, and no tiresome blab to listen to. The
+older I get, the more I think of people that keep their mouths shut."
+
+"Aye," observed Semple again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+IN the Board Room, next day, Thorpe awaited the coming of Lord Plowden
+with the serene confidence of a prophet who not only knows that he
+is inspired, but has had an illicit glimpse into the workings of the
+machinery of events.
+
+He sat motionless at his desk, like a big spider for who time has
+no meaning. Before him lay two newspapers, folded so as to expose
+paragraphs heavily indicated by blue pencil-marks. They were not
+financial journals, and for that reason it was improbable that he would
+have seen these paragraphs, if the Secretary of the Company had not
+marked them, and brought them to him. That official had been vastly more
+fluttered by them than he found it possible to be. In slightly-varying
+language, these two items embedded in so-called money articles reported
+the rumour that a charge of fraud had arisen in connection with the
+Rubber Consols corner, and that sensational disclosures were believed to
+be impending.
+
+Thorpe looked with a dulled, abstracted eye at these papers, lying
+on the desk, and especially at the blue pencil-lines upon them, as he
+pondered many things. Their statement, thus scattered broadcast to the
+public, seemed at once to introduce a new element into the situation,
+and to leave it unchanged. That influence of some sort had been exerted
+to get this story into these papers, it did not occur to him for an
+instant to doubt. To his view, all things that were put into papers
+were put there for a purpose--it would express his notion more clearly,
+perhaps, to say for a price. Of the methods of Fleet Street, he was
+profoundly ignorant, but his impressions of them were all cynical. Upon
+reflection, however, it seemed unlikely to him that Lord Plowden had
+secured the insertion of these rumours. So far as Thorpe could fathom
+that nobleman's game, its aims would not be served by premature
+publicity of this kind.
+
+Gradually, the outlines of a more probable combination took shape in
+his thoughts. There were left in the grip of the "corner" now only
+two victims,--Rostocker and Aronson. They owed this invidious
+differentiation to a number of causes: they had been the chief sellers
+of stock, being between them responsible for the delivery of 8,500
+Rubber Consols shares, which they could not get; they were men of larger
+fortune than the other "shorts," and therefore could with safety be
+squeezed longest; what was fortunate for him under the circumstances,
+they were the two men against whom Thorpe's personal grudge seemed able
+to maintain itself most easily.
+
+For these reasons, they had already been mulcted in differences to the
+extent of, in round numbers, 165,000 pounds. On the morrow, the twelfth
+of September, it was Thorpe's plan to allow them to buy in the shares
+they needed, at 22 or 23 pounds per share--which would take from them
+nearly 200,000 pounds more. He had satisfied himself that they could,
+and would if necessary, pay this enormous ransom for their final escape
+from the "corner." Partly because it was not so certain that they could
+pay more, partly because he was satiated with spoils and tired of the
+strain of the business, he had decided to permit this escape.
+
+He realized now, however, that they on their side had planned to escape
+without paying any final ransom at all.
+
+That was clearly the meaning of these paragraphs, and of the
+representations which had yesterday been made to the Stock Exchange
+Committee. He had additional knowledge today of the character of these
+representations. Nothing definite had been alleged, but some of the
+members of the Committee had been informally notified, so Semple had
+this morning learned, that a specific charge of fraud, supported
+by unanswerable proof, was to be brought against the Rubber Consols
+management on the morrow. Thorpe reasoned out now, step by step, what
+that meant. Lord Plowden had sought out Rostocker and Aronson, and
+had told them that he had it in his power ignominiously to break the
+"corner." He could hardly have told them the exact nature of his power,
+because until he should have seen Tavender he did not himself know what
+it was. But he had given them to understand that he could prove fraud,
+and they, scenting in this the chance of saving 200,000 pounds, and
+seeing that time was so terribly short, had hastened to the Committeemen
+with this vague declaration that, on the morrow, they could prove--they
+did not precisely know what. Yes--plainly enough--that was what had
+happened. And it would be these two Jew "wreckers," eager to invest
+their speculative notification to the Committee with as much of an
+air of formality as possible, who had caused the allusions to it to be
+published in these papers.
+
+Thorpe's lustreless eye suddenly twinkled with mirth as he reached this
+conclusion; his heavy face brightened into a grin of delight. A vision
+of Lord Plowden's absurd predicament rose vividly before him, and he
+chuckled aloud at it.
+
+It seemed only the most natural thing in the world that, at this
+instant, a clerk should open the door and nod with meaning to the
+master. The visitor whom he had warned the people in the outer office
+he expected, had arrived. Thorpe was still laughing to himself when Lord
+Plowden entered.
+
+"Hallo! How d'ye do!" he called out to him from where he sat at his
+desk.
+
+The hilarity of the manner into which he had been betrayed, upon the
+instant surprised and rather confused him. He had not been altogether
+clear as to how he should receive Plowden, but certainly a warm
+joviality had not occurred to him as appropriate.
+
+The nobleman was even more taken aback. He stared momentarily at the
+big man's beaming mask, and then, with nervous awkwardness, executed a
+series of changes in his own facial expression and demeanour. He flushed
+red, opened his lips to say "Ah!" and then twisted them into a doubting
+and seemingly painful smile. He looked with very bright-eyed intentness
+at Thorpe, as he advanced, and somewhat spasmodically put out his hand.
+
+It occurred to Thorpe not to see this hand. "How are you!" he repeated
+in a more mechanical voice, and withdrew his smile. Lord Plowden
+fidgeted on his feet for a brief, embarrassed interval before the desk,
+and then dropped into a chair at its side. With a deliberate effort at
+nonchalance, he crossed his legs, and caressed the ankle on his knee
+with a careless hand. "Anything new?" he asked.
+
+Thorpe lolled back in his arm-chair. "I'm going to be able to get away
+in a few days' time," he said, indifferently. "I expect to finally wind
+up the business on the Stock Exchange tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--yes," commented Plowden, vacantly. He seemed to be searching after
+thoughts which had wandered astray. "Yes--of course."
+
+"Yes--of course," Thorpe said after him, with a latent touch of
+significance.
+
+The other looked up quickly, then glanced away again. "It's all going as
+you expected, is it?" he asked.
+
+"Better than I expected," Thorpe told him, energetically. "Much better
+than anybody expected."
+
+"Hah!" said Plowden. After a moment's reflection he went on
+hesitatingly: "I didn't know. I saw something in one of the papers this
+morning,--one of the money articles,--which spoke as if there were some
+doubt about the result. That's why I called."
+
+"Well--it's damned good of you to come round, and show such a friendly
+interest." Thorpe's voice seemed candid enough, but there was an
+enigmatic something in his glance which aroused the other's distrust.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't take very much stock in the 'friendly interest,'"
+he said, with a constrained little laugh.
+
+"I'm not taking stock in anything new just now," replied Thorpe, lending
+himself lazily to the other's metaphor. "I'm loaded up to the gunnels
+already."
+
+A minute of rather oppressive silence ensued. Then Plowden ventured upon
+an opening. "All the same, it WAS with an idea of,--perhaps being of use
+to you,--that I came here," he affirmed. "In what way?" Thorpe put the
+query almost listlessly.
+
+Lord Plowden turned his hands and let his dark eyes sparkle in a gesture
+of amiable uncertainty. "That depended upon what was needed. I got the
+impression that you were in trouble--the paper spoke as if there were
+no doubt of it--and I imagined that quite probably you would be glad to
+talk with me about it."
+
+"Quite right," said Thorpe. "So I should."
+
+This comprehensive assurance seemed not, however, to facilitate
+conversation. The nobleman looked at the pattern of the sock on the
+ankle he was nursing, and knitted his brows in perplexity. "What if the
+Committee of the Stock Exchange decide to interfere?" he asked at last.
+
+"Oh, that would knock me sky-high," Thorpe admitted.
+
+"Approximately, how much may one take 'sky-high' to mean?"
+
+Thorpe appeared to calculate. "Almost anything up to a quarter of a
+million," he answered.
+
+"Hah!" said Lord Plowden again. "Well--I understand--I'm given to
+understand--that very likely that is what the Committee will decide."
+
+"Does it say that in the papers?" asked Thorpe. He essayed an effect of
+concern. "Where did you see that?"
+
+"I didn't see it," the other explained. "It--it came to me."
+
+"God!" said Thorpe. "That'll be awful! But are you really in earnest? Is
+that what you hear? And does it come at all straight?"
+
+Lord Plowden nodded portentously. "Absolutely straight," he said, with
+gravity.
+
+Thorpe, after a momentary stare of what looked like bewilderment,
+was seen to clutch at a straw. "But what was it you were saying?" he
+demanded, with eagerness. "You talked about help--a minute ago. Did you
+mean it? Have you got a plan? Is there something that you can do?"
+
+Plowden weighed his words. "It would be necessary to have a very
+complete understanding," he remarked.
+
+"Whatever you like," exclaimed the other.
+
+"Pardon me--it would have to be a good deal more definite than that,"
+Plowden declared. "A 'burnt child'--you know."
+
+The big man tapped musingly with his finger-nails on the desk. "We won't
+quarrel about that," he said. "But what I'd like to know first,--you
+needn't give anything away that you don't want to,--but what's your
+plan? You say that they've got me in a hole, and that you can get me
+out." "In effect--yes."
+
+"But how do you know that I can't get myself out? What do you know about
+the whole thing anyway? Supposing I tell you that I laugh at it--that
+there's no more ground for raising the suspicion of fraud than there is
+for--for suspecting that you've got wings and can fly."
+
+"I--I don't think you'll tell me that," said Plowden, placidly.
+
+"Well then, supposing I don't tell you that," the other resumed,
+argumentatively. "Supposing I say instead that it can't be proved. If
+the Committee doesn't have proof NOW,--within twenty-one or twenty-two
+hours,--they can't do anything at all. Tomorrow is settling day. All
+along, I've said I would wind up the thing tomorrow. The market-price
+has been made for me by the jobbers yesterday and today. I'm all ready
+to end the whole business tomorrow--close it all out. And after that's
+done, what do I care about the Stock Exchange Committee? They can
+investigate and be damned! What could they do to me?"
+
+"I think a man can always be arrested and indicted, and sent to penal
+servitude," said Lord Plowden, with a certain solemnity of tone. "There
+are even well-known instances of extradition."
+
+Thorpe buried his chin deep in his collar, and regarded his companion
+with a fixed gaze, in which the latter detected signs of trepidation.
+"But about the Committee--and tomorrow," he said slowly. "What do you
+say about that? How can they act in that lightning fashion? And even if
+proofs could be got, how do you suppose they are to be got on the drop
+of the hat, at a minute's notice?"
+
+"The case is of sufficient importance to warrant a special meeting
+tomorrow morning," the other rejoined. "One hour's notice, posted in the
+House, is sufficient, I believe. Any three members of the Committee can
+call such a meeting, and I understand that seven make a quorum. You will
+see that a meeting could be held at noon tomorrow, and within half an
+hour could make you a ruined man."
+
+"I don't know--would you call it quite ruined?" commented Thorpe. "I
+should still have a few sovereigns to go on with."
+
+"A criminal prosecution would be practically inevitable--after such a
+disclosure," Plowden reminded him, with augmented severity of tone.
+
+"Don't mix the two things up," the other urged. There seemed to the
+listener to be supplication in the voice. "It's the action of the
+Committee that you said you could influence. That's what we were talking
+about. You say there will be a special meeting at noon tomorrow----
+
+"I said there could be one," Plowden corrected him.
+
+"All right. There CAN be one. And do you say that there can be
+proof,--proof against me of fraud,--produced at that meeting?"
+
+"Yes--I say that," the nobleman affirmed, quietly.
+
+"And further still--do you say that it rests with you whether that proof
+shall be produced or not?"
+
+Lord Plowden looked into the impassive, deep-eyed gaze which covered
+him, and looked away from it again. "I haven't put it in just that
+form," he said, hesitatingly. "But in essentials--yes, that may be taken
+as true."
+
+"And what is your figure? How much do you want for holding this proof
+of yours back, and letting me finish scooping the money of your Hebrew
+friends Aronson and Rostocker?"
+
+The peer raised his head, and shot a keenly enquiring glance at the
+other. "Are they my friends?" he asked, with challenging insolence.
+
+"I'm bound to assume that you have been dealing with them, just as you
+are dealing with me." Thorpe explained his meaning dispassionately, as
+if the transaction were entirely commonplace. "You tell them that you're
+in a position to produce proof against me, and ask them what they'll
+give for it. Then naturally enough you come to me, and ask what I'll be
+willing to pay to have the proof suppressed. I quite understand that I
+must bid against these men--and of course I take it for granted that,
+since you know their figure, you've arranged in your mind what mine is
+to be. I quite understand, too, that I am to pay more than they have
+offered. That is on account of 'friendly interest.'"
+
+"Since you allude to it," Lord Plowden observed, with a certain calm
+loftiness of tone, "there is no harm in saying that you WILL pay
+something on that old score. Once you thrust the promise of something
+like a hundred thousand pounds positively upon me. You insisted on my
+believing it, and I did so, like a fool. I came to you to redeem the
+promise, and you laughed in my face. Very well. It is my turn now. I
+hold the whip-hand, and I should be an ass not to remember things. I
+shall want that entire one hundred thousand pounds from you, and fifty
+thousand added to it 'on account of the 'friendly interest,' as you so
+intelligently expressed it."
+
+Thorpe's chin burrowed still deeper upon his breast. "It's an outrage,"
+he said with feeling. Then he added, in tones of dejected resignation:
+"When will you want it?"
+
+"At the moment when the payments of Rostocker and Aronson are made to
+you, or to your bankers or agents," Lord Plowden replied, with prepared
+facility. He had evidently given much thought to this part of the
+proceedings. "And of course I shall expect you to draw up now an
+agreement to that effect. I happen to have a stamped paper with me this
+time. And if you don't mind, we will have it properly witnessed--this
+time."
+
+Thorpe looked at him with a disconcertingly leaden stare, the while he
+thought over what had been proposed. "That's right enough," he announced
+at last, "but I shall expect you to do some writing too. Since we're
+dealing on this basis, there must be no doubt about the guarantee that
+you will perform your part of the contract."
+
+"The performance itself, since payment is conditional upon it--" began
+Plowden, but the other interrupted him.
+
+"No, I want something better than that. Here--give me your stamped
+paper." He took the bluish sheet, and, without hesitation, wrote several
+lines rapidly. "Here--this is my promise," he said, "to pay you 150,000
+pounds, upon your satisfactory performance of a certain undertaking to
+be separately nominated in a document called 'A,' which we will jointly
+draw up and agree to and sign, and deposit wherever you like--for
+safe keeping. Now, if you'll sit here, and write out for me a similar
+thing--that in consideration of my promise of 150,000 pounds, you
+covenant to perform the undertaking to be nominated in the document
+'A'--and so on."
+
+Lord Plowden treated as a matter of course the ready and business-like
+suggestion of the other. Taking his place at the desk in turn, he wrote
+out what had been suggested. Thorpe touched a bell, and the clerk who
+came in perfunctorily attested the signatures upon both papers. Each
+principal folded and pocketed the pledge of the other.
+
+"Now," said Thorpe, when he had seated himself again at the desk, "we
+are all right so far as protection against each other goes. If you don't
+mind, I will draw up a suggestion of what the separate document 'A'
+should set forth. If you don't like it, you can write one."
+
+He took more time to this task, frowning laboriously over the fresh
+sheet of foolscap, and screening from observation with his hand what he
+was writing. Finally, the task seemed finished to his mind. He took up
+the paper, glanced through it once more, and handed it in silence to the
+other.
+
+In silence also, and with an expression of arrested attention, Lord
+Plowden read these lines:
+
+"The undertaking referred to in the two documents of even date, signed
+respectively by Lord Plowden and Stormont Thorpe, is to the effect
+that at some hour between eleven A.M. and three P.M. of September 12th,
+instant, Lord Plowden shall produce before a special meeting of the
+Committee of the Stock Exchange, the person of one Jerome P. Tavender,
+to explain to said Committee his share in the blackmailing scheme of
+which Lord Plowden, over his own signature, has furnished documentary
+evidence."
+
+The nobleman continued to look down at the paper, after the power to
+hold it without shaking had left his hand. There came into his face,
+mingling with and vitiating its rich natural hues of health, a kind of
+grey shadow. It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint.
+He did not lift his eyes.
+
+Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation of his trick with
+boisterous and scornful mirth. Even while the victim was deciphering the
+fatal paper, he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst
+out into bitter laughter. But now there was something in the aspect of
+Plowden's collapse which seemed to forbid triumphant derision. He was
+taking his blow so like a gentleman,--ashen-pale and quivering, but
+clinging to a high-bred dignity of silence,--that the impulse to exhibit
+equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant.
+
+"Well--you see how little business you've got, setting yourself to buck
+against a grown-up man."
+
+He offered the observation in the tone of the school-teacher, affectedly
+philosophical but secretly jubilant, who harangues a defeated and
+humiliated urchin upon his folly.
+
+"Oh, chuck it!" growled Lord Plowden, staring still at the calamitous
+paper.
+
+Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence was after all
+most decorous. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and tipping
+back his chair, surveyed the discomfited Viscount impassively. He
+forbore even to smile.
+
+"So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!" Lord Plowden had
+found words at last. As he spoke, he lifted his face, and made a show of
+looking the other in the eye.
+
+"Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even, that you haven't
+an inkling of," Thorpe told him, lightly. "I've been watching every move
+you've made, seeing further ahead in your own game than you did. Why, it
+was too easy! It was like playing draughts with a girl. I knew you would
+come today, for example. I told the people out there that I expected
+you."
+
+"Yes-s," said the other, with rueful bewilderment. "You seem to have
+been rather on the spot--I confess."
+
+"On the spot? All over the place!" Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his
+chair, and put more animation into his voice.
+
+"It's the mistake you people make!" he declared oracularly. "You think
+that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great
+combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the
+smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em,
+and make for himself a big fortune--and still be a fool! You imagine
+that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked by amateurs like
+yourself. It's too ridiculous!"
+
+The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun
+to spread through Plowden's consciousness. It was almost more surprising
+to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed
+himself to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept
+back into his glance. He breathed more easily.
+
+"You are right!" he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of
+fervid conviction to the tone of his words. The big brute's pride in his
+own brains and power was still his weakest point. "You are right! I did
+play the fool. And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first
+man in London to recognize the immense forces in you. I said to you at
+the very outset, 'You are going to go far. You are going to be a great
+man.' You remember that, don't you?"
+
+Thorpe nodded. "Yes--I remember it."
+
+The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket,
+and extracted a match. "Do you mind?" he asked, and scarcely waiting for
+a token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied
+it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. The two men
+watched it curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate,
+without a word.
+
+This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of
+the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it
+became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and
+put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.
+
+"It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me," he said, in
+an altered, harsh tone, "but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old bum
+of a Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and
+he's a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what
+one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and
+spend your money,--money I gave you, by the way,--in bringing Tavender
+over here. You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using him
+against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for
+a still bigger profit. You see it's all at my fingers' ends."
+
+Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent.
+
+"Well then--Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to
+meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've set out to fight one of the
+smartest and strongest men in England, and I've got to keep every atom
+of wits about me, and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every
+point of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it! You
+snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson--Gafferson!--the mud-head of the
+earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and
+bring him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My God!
+You've only got two clear days left to do the whole thing in--and
+you don't even come up to town to get ready for them! You send
+Gafferson--and he goes off to see a flower-show--Mother of Moses! think
+of it! a FLOWER-show!--and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll
+together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so
+on, to our hearts' content. Really, it's too easy! You make me tired!"
+
+The nobleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile. "I confess to a
+certain degree of weariness myself," he said, humbly.
+
+Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion for a little.
+"I may tell you that if you HAD got hold of Tavender," he decided to
+tell him, "he shouldn't have been of the faintest use to you. I know
+what it was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn't understand it when
+he first told me, but afterwards I saw through it,--and it was merely a
+maudlin misapprehension of his. He'd got three or four things all mixed
+up together. You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd
+enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred yards off. What
+little brain he's got left is soaked in it. The first time I was ever
+camping with him, I had to lick him for drinking the methylated spirits
+we were using with our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!"
+
+"Evidently," said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, "it was all a most
+unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake." With inspiration, he made
+bold to add: "The most amazing thing, though--to my mind--is that you
+don't seem--what shall I say?--particularly enraged with me about it."
+
+"Yes--that surprises me, too," Thorpe meditatively admitted. "I was
+entitled to kill you--crush you to jelly. Any other man I would. But
+you,--I don't know,--I do funny things with you."
+
+"I wish you would give me a drink, now--as one of them," Plowden
+ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry.
+
+Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved across the room.
+He set out upon the big official table in the middle, that mockingly
+pretentious reminder of a Board which never met, a decanter and two
+glasses and some recumbent, round-bottomed bottles. He handed one of
+these last to Plowden, as the latter strolled toward the table.
+
+"You know how to open these, don't you?" he said, languidly. "Somehow I
+never could manage it."
+
+The nobleman submissively took the bottle, and picked with awkwardness
+at its wire and cork, and all at once achieved a premature and not
+over-successful explosion. He wiped his dripping cuff in silence, when
+the tumblers were supplied.
+
+"Well--here's better luck to you next time," Thorpe said, lifting his
+glass. The audacious irony of his words filled Plowden with an instant
+purpose.
+
+"What on earth did you round on me in that way for, Thorpe--when I was
+here last?" He put the question with bravery enough, but at sight of the
+other's unresponsive face grew suddenly timorous aud explanatory. "No
+man was ever more astounded in the world than I was. To this day I'm as
+unable to account for it as a babe unborn. What conceivable thing had I
+done to you?"
+
+Thorpe slowly thought of something that had not occurred to him before,
+and seized upon it with a certain satisfaction.
+
+"That day that you took me shooting," he said, with the tone of one
+finally exposing a long-nursed grievance, "you stayed in bed for hours
+after you knew I was up and waiting for you--and when we went out, you
+had a servant to carry a chair for you, but I--by God!--I had to stand
+up."
+
+"Heavens above!" ejaculated Plowden, in unfeigned amazement.
+
+"These are little things--mere trifles," continued Thorpe, dogmatically,
+"but with men of my temper and make-up those are just the things that
+aggravate and rankle and hurt. Maybe it's foolish, but that's the kind
+of man I am. You ought to have had the intelligence to see that--and not
+let these stupid little things happen to annoy me. Why just think what
+you did. I was going to do God knows what for you--make your fortune and
+everything else,--and you didn't show consideration enough for me to get
+out of bed at a decent hour--much less see to it that I had a chair if
+you were going to have one."
+
+"Upon my word, I can't tell how ashamed and sorry I am," Lord Plowden
+assured him, with fervent contrition in his voice.
+
+"Well, those are the things to guard against," said Thorpe, approaching
+a dismissal of the subject. "People who show consideration for me;
+people who take pains to do the little pleasant things for me, and see
+that I'm not annoyed and worried by trifles--they're the people that
+I, on my side, do the big things for. I can be the best friend in the
+world, but only to those who show that they care for me, and do what
+they know I'll like. I don't want toadies about me, but I do want people
+who feel bound to me, and are as keen about me and my feelings and
+interests as they are about their own."
+
+"It is delightfully feudal--all this," commented the nobleman, smilingly
+addressing the remark to nobody in particular. Then he looked at Thorpe.
+"Let me be one of them--one of the people you speak of," he said, with
+directness.
+
+Thorpe returned his look with the good-natured beginnings of a grin.
+"But what would you be good for?" he queried, in a bantering tone.
+"People I have about me have to be of some use. They require to have
+heads on their shoulders. Why--just think what you've done. I don't mean
+so much about your letting Tavender slip through your fingers--although
+that was about the worst I ever heard of. But here in this room, at
+that desk there, you allowed me to bounce you into writing and signing
+a paper which you ought to have had your hand cut off rather than write,
+much less sign. You come here trying to work the most difficult and
+dangerous kind of a bluff,--knowing all the while that the witness you
+depended entirely upon had disappeared, you hadn't the remotest idea
+where,--and you actually let me lead you into giving me your signature
+to your own declaration that you are blackmailing me! Thinking it all
+over--you know--I can't see that you would be of much help to me in the
+City."
+
+Lord Plowden joined perforce in the laughter with which the big man
+enjoyed his own pleasantry. His mirth had some superficial signs of
+shamefacedness, but it was hopeful underneath. "The City!" he echoed,
+with meaning. "That's the curse of it. What do I know about the City?
+What business have I in the City? As you said, I'm the amateur. A strong
+man like you can make me seem any kind of a ridiculous fool he likes,
+with the turn of his hand. I see that right enough. But what am I to do?
+I have to make a shot at something. I'm so rotten poor!"
+
+Thorpe had retired again behind the barrier of dull-eyed abstraction. He
+seemed not to have heard this appealing explanation.
+
+The other preserved silence in turn, and even made a pretence of looking
+at some pamphlets on the table, as a token of his boundless deference to
+the master's mood.
+
+"I don't know. I'll see," the big man muttered at last, doubtfully.
+
+Lord Plowden felt warranted in taking an optimistic view of these vague
+words. "It's awfully good of you"--he began, lamely, and then paused.
+"I wonder,"--he took up a new thought with a more solicitous tone,--"I
+wonder if you would mind returning to me that idiotic paper I signed."
+
+Thorpe shook his head. "Not just now, at any rate," he said, still
+musingly. With his head bowed, he took a few restless steps.
+
+"But you are going to--to help me!" the other remarked, with an air of
+confidence. He had taken up his hat, in response to the tacit warning of
+his companion's manner.
+
+Thorpe looked at him curiously, and hesitated over his answer. It was a
+surprising and almost unaccountable conclusion for the interview to
+have reached. He was in some vague way ashamed of himself, but he was
+explicitly and contemptuously ashamed for Plowden, and the impulse to
+say so was strong within him. This handsome young gentleman of title
+ought not to be escaping with this restored buoyancy of mien, and this
+complacency of spirit. He had deserved to be punished with a heavy hand,
+and here he was blithely making certain of new benefits instead.
+
+"I don't know--I'll see," Thorpe moodily repeated--and there was no more
+to be said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people had made
+themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up.
+
+It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so
+little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but
+he had slept very badly in it, none the less. The room was luxuriously
+furnished, as was the entire suite, but it was all strange and
+uncomfortable to his senses. The operation of shaving and dressing in
+solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. He regretted not having
+brought his man with him for this reason, and then, upon meditation, for
+other reasons. A person of his position ought always to have a servant
+with him. The hotel people must have been surprised at his travelling
+unattended--and the people at High Thorpe must also have thought it
+strange. It flashed across his mind that no doubt his wife had most of
+all thought it strange. How would she explain to herself his sudden,
+precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite naturally
+put an unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to
+remember that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much
+worse to be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over
+his mysterious absence in her mind.
+
+He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt
+signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and
+made his way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his
+in the old days--but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It
+seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with
+his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a
+hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost
+the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and
+from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the
+discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his
+unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east,
+and ever and again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway,
+and flung it in his face.
+
+He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose, and with
+no very definite reflections. It occurred to him that if his wife did
+impute to him some unworthy motive in stealing off to London, and
+made herself unhappy in doing so--that would at least provide the
+compensation of showing that she cared. The thought, however, upon
+examination, contained very meagre elements of solace. He could not in
+the least be sure about any of the workings of her mind. There might be
+more or less annoyance mixed up this morning with the secret thoughts
+she had concerning him--or she might not be bothering her head about him
+at all. This latter contingency had never presented itself so frankly to
+him before. He looked hard at it, and saw more semblances of probability
+about it than he liked. It might very well be that she was not thinking
+about him one way or the other.
+
+A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need think about him
+pervaded his soul. Who cared what he said or did or felt? The City had
+forgotten his very existence. In the West End, only here and there some
+person might chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder
+who had married Lady Cressage. Nowhere else in England, save one dull
+strip of agricultural blankness in a backward home county, was there
+a human being who knew anything whatever about him. And this was his
+career! It was for this that he had planned that memorable campaign, and
+waged that amazing series of fortnightly battles, never missing victory,
+never failing at any point of the complicated strategy, and crowning it
+all with a culminating triumph which had been the wonder and admiration
+of the whole financial world! A few score of menials or interested
+inferiors bowed to him; he drove some good horses, and was attentively
+waited upon, and had a never-failing abundance of good things to eat and
+drink aud smoke. Hardly anything more than that, when you came to think
+of it--and the passing usufruct of all these things could be enjoyed by
+any fool who had a ten-pound note in his pocket!
+
+What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had achieved power--and
+where was that power? What had he done with it? What COULD he do with
+it? He had an excess of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it
+command an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox, as he
+dimly perceived. There existed only a narrow margin of advantage in
+favour of the rich man. He could eat and drink a little more and a
+little better than the poor man; he could have better clothes, and lie
+abed later in the morning, and take life easier all round--but only
+within hard and fast bounds. There was an ascertained limit beyond which
+the millionaire could no more stuff himself with food and wine than
+could the beggar. It might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in
+bed in the morning, but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So
+it ran indefinitely--this thin selvedge of advantage which money
+could buy--with deprivation on the one side, and surfeit on the other.
+Candidly, was it not true that more happiness lay in winning the way out
+of deprivation, than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The
+poor man succeeding in making himself rich--at numerous stages of the
+operation there might be made a moral snap-shot of the truly happy man.
+But not after he had reached the top. Then disintegration began at once.
+The contrast between what he supposed he could do, and what he finds it
+possible to do, is too vast to be accepted with equanimity.
+
+It must be said that after breakfast--a meal which he found in an
+Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension,
+and ate with an almost novel relish--Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy
+views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into
+warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite
+unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his
+meditations. He established in his mind the proposition that since an
+excess of enjoyment was impossible--since one could not derive a great
+block of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, but
+at the most could only gather a little from each--the desirable thing
+was to multiply as much as might be those tastes and whims and fancies
+which passed for appetites, and thus expand the area of possible
+gratification.
+
+This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply itself to his
+individual needs with much facility. What did he want to do that he had
+not done? It was difficult for him to say. Perhaps it was chandlers'
+signs and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring preoccupation
+suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets, which raised the question
+of a yacht in his mind. Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once
+dwelt with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it would still
+be full of attractions for him. He liked the water, and the water
+liked him--and he was better able now than formerly to understand how
+luxurious existence can be made in modern private ships. He decided that
+he would have a yacht--and then perceived that the decision brought no
+exhilaration. He was no happier than before. He could decide that he
+would have anything he chose to name--and it would in no whit lighten
+his mood. The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively as
+spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired of the one as
+he had of the other?
+
+He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something he had never
+admitted to himself. Was he indeed tired of High Thorpe? He had assured
+his wife to the contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his
+own mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself. He carried
+a weariness about with him, which looked at everything with apathetic
+eyes, and cared for nothing. Some nameless paralysis had settled upon
+his capacity for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it. He had
+had the power to expand his life to the farthest boundaries of rich
+experience and sensation, and he had deliberately shrunk into a sort of
+herbaceous nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had
+London at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might
+mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than
+that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with
+dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.
+
+Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently
+came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him.
+He walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign
+fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting
+recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped,
+to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the
+left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian
+buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of
+the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and
+the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the
+picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied
+smugness--of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could
+be more commonplace to the eye.
+
+Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels
+of power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within
+those doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct
+the movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and
+their cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between
+them wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth.
+They could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole
+people, or decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of
+their little family council. He remembered now how he had stood on this
+same spot, and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull
+houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild--and
+that was only a little over a year ago!
+
+There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found
+himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the
+little knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the
+doorway. It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding
+within. One of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for
+aught he knew; at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were
+on the premises. He had heard it said that the very head of the house
+listened to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon, and
+interrupted his conversations with the most important of non-commercial
+callers, to make or refuse bargains in shares offered by brokers who
+came in. What impulse lay behind this extraordinary devotion to labour?
+Toward what conceivable goal could it be striving?
+
+To work hard and risk great things for the possession of a fortune, in
+order to enjoy it afterward--he could understand how that attracted
+men. But to possess already the biggest of human fortunes, and still
+work--that baffled him. He wished he knew some of those men in there,
+especially if they belonged to the place. It would be wonderfully
+interesting to get at the inner point of view of New Court.
+
+A little later, in Colin Semple's office, he sat down to await the
+coming of that gentleman. "Then he doesn't get here so early nowadays?"
+he suggested to the head-clerk who, with instant recognition and
+exaggerated deference, had ushered him into this furthermost private
+room. It pleased him to assume that prosperity had relaxed the
+Scotchman's vigilance.
+
+"Oh yes, sir," the clerk replied. "A bit earlier if anything, as a rule.
+But I think he is stopping at his solicitors on his way to the City. I
+hope you are very well, sir."
+
+"Yes--I'm very fit--thanks," Thorpe said, listlessly, and the other left
+him.
+
+Mr. Semple, when at last he arrived, bustled into the room with
+unaffected gratification at the news he had heard without. "Well, well,
+Thorpe man!" he cried, and shook hands cordially. "This is fine! If
+I'd only known you were in town! Why wouldn't you have told me you were
+coming? I'd never have kept you waiting."
+
+Thorpe laughed wearily. "I hardly knew I was in town myself. I only ran
+up last night. I thought it would amuse me to have a look round--but
+things seem as dull as ditchwater."
+
+"Oh no," said Semple, "the autumn is opening verra well indeed. There
+are more new companies, and a better public subscription all round, than
+for any first week of October I remember. Westralians appear bad on
+the face of things, it's true--but don't believe all you hear of them.
+There's more than the suspicion of a 'rig' there. Besides, you haven't a
+penny in them."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of that," Thorpe told him, with comprehensive
+vagueness. "Well, I suppose you're still coining money," he observed,
+after a pause.
+
+"Keeping along--keeping along," the broker replied, cheerfully. "I canna
+complain." Thorpe looked at him with a meditative frown. "Well, what are
+you going to do with it, after you've got it?" he demanded, almost with
+sharpness.
+
+The Scotchman, after a surprised instant, smiled. "Oh, I'll just keep my
+hands on it," he assured him, lightly.
+
+"That isn't what I mean," Thorpe said, groping after what he did
+mean, with sullen tenacity, among his thoughts. His large, heavy face
+exhibited a depressed gravity which attracted the other's attention.
+
+"What's the matter?" Semple asked quickly. "Has anything gone wrong with
+you?"
+
+Thorpe slowly shook his head. "What better off do you think you'll be
+with six figures than you are with five?" he pursued, with dogmatic
+insistence.
+
+Semple shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have grown much brighter
+and gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. Apparently he was somewhat
+stouter, and certainly there was a mellowed softening of his sharp
+glance and shrewd smile. It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat
+nonplussed him, but his good-humour was unflagging.
+
+"It's the way we're taught at school," he hazarded, genially. "In all
+the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six."
+
+"They're wrong," Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a
+grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement.
+"What I mean is--what's the good of piling up money, while you can't
+pile up the enjoyments it will buy? What will a million give you, that
+the fifth of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?"
+
+"Aye," said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. "So
+you've come to that frame of mind, have you? Why does a man go on and
+shoot five hundred pheasants, when he can eat only one?"
+
+"Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing more to say,"
+Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. "I've always thought of
+you as a man like myself, who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy
+himself."
+
+The Scotchman laughed joyously. "Enjoy myself! Like you!" he cried.
+"Man, you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's funeral! What's come over
+you? I know what it is. You go and take a course of German waters----"
+
+"Oh, that be damned!" Thorpe objected, gloomily. "I tell you I'm all
+right. Only--only--God! I've a great notion to go and get drunk."
+
+Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic expression.
+"I'm sorry you're so hipped," he said, in gentle tones. "It can't be
+more than some passing whimsy. You're in no real trouble, are you?--no
+family trouble?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head. "The whole thing is rot!" he affirmed,
+enigmatically.
+
+"What whole thing?" The broker perched on the edge of his desk, and with
+patient philosophy took him up. "Do you mean eighty thousand a year is
+rot? That depends upon the man who has it."
+
+"I know that well enough," broke in the other, heavily. "That's what I'm
+kicking about. I'm no good!"
+
+Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips in
+reflection. "That's not the case," he observed with argumentative
+calmness. "You're a great deal of good. I'm not so sure that what you've
+been trying to do is any good, though. Come!--I read you like large
+print. You've set out to live the life of a rich country squire--and it
+hasn't come off. It couldn't come off! I never believed it would. You
+haven't the taste for it inbred in your bones. You haven't the thousand
+little habits and interests that they take in with their mother's milk,
+and that make such a life possible. When you look at a hedge, you don't
+think of it as something to worry live animals out of. When you see one
+of your labourers, you don't care who his father was, or which dairymaid
+his uncle ought to have married, if he had wanted to get a certain
+cottage. You don't want to know the name of everybody whose roof you can
+see; much less could you remember them, and talk about them, and listen
+to gossip about them, year after year. It isn't a passion in your blood
+to ride to hounds, and to shoot, and all that. It doesn't come to you
+by tradition--and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might be a
+substitute for tradition. What are you doing in the country, then? Just
+eating too much, and sitting about, and getting fat and stupid. If you
+want the truth, there it is for you."
+
+Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon reflection to the
+view that this was the truth. "That's all right, as far as it goes," he
+assented, with hesitation. "But what the hell else is there?"
+
+The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis to drop
+it in an incomplete state. "A year ago," he went on, "you had won your
+victories like a veritable Napoleon. You had everything in your own
+hands; Napoleon himself was not more the master of what he saw about
+him than you were. And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired
+yourself to your Elba. It wasn't that you were beaten and driven there
+by others; you went of your own accord. Have you ever thought, Thorpe,
+of this? Napoleon was the greatest man of his age--one of the greatest
+men of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred other ways. He spent
+the last six years of his life at St. Helena--in excellent health and
+with companions that he talked freely to--and in all the extraordinarily
+copious reports of his conversations there, we don't get a single
+sentence worth repeating. If you read it, you'll see he talked like a
+dull, ordinary body. The greatness had entirely evaporated from him, the
+moment he was put on an island where he had nothing to do."
+
+"Yes-s," said Thorpe, thoughtfully. He accepted the application without
+any qualms about the splendour of the comparison it rested upon. He had
+done the great things, just as Semple said, and there was no room for
+false modesty about them in his mind. "The trouble is," he began, "that
+I did what I had always thought I wanted to do most. I was quite certain
+in my mind that that was what I wanted. And if we say now that I was
+wrong--if we admit that that wasn't what I really wanted--why then, God
+knows what it is I DO want. I'll be hanged if I do!"
+
+"Come back to the City," Semple told him. "That's where you belong."
+
+"No--no!" Thorpe spoke with emphasis. "That's where you're all off. I
+don't belong in the City at all. I hate the whole outfit. What the devil
+amusement would it be to me to take other men's money away from them?
+I'd be wanting all the while to give it back to them. And certainly I
+wouldn't get any fun out of their taking my money away from me. Besides,
+it doesn't entertain me. I've no taste at all for it. I never look at a
+financial paper now. I could no more interest myself in all that stuff
+again than I could fly. That's the hell of it--to be interested in
+anything."
+
+"Go in for politics," the other suggested, with less warmth.
+
+"Yes, I know," Thorpe commented, with a lingering tone. "Perhaps I ought
+to think more about that. By the way, what's Plowden doing? I've lost
+all track of him."
+
+"Abroad somewhere, I fancy," Semple replied. His manner exhibited a
+profound indifference. "When his mother died he came into something--I
+don't know how much. I don't think I've seen him since--and that must
+have been six months and more ago."
+
+"Yes. I heard about it at the time," the other said. "It must be about
+that. His sister and brother--the young Plowdens--they're coming to us
+at the end of the week, I believe. You didn't hit it off particularly
+with Plowden, eh?"
+
+Semple emitted a contemptuous little laugh. "I did not quarrel with
+him--if you mean that," he said, "but even to please you, Thorpe, I
+couldn't bring myself to put my back into the job of making money for
+him. He was treated fairly--even generously, d'ye mind. I should think,
+all told, he had some thirty thousand pounds for his shares, and that's
+a hundred times as much as I had a pleasure in seeing him get. Each man
+can wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand another
+man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the chance came."
+
+"THAT'S all right," Thorpe assured him, easily. "I never told you that
+he was any good. I merely felt like giving him a leg up--because really
+at the start he was of use to me. I did owe him something....It was at
+his house that I met my wife."
+
+"Aye," said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who
+had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could
+think of no one else in the City whom he desired to see. A call upon
+his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant
+courtesy by those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely
+worth the trouble.
+
+He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch
+of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when
+the whim seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were
+like. After luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from
+St. Giles, through avenues which had not existed in the London of his
+boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials. Here also the landmarks
+seemed all changed, but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and
+disorder to identify the district. He observed it and its inhabitants
+with a certain new curiosity. A notable alteration for the better had
+come over his spirits. It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it
+might be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple, that had
+dissipated his gloom. At all events it was gone--and he strolled along
+in quite placid contentment, taking in the panorama of London's more
+intimate life with the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh
+country eye.
+
+He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the
+spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had
+not supposed it possible to do. He surrendered himself to the experience
+with a novel sense of having found something worth while--and found it,
+moreover, under his very nose. In some dull, meaningless fashion he had
+always known this part of London, and been familiar with its external
+aspects. Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of
+seeing it all in a different way. The objects he beheld, inanimate
+and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. His mind was stirred
+pleasurably by the things they said to him.
+
+He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the
+barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at
+the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their
+shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or
+about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy,
+shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background
+of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown
+theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts,
+sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some
+survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly,
+their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where
+through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse;
+at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to
+him--faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding,
+faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by
+resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it
+were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed
+alive to him before.
+
+Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's
+book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and
+stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident
+that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship.
+It pleased Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and
+pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. He had
+almost the temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and
+see what the lad would do. It was remarkable, he reflected with
+satisfaction--this new capacity within him to find drama in trifles.
+
+There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he
+had had with his sister about the sign overhead. He stepped back a
+few paces and looked up at it. There were the old words--"Thorpe,
+Bookseller"--right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a
+novel prominence. Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been
+repainted. At this he laughed aloud. The details of the episode came
+back to him now. For some reason, or no reason at all--he could not now
+imagine what on earth could have prompted him--he had last spring caused
+his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney, should
+be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. It was to Julia that he
+had confided this mission, and it was Julia who, in a round-about
+way, had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do
+nothing of the sort. He laughed again at the added defiance that this
+refurbishing of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly
+as he entered the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.
+
+She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he
+could remember her--tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling
+as it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. Her long,
+mannish countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence,
+when she recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was
+pleased or otherwise. In their infrequent latter-day encounters he had
+dropped the habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in
+her manner of expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now--but upon
+a sudden impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt
+waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.
+
+Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his
+embrace, was plain enough. "Well!" she exclaimed vaguely, and then
+looked at him. "You're getting fatter."
+
+"No I'm not," he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an
+important topic. "People think I am--but it's merely the looseness of
+these clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last."
+
+The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this
+last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. "Let's
+see--that was just before Christmas, wasn't it?" he said.
+
+"Something like that," she responded. "You were going to get married
+in a week or two, I remember, and THAT was in January, wasn't it? I was
+taking stock, I know."
+
+He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his
+marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday,
+and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic
+life, annoyed him afresh. "You're an awful goat, not to come near us,"
+he felt impelled, in brotherly frankness, to tell her.
+
+She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which
+it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. "I
+thought that was all settled and done with long ago," she said, moodily.
+
+"Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou," he observed, with reassuring
+kindness of tone. "I never felt so much like being nice to you in my
+life."
+
+She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new
+fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
+
+"Julia and Alfred all right?" he queried, cheerfully.
+
+"I daresay," she made brief answer.
+
+"But they write to you, don't they?"
+
+"SHE does--sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well, from
+what she says."
+
+"She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters," he told her, in
+tones of confidential reproach.
+
+"Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say," she
+answered, as if the explanation were ample.
+
+The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf,
+where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental
+student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable
+pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and
+occupation of a home of her own. They had taken a house for the summer
+and autumn, and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for
+the winter.
+
+"What I would really have liked," Thorpe confided to his sister now,
+"was to have had them both live with me. They would have been as welcome
+as the day is long. I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if
+he's set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad. Even the best
+English artists, he says, do that at the beginning. So it was all right
+for him to go. But Julia--it was different with her--I was rather keen
+about her staying. My wife was just as keen as I was. She took the
+greatest fancy to Julia from the very start--and so far as I could
+see, Julia liked her all right. In fact, I thought Julia would want to
+stay--but somehow she didn't."
+
+"She always spoke very highly of your wife," Mrs. Dabney affirmed with
+judicial fairness. "I think she does like her very much."
+
+"Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those Dutchmen
+for, when one of the best houses in England was open to her?" Thorpe
+demanded.
+
+"You mustn't ask me," her mother responded. Her tone seemed to carry
+the suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's
+interests.
+
+"I don't believe you know any more about it than I do," was his
+impulsive comment.
+
+"I daresay not," she replied, with indifference. "Probably she didn't
+fancy living in so big a house--although heaven knows her ideas are big
+enough about most things."
+
+"Did she say so?" Thorpe asked abruptly.
+
+The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. "She didn't
+say anything to me about it, one way or the other. I formed my own
+impressions--that's all. It's a free country. Everybody can form their
+impressions."
+
+"I wish you'd tell me what you really think," Thorpe urged her, mildly
+persuasive. "You know how fond I am of Julia, and how little I want to
+do her an injustice."
+
+"Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way," Louisa observed, vaguely. "If you ask
+me plain, I think it was dull for her."
+
+"Well," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "I shouldn't be surprised if it
+was. I hadn't thought of that. But still--why she and my wife could be
+company for each other."
+
+"You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey," she told him,
+in an unexpected flight of metaphor. "Two women cooped up in a lonesome
+country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself
+would be--but not much. It's none of my business--but how your wife must
+hate it!"
+
+He laughed easily. "Ah, that's where you're wrong," he said. "She
+doesn't care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy
+about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting
+the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating
+apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do
+you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the
+amaryllises--and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you
+like. Well, that's her passion. That's what she really loves."
+
+"That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,"
+Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother
+she went on. "Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four
+customers--ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title,
+too--and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when
+they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to
+me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart
+doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all
+day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own
+way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to
+occupy themselves with--and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd even
+do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank God I don't!"
+
+"That's because you don't know anything about the country," he told her,
+but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in
+his own ears. "All you know outside of London is Margate."
+
+"I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer," she informed him,
+crushingly.
+
+Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. "I know what you mean, Lou," he
+said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. "I suppose there's a
+good deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you
+have too much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never
+occurred to me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is
+there to do? We tried a house in London, during the Season----"
+
+"Yes, I saw in the papers you were here," she said impassively, in
+comment upon his embarrassed pause.
+
+"I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see
+me"--he explained with a certain awkwardness--"but bye-gones are all
+bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one
+endless procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties;
+we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well
+there you are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfordshire, and it's
+stupid here. Of course one can travel abroad, but that's no good
+for more than a few months. Of course it would be different if I had
+something to do. I tell you God's truth, Lou--sometimes I feel as if I
+was really happier when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot--I really
+wasn't--but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was."
+
+She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. "Didn't it ever occur
+to you to do some good with your money?" she said, with slow bluntness.
+Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: "I
+don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes;
+we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while
+we were doing it--but I mean outside, in the world at large."
+
+"What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't make it; I'm
+not responsible for it." He muttered the phrases lightly enough, but a
+certain fatuity in them seemed to attract his attention when he heard
+their sound. "I've given between five and six thousand pounds to London
+hospitals within the present year," he added, straightening himself. "I
+wonder you didn't see it. It was in all the papers."
+
+"Hospitals!"
+
+It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her voice imported into
+the word. He looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and then took in the
+impression that she was upon a subject which exceptionally interested
+her. Certainly the display of something approaching animation in her
+glance and manner was abnormal.
+
+"I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'" she reminded him, still with a
+vibration of feeling in her tone. "You must live in the country, if
+you think London hospitals are deserving objects. They couldn't fool
+Londoners on that point, not if they had got the Prince to go on his
+hands and knees. And you give a few big cheques to them," she went on,
+meditatively, "and you never ask how they're managed, or what rings are
+running them for their own benefit, or how your money is spent--and you
+think you've done a noble, philanthropic thing! Oh no--I wasn't talking
+about humbug charity. I was talking about doing some genuine good in the
+world."
+
+He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat back with a
+smile. "All right," he said, genially. "What do you propose?"
+
+"I don't propose anything," she told him, after a moment's hesitation.
+"You must work that out for yourself. What might seem important to
+me might not interest you at all--and if you weren't interested you
+wouldn't do anything. But this I do say to you, Joel--and I've said it
+to myself every day for this last year or more, and had you in mind all
+the time, too--if I had made a great fortune, and I sat about in
+purple and fine linen doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and
+selfishness, letting my riches accumulate and multiply themselves
+without being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look my
+fellow-creatures in the face! You were born here. You know what London
+slums are like. You know what Clare Market was like--it's bad enough
+still--and what the Seven Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places
+round here are like to this day. That's only within a stone's throw.
+Have you seen Charles Booth's figures about the London poor? Of course
+you haven't--and it doesn't matter. You KNOW what they are like. But you
+don't care. The misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two
+or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your
+money-bags and smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for
+a brother!"
+
+"Well, I'm damned!" was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this
+outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. "Since
+when have you been taken this way?" he asked at last, mechanically
+jocular.
+
+"That's all right," she declared with defensive inconsequence. "It's the
+way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning."
+
+He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for
+demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked
+about in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was
+to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he
+had been conscious.
+
+"How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too--from the
+beginning?" he demanded of her, almost with truculence. "You say I sit
+on my money-bags and smile--you abuse me with doing no good with my
+money--how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this
+while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did
+believe in me!"
+
+She sniffed at him. "I don't believe in you now, at all events," she
+said, bluntly.
+
+He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. "Why, this very
+day"--he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming
+up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his
+brain--"this whole day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground
+you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and
+alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the
+things they buy and the way they live--and thinking out my plans for
+doing something. I don't claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more
+than what a man in my position ought to do. But I own that to come in,
+actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's
+own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the
+rest of it--I must say, that's a bit rum."
+
+Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected
+to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown
+with which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after
+some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to
+avoid offense. "It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if
+you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. You're too
+used to it for that."
+
+He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his assurances than
+this--but after all, one did not look to Louisa for enthusiasms. The
+depth of feeling she had disclosed on this subject of London's poor
+still astonished him, but principally now because of its unlikely
+source. If she had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed
+disposition, he could have understood it. But she had been always the
+hard, dry, unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself
+to be a volatile and even sentimental person. If she had such views
+as these, it became clear to him that his own views were even much
+advanced.
+
+"It's a tremendous subject," he said, with loose largeness of manner.
+"Only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. The
+only way is to start with the understanding that something is going
+to be done. No matter how many difficulties there are in the way,
+SOMETHING'S GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out with that, why
+then he can fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or
+bend them to suit his purpose, and accomplish something."
+
+Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with--yet
+somehow remained, if not skeptical, then passively unconvinced. "What
+are your plans?" she asked him.
+
+"Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything," he told her, with prepared
+readiness. "It isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked
+theories and limited information. Great results, permanent results, are
+never obtained that way."
+
+"I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing."
+
+"Oh, nothing like it in the least," he assured her, and made a mental
+note to find out what it was she had referred to.
+
+"The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say," she went on, "but it
+seems to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this
+immense number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their
+pocket. That's where the real mischief lies."
+
+He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then
+something occurred to him. "Look here!" he said. "If you're as keen
+about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and
+devote your time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into
+shape?"
+
+She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to
+her. "It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?"
+she observed.
+
+"No--you've got to promise me now," he told her.
+
+"Well that I won't!" she answered, roundly.
+
+"You'd see the whole--the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?"--he
+scolded at her--"rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness."
+
+"Aha!" she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining
+through the stolidity of her mien. "I knew you were humbugging! If
+you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing
+because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm
+always a goose when I believe what you tell me."
+
+A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. "No you're
+not, Lou," he replied, coaxingly. "I really mean it all--every word of
+it--and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you
+helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?"
+
+She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of
+sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. "I
+don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it," she declared,
+when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it
+had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied
+in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of
+their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their
+perusal--and almost to their endorsement. He had thought during the day
+of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the
+morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time
+he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his
+mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+"I DIDN'T ask your father, after all," was one of the things that
+Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing
+a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark
+with a scant, silent nod.
+
+Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the
+terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day,
+with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had
+glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at
+random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight
+before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and
+yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of
+the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits
+of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to
+induce.
+
+"About your father," he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak
+with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: "I'm afraid
+I annoyed you the other day by what I said."
+
+"I have no recollection of it," she told him, with tranquil politeness,
+over her shoulder.
+
+He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this
+topic. "But I want you to recollect," he said, as he rose to his
+feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her
+attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched
+herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant
+against the parapet.
+
+"I've thought of it a good deal," he went on, in halting explanation.
+His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which
+to define it. "I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't
+want me to do--something that was a good deal more your affair than
+mine--and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to
+do."
+
+Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for
+an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly
+embarrassed as well. "I'm sure you always wish to be nice," she said at
+last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them
+somewhere a perfunctory note.
+
+"Oh--nice!" he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word.
+"Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten
+thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'"
+
+"I withdraw the word immediately--unreservedly," she put in, with a
+smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.
+
+"You laugh at me--whenever I try to talk seriously," he objected.
+
+"I laugh?" she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated
+amazement. "Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how."
+
+"Ah, now we get to it!" he broke out, with energy. "You're really
+feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're
+doing--with the life we're leading--any more than I am. I see that,
+plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea
+that you were enjoying it immensely--the greenhouses and gardens and all
+that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right--that
+told me you hated it?"
+
+"Oh, don't let us talk of him!" Edith exclaimed, swiftly.
+
+Thorpe laughed. "You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him.
+No--it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew
+enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were
+happy here."
+
+"How clever of her!" A certain bantering smile accompanied the words,
+but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity.
+"I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real
+sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live
+with--I daresay all genuine characters are--but she's very real.
+Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy
+talking with her."
+
+"How do you mean?" Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.
+
+"Oh, I often go to her shop--or did when I was in town. I went almost
+immediately after our--our return to England. I was half afraid
+she would recognize me--the portraits in the papers, you know--but
+apparently she didn't. And it's splendid--the way she says absolutely
+nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks
+books are bad she says so. Fancy that!"
+
+He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. "You never mentioned
+to me that you had gone there," he told her, as if in reproach.
+
+"Ah, it was complicated," Edith explained. "She objects to knowing me--I
+think secretly I respect her a great deal for that--and therefore there
+is something clandestine about my getting to know her--and I could not
+be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to
+mention it."
+
+"It isn't that alone," he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer
+voice. "Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the
+difference in the world to me, if--if you were really--actually my other
+half!"
+
+The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to
+impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked
+dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.
+
+"I mean"--all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as
+he progressed--"I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm
+not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the
+start--you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than
+that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy."
+
+"Oh no," she interposed, gently. "It is not the fact that it has made me
+unhappy."
+
+"Well--discontented, then," he resumed, without pause. "Here we are. We
+do the thing we want to do--we make the kind of home for ourselves
+that we've agreed we would like--and then it turns out that somehow it
+doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the
+truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look
+at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of
+us. It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and
+examine frankly in all its bearings--in order to see if we can't better
+it--but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between
+us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy----"
+
+"You use the word again," she reminded him, a wan smile softening her
+protest.
+
+Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her
+glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding
+her.
+
+"Do you tell me that you are happy?" he asked, with sober directness.
+
+She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. "You
+consider only the extremes," she told him. "Between black and white
+there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum,
+in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the
+true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications.
+People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that
+can be said of me is that I may be in the blues--in the light-blues--but
+it is fair to remember that they photograph white."
+
+Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling,
+he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. "That is to
+say"--he began hesitatingly.
+
+"To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy."
+
+"Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?"
+
+The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The
+intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.
+
+"If I could tell myself," she answered him, after an instant's thought,
+"pray believe that I would tell you."
+
+The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily.
+"I want to get nearer to you," he said, with gloom, "and I don't!"
+
+It occurred to her to remark: "You take exception to my phraseology when
+I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean."
+She offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he
+gazed moodily.
+
+"You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me," he was
+suddenly inspired to say. "I can't imagine your applying that word to me
+then in your mind. God knows what it was you did say to yourself about
+me, but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would
+have fitted me then--and now it's the only one you can think of."
+The hint that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries
+enveloping him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke. The year had
+wrought a baffling difference in him. He lacked something now that then
+he had possessed, but he was powerless to define it.
+
+He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm
+to keep her where she lightly rested beside him. "Will you tell me," he
+said, with a kind of sombre gentleness, "what the word is that you would
+have used then? I know you wouldn't--couldn't--have called me 'nice.'
+What would you have called me?"
+
+She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and
+stood erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his
+fingers. "I suppose," she said, musingly--"I suppose I should have said
+'powerful' or 'strong.'" Then she released her arm, and in turn moved to
+the parapet.
+
+"And I am weak now--I am 'nice,'" he reflected, mechanically.
+
+In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon,
+there was something pensive, even sad. She did not speak at once, and as
+he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering.
+A new sense of her great beauty came to him--and with it a hint that
+for the instant at least her guard was down. He sprang to his feet, and
+stood beside her.
+
+"You ARE going to be open with me--Edith!" he pleaded, softly.
+
+She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation.
+"Oh, what is there to say?" she demanded, in a tone which was almost a
+wail. "It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you."
+
+"WHAT is not my fault?" he persisted with patient gentleness.
+
+Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon
+her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. "It is a mistake--a
+blunder," she began, hurriedly. "I take it all upon my own shoulders.
+I was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment--more good
+sense!"
+
+"You are not telling me, are you," he asked with gravity, "that you are
+sorry you married me?"
+
+"Is either of us glad?" she retorted, breathlessly. "What is there to be
+glad about? You are bored to death--you confess it. And I--well, it is
+not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach
+you."
+
+"No, you keep saying that," he observed, with gloomy slowness of
+utterance. "But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as
+well have it out."
+
+"Yes," she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his
+with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. "I married one
+man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another
+because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am.
+There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am
+his daughter; that explains everything."
+
+The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect
+upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new
+personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced
+cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a
+woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all--a woman to whom he could
+talk on terms of intimacy.
+
+"Rubbish!" he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal
+smile. "You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply
+came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would
+have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence."
+
+To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of
+answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action
+too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.
+
+"The trouble has been," he declared, "that I've been too much afraid of
+you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am,
+that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right
+enough now. You ARE finer than I am--God knows there's no dispute about
+that--but that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands
+off!' all around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the
+cheek to capture you and carry you off--and I ought to have had the
+pluck to make you love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm
+going to do!"
+
+To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to
+gaze with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread
+below them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and
+then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say
+that there was any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm
+to himself with new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small
+head at his shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn softly
+over the temples, and its glimpse of the matchless profile inclined
+beneath--that it was all right.
+
+He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience, for her to speak. The
+mere fact that she stood beneath his engirdling arm, and gave no thought
+to the potential servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present
+happiness. He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his
+terrace with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest view in
+England--and something much more than that beside.
+
+At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud--a silvery, amused little laugh
+under her breath. "How comedy and tragedy tread forever on each other's
+heels!" she remarked. Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon
+reflection he did not wholly like her words.
+
+"There wasn't any tragedy," he said, "and there isn't any comedy."
+
+She laughed again. "Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal to your sense
+of humour!" she urged, with mock fervour.
+
+Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this, that she seemed
+touched by his mood. Without stirring from his hold, she lifted her
+face. "Don't think I'm hateful," she bade him, and her eyes were very
+kind. "There's more truth in what you've been saying than even you
+imagine. It really wasn't the money--or I mean it might easily have been
+the same if there had been no money. But how shall I explain it? I am
+attracted by a big, bold, strong pirate, let us say, but as soon as
+he has carried me off--that is the phrase for it--then he straightway
+renounces crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. My
+buccaneer transforms himself, under my very eyes, into an alderman! Do
+you say there is no comedy in that--and tragedy too?"
+
+"Oh, put it that way and it's all right," he declared, after a moment's
+consideration. "I've got as much fun in me as anybody else," he went
+on, "only your jokes have a way of raising blisters on me, somehow.
+But that's all done with now. That's because I didn't know you--was
+frightened of you. But I aint scared any more. Everything is different!"
+
+With a certain graciousness of lingering movement, she withdrew herself
+from his clasp, and faced him with a doubtful smile. "Ah, don't be too
+sure," she murmured.
+
+"Everything is different!" he repeated, with confident emphasis. "Don't
+you see yourself it is?"
+
+"You say it is," she replied, hesitatingly, "but that alone doesn't make
+it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it."
+
+"Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that," he broke in
+triumphantly. "We've been standing off with one another. We've been
+of no help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over
+everything together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do,
+and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it."
+
+She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. "Don't
+count on me for too much wisdom or invention," she warned him. "If
+things are to be done, you are still the one who will have to do them.
+But undoubtedly you are at your best when you are doing things. This
+really has been no sort of life for you, here."
+
+He gathered her arm into his. "Come and show me your greenhouses," he
+said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. "It'll turn
+out to have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here," he
+continued, as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness
+of new intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his
+tone with buoyancy. "I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and
+getting myself into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In
+every way I'm a better man than I was."
+
+They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached
+now a long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft
+colour--whites, yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds--were
+dimly perceptible.
+
+"The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year," Edith observed,
+as they drew near to the door of this house. "Collins did them very
+badly--as he did most other things. But next year it will be very
+different. Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is
+he in there now, I think."
+
+Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions
+stirred by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.
+
+"Gafferson?" he asked her, with a blank countenance.
+
+"My new head-gardener," she explained. "He was at Hadlow, and after poor
+old Lady Plowden died--why, surely you remember him there. You spoke
+about him--you'd known him somewhere--in the West Indies, wasn't it?"
+
+He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied. "Did I?" he
+mumbled automatically.
+
+Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. "I've got a
+kind of headache coming on," he said. "If you don't mind, we won't go
+inside among the flowers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts of the great
+gardens, as the first shadows of evening began to dull the daylight.
+For a long time he moved aimlessly about, sick at heart and benumbed of
+mind, in the stupid oppression of a bad dream.
+
+There ran through all his confused thoughts the exasperating
+consciousness that it was nonsense to be frightened, or even disturbed;
+that, in truth, nothing whatever had happened. But he could not lay hold
+of it to any comforting purpose. Some perverse force within him insisted
+on raising new phantoms in his path, and directing his reluctant gaze
+to their unpleasant shapes. Forgotten terrors pushed themselves upon his
+recollection. It was as if he stood again in the Board Room, with the
+telegram telling of old Tavender's death in his hands, waiting to hear
+the knock of Scotland Yard upon the door.
+
+The coming of Gafferson took on a kind of supernatural aspect, when
+Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which
+had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the
+very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed
+a vivid picture of that approach--of the old ramshackle village trap,
+and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent,
+red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively
+suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now
+that he had at the time discerned a certain fateful quality in the
+apparition. And he and his wife had actually been talking of old Kervick
+at the moment! It was their disagreement over him which had prevented
+her explaining about the new head-gardener. There was an effect of the
+uncanny in all this.
+
+And what did Gafferson want? How much did he know? The idea that perhaps
+old Kervick had found him out, and patched up with him a scheme of
+blackmail, occurred to him, and in the unreal atmosphere of his mood,
+became a thing of substance. With blackmail, however, one could always
+deal; it was almost a relief to see the complication assume that guise.
+But if Gafferson was intent upon revenge and exposure instead? With such
+a slug-like, patient, tenacious fool, was that not more likely?
+
+Reasonable arguments presented themselves to his mind ever and again:
+his wife had known of Gafferson's work, and thought highly of it, and
+had been in a position to learn of his leaving Hadlow. What more natural
+than that she should hasten to employ him? And what was it, after all,
+that Gafferson could possibly know or prove? His brother-in-law had gone
+off, and got too drunk to live, and had died. What in the name of all
+that was sensible had this to do with Thorpe? Why should it even
+be supposed that Gafferson associated Thorpe with any phase of the
+business? And if he had any notion of a hostile movement, why should he
+have delayed action so long? Why indeed!
+
+Reassurance did not come to him, but at last an impulse to definite
+action turned his footsteps toward the cluster of greenhouses in the
+deepening shadow of the mansion. He would find Gafferson, and probe this
+business to the uttermost. If there was discoverable in the man's manner
+or glance the least evidence of a malevolent intention--he would know
+what to do. Ah, what was it that he would do? He could not say, beyond
+that it would be bad for Gafferson. He instinctively clenched the
+fists in the pockets of his jacket as he quickened his pace. Inside the
+congeries of glazed houses he was somewhat at sea. It was still light
+enough to make one's way about in the passages between the stagings, but
+he had no idea of the general plan of the buildings, and it seemed to
+him that he frequently got back to places he had traversed before. There
+were two or three subordinate gardeners in or about the houses, but
+upon reflection he forbore to question them. He tried to assume an
+idly indifferent air as he sauntered past, nodding almost imperceptible
+acknowledgment of the forefingers they jerked upward in salutation.
+
+He came at last upon a locked door, the key of which had been removed.
+The fact vaguely surprised him, and he looked with awakened interest
+through the panes of this door. The air inside seemed slightly
+thickened--and then his eye caught the flicker of a flame, straight
+ahead. It was nothing but the fumigation of a house; the burning spirits
+in the lamp underneath the brazier were filling the structure with
+vapours fatal to all insect life. In two or three hours the men would
+come and open the doors and windows and ventilate the place. The
+operation was quite familiar to him; it had indeed interested him more
+when he first saw it done than had anything else connected with the
+greenhouses.
+
+His abstracted gaze happened to take note of the fact that the door-key
+was hanging on a nail overhead, and then suddenly this seemed to be
+related to something else in his thoughts--some obscure impression
+or memory which evaded him. Continuing to look at the key, a certain
+recollection all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it came
+to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they were using warned
+people against exposing themselves to its fumes more than was absolutely
+necessary. That meant, of course, that their full force would kill a
+human being. It was very interesting. He looked through the glass again,
+but could not see that the air was any thicker. The lamp still burned
+brightly.
+
+He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron, at the
+further end of the palm-house he was in, doing something to a plant.
+Thorpe noted the fact that he felt no surprise in seeing that it was
+Gafferson. Somehow the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading
+flame inside the locked door, seemed to have prepared him for the
+spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. He moved forward slowly toward the
+head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at
+each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into
+non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house,
+and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. The men
+when they came back would find him there. But ah! they would know that
+they had not left him there; they would have seen him outside, no doubt,
+after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key could be left in the
+unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had rashly entered, and
+been overcome by the vapours. He approached the man silently, his brain
+arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.
+
+Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost
+exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was
+to be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his
+wife talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have
+a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of
+conversation. Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole
+household into confusion. And its effect upon his wife!--the progress
+of his thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the
+shock such a catastrophe might involve to her--or at the best, of the
+gross unpleasantness she would find in it--flashed over his mind, and
+then yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this
+meant to him. It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. A
+profoundly tender desire for her happiness was in complete possession.
+Already the notion of doing anything to wound or grieve her appeared
+incredible to him.
+
+"Well, Gafferson," he heard himself saying, in one of the more reserved
+tones of his patriarchal manner. He had halted close to the inattentive
+man, and stood looking down upon him. His glance was at once tolerant
+and watchful.
+
+Gafferson slowly rose from his slouching posture, surveyed the other
+while his faculties in leisurely fashion worked out the problem of
+recognition, aud then raised his finger to his cap-brim. "Good-evening,
+sir," he said.
+
+This gesture of deference was eloquently convincing. Thorpe, after an
+instant's alert scrutiny, smiled upon him. "I was glad to hear that you
+had come to us," he said with benevolent affability. "We shall expect
+great things of a man of your reputation."
+
+"It'll be a fair comfort, sir," the other replied, "to be in a place
+where what one does is appreciated. What use is it to succeed in
+hybridizing a Hippeastrum procera with a Pancratium Amancaes, after
+over six hundred attempts in ten years, and then spend three years
+a-hand-nursing the seedlings, and then your master won't take enough
+interest in the thing to pay your fare up to London to the exhibition
+with 'em? That's what 'ud break any man's heart."
+
+"Quite true," Thorpe assented, with patrician kindliness. "You need fear
+nothing of that sort here, Gafferson. We give you a free hand. Whatever
+you want, you have only to let us know. And you can't do things too well
+to please us." "Thank you, sir," said Gafferson, and really, as Thorpe
+thought about it, the interview seemed at an end.
+
+The master turned upon his heel, with a brief, oblique nod over his
+shoulder, and made his way out into the open air. Here, as he walked,
+he drew a succession of long consolatory breaths. It was almost as if
+he had emerged from the lethal presence of the fumigator itself. He took
+the largest cigar from his case, lighted it, and sighed smoke-laden new
+relief as he strolled back toward the terrace.
+
+But a few minutes before he had been struggling helplessly in the coils
+of an evil nightmare. These terrors seemed infinitely far behind him
+now. He gave an indifferent parting glance backward at them, as one
+might over his after-breakfast cigar at the confused alarms of an early
+awakening hours before. There was nothing worth remembering--only the
+shapeless and foolish burden of a bad dream.
+
+The assurance rose within him that he was not to have any more such
+trouble. With a singular clearness of mental vision he perceived that
+the part of him which brought bad dreams had been sloughed off, like a
+serpent's skin. There had been two Thorpes, and one of them--the Thorpe
+who had always been willing to profit by knavery, and at last in a
+splendid coup as a master thief had stolen nearly a million, and would
+have shrunk not at all from adding murder to the rest, to protect that
+plunder--this vicious Thorpe had gone away altogether. There was no
+longer a place for him in life; he would never be seen again by
+mortal eye....There remained only the good Thorpe, the pleasant,
+well-intentioned opulent gentleman; the excellent citizen; the
+beneficent master, to whom, even Gafferson like the others, touched a
+respectful forelock.
+
+It passed in the procession of his reverie as a kind of triumph of
+virtue that the good Thorpe retained the fortune which the bad Thorpe
+had stolen. It was in all senses a fortunate fact, because now it would
+be put to worthy uses. Considering that he had but dimly drifted
+about heretofore on the outskirts of the altruistic impulse, it was
+surprisingly plain to him now that he intended to be a philanthropist.
+Even as he mentioned the word to himself, the possibilities suggested
+by it expanded in his thoughts. His old dormant, formless lust for power
+stirred again in his pulses. What other phase of power carried with it
+such rewards, such gratitudes, such humble subservience on all sides
+as far as the eye could reach--as that exercised by the intelligently
+munificent philanthropist?
+
+Intelligence! that was the note of it all. Many rich people dabbled at
+the giving of money, but they did it so stupidly, in such a slip-shod
+fashion, that they got no credit for it. Even millionaires more or less
+in public life, great newspaper-owners, great brewer-peers, and the
+like, men who should know how to do things well, gave huge sums in bulk
+for public charities, such as the housing of the poor, and yet contrived
+somehow to let the kudos that should have been theirs evaporate. He
+would make no such mistake as that.
+
+It was easy enough to see wherein they erred. They gave superciliously,
+handing down their alms from a top lofty altitude of Tory superiority,
+and the Radicals down below sniffed or growled even while they
+grudgingly took these gifts--that was all nonsense. These aristocratic
+or tuft-hunting philanthropists were the veriest duffers. They laid out
+millions of pounds in the vain attempt to secure what might easily
+be had for mere thousands, if they went sensibly to work. Their vast
+benefactions yielded them at the most bare thanks, or more often no
+thanks at all, because they lacked the wit to lay aside certain little
+trivial but annoying pretensions, and waive a few empty prejudices.
+They went on, year after year, tossing their fortunes into a sink of
+contemptuous ingratitude, wondering feebly why they were not beloved in
+return. It was because they were fools. They could not, or they would
+not, understand the people they sought to manipulate.
+
+What could not a man of real brain, of real breadth and energy and force
+of character, do in London with two hundred thousand pounds? Why, he
+could make himself master of the town! He could break into fragments the
+political ascendency of the snob, "semi-detached" villa classes, in half
+the Parliamentary divisions they now controlled. He could reverse
+the partisan complexion of the Metropolitan delegation, and lead to
+Westminster a party of his own, a solid phalanx of disciplined men,
+standing for the implacable Democracy of reawakened London. With such a
+backing, he could coerce ministries at will, and remake the politics of
+England. The role of Great Oliver himself was not too hopelessly beyond
+the scope of such a vision.
+
+Thorpe threw his cigar-end aside, and then noted that it was almost
+dark. He strode up to the terrace two steps at a time, and swung along
+its length with a vigour and exhilaration of movement he had not known,
+it seemed to him, for years. He felt the excitement of a new incentive
+bubbling in his veins.
+
+"Her Ladyship is in her sitting-room, sir," a domestic replied to his
+enquiry in the hall. The title arrested his attention from some
+fresh point of view, and he pondered it, as he made his way along the
+corridor, and knocked at a door. At the sound of a voice he pushed open
+the door, and went in.
+
+Lady Cressage, looking up, noted, with aroused interest, a marked change
+in his carriage. He stood aggressively erect, his big shoulders squared,
+and his head held high. On his massive face there was the smile, at once
+buoyant and contained, of a strong man satisfied with himself.
+
+Something impelled her to rise, and to put a certain wistfulness of
+enquiry into her answering smile.
+
+"Your headache is better then?" she asked him.
+
+He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. "Oh--yes," he
+answered. Advancing, he caught her suddenly, almost vehemently, in his
+arms, aud covered the face that was perforce upturned with kisses. When
+she was released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting
+and flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes, in which
+mystification was mellowed by the gleam of not-displeased curiosity, he
+preferred a request which completed her bewilderment.
+
+"Mrs. Thorpe," he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with
+his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words--"would you mind if
+we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little
+breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead of the big place?"
+
+"Why, not at all, if you wish it," she answered readily enough, but
+viewing him still with a puzzled glance.
+
+"I'm full of new ideas," he explained, impulsively impatient of the
+necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. "I see great things
+ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if
+I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time
+and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. You don't
+know what it means to me to have something to do. It makes another man
+of me, just to think about it. Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a
+thing that can be done, and by God! I'm going to do it!"
+
+She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the
+man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through
+the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large
+features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance
+as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a
+conqueror--of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his
+fellows, the appetites, energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast
+of prey. Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the
+frank barbarism of power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to
+her that something more was to be read in this look; there was in it a
+reservation of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for
+her special self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces
+and devour others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love
+with all his strength. An involuntary trembling thrill ran through
+her--and then she smiled up at him.
+
+"What is it you're going to do?" she asked him, mechanically. Her mind
+roved far afield.
+
+"Rule England!" he told her with gravity.
+
+For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in
+the statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his
+refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what
+would be impossible to him.
+
+She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of
+good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before.
+"Delightful," she said gayly. "But I'm not sure that I quite understand
+the--the precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room
+with the project." He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in
+which she took him. "Just a whim," he explained. "The things I've got
+in mind don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and
+men standing about. What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug
+little evening with you alone, where I can talk to you and--and we can
+be together by ourselves. You'd like it, wouldn't you?"
+
+She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarrassment in her
+mantling colour and down-spread lashes. It had always to his eyes been,
+from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the
+world--exquisitely matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene
+yet sensitive grace. But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that
+there could come to it, this crowning added loveliness of feminine
+confusion.
+
+"You would like it, wouldn't you?" he repeated in a lower, more
+strenuous tone.
+
+She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his
+shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming.
+She swayed rather than stepped toward him.
+
+"I think," she answered, in a musing murmur,--"I think I shall
+like--everything."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+THORPE found the Duke of Glastonbury a much more interesting person
+to watch and to talk with, both during the dinner Saturday evening and
+later, than he had anticipated.
+
+He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature,
+but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had
+a distinction of its own. His face, with its little black moustache
+and large dark eyes, was fine upon examination, but in some elusively
+foreign way. There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked.
+His speech was English enough to the ear, it was true, but it was the
+considered English of a book, and its phrases had a deftness which was
+hardly native. He looked, if not a sad young man, then one conscious
+always of sufficient reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time, to
+see that the mood beneath was not melancholy. It had even its sprightly
+side, which shone out irregularly in his glance and talk, from a sober
+mean of amiable weariness.
+
+Thorpe knew his extraordinary story--that of a poor tutor, earning his
+living in ignorance of the fact that he had a birthright of any sort,
+who had been miraculously translated into the heir, not only to an
+ancient title but to vast collateral wealth. He had been born and reared
+in France, and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change
+in his affairs had found him out. There was a good deal more to the
+story, including numerous unsavoury legends about people now many years
+dead, and it was impossible to observe the young Duke and not seem to
+perceive signs that he was still nervously conscious of these legends.
+The story of his wife--a serene, grey-eyed, rather silent young person,
+with a pale face of some beauty, and with much purity and intellect--was
+strange enough to match. She also had earned her own living, as a
+private secretary or type-writing girl, or something of the sort, and
+her husband had deliberately chosen her after he had come into his
+title. One might study her very closely, however, and catch no hint that
+these facts in any degree disconcerted her.
+
+Thorpe studied her a good deal, in a furtive way, with a curiosity born
+of his knowledge that the Duke had preferred her, when he might have
+married his widowed cousin, who was now Thorpe's own wife. How he had
+come to know this, he could never have told. He had breathed it in,
+somehow, with the gossip-laden atmosphere of that one London season of
+his. It was patent enough, too, that his wife--his Edith--had not only
+liked this ducal youngster very much, but still entertained toward him
+a considerable affection. She had never dissembled this feeling, and it
+visibly informed her glance and manner now, at her own table, when she
+turned to speak with him, where he sat at her right hand. Thorpe had
+never dreamed of thinking ill of his wife's friendship, even when her
+indifference to what he thought had been most taken for granted. Now
+that this was all changed, and the amazing new glory of a lover had
+enveloped him, he had a distinct delight in watching the myriad charming
+phases of her kind manner, half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the
+grave-faced young man. It was all a part of the delicious change which
+these past few days had wrought in her, this warm and supple softness of
+mien, of eye and smile and voice.
+
+But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could
+have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave
+more attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the
+conversation of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the
+young Duchess beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which
+left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while
+she turned to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the
+Hon. Winifred Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies
+interested him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested
+that it was amusing. He looked from his wife to the Duchess and back
+again, in ever-recurring surprise that the coronet had been carried
+past Edith. And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke, and
+formulated the theory that she must have refused him. No doubt that was
+why she had been sympathetically fond of him ever since, and was being
+so nice to him now. Yes--clearly that was it. He felt upon this that he
+also liked the Duke very much.
+
+It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. Both he and his
+Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even deferentially polite, but
+there was a painstaking effect about it, which, seemingly, they lacked
+the art altogether to conceal. It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests
+unconsciously took their cue from this august couple, and all exposed
+somewhat the effort their civility to him involved. At another time the
+suspicion of this would have stung him. He had only to glance across the
+table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. What other
+people thought of him--how other people liked or disliked him--was of no
+earthly importance. Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel
+from them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull inability
+to read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich
+outsider who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable
+tolerance this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to
+do so, he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and
+the burst of thunder.
+
+The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination, to
+contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. The young man
+seemed both clever and sensible, and in a way impressionable as well.
+Thorpe thought that he would probably have some interesting things to
+say, but still more he thought of him as a likely listener. It would be
+the easier to detach him from the company, since the occasion was one
+of studied informality. The Duke did not go about in society, in the
+ordinary sense of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe to
+meet a large party. He was here as a kinsman and friend of his hostess
+for a quiet week; and the few other guests fitted readily enough into
+the picture of a family gathering. The spirit of domesticity had indeed
+so obviously descended upon the little group in the drawing-room, an
+hour or so after dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural thing to
+put his arm through that of the Duke and lead him off to his personal
+smoking-room. He even published his intention by audibly bidding the
+Hon. Balder Plowden to remain with the ladies.
+
+When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the
+host had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in
+the matter of large rich cigars, a brief silence ensued.
+
+"I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject," Thorpe was
+inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries aside. "If a man of
+fortune wishes to do genuine good with his money, here in England, how
+should he best go about it?"
+
+The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash of surprise on
+his dark, mobile face. He hesitated a moment, and smiled a little. "You
+ask of me the sum of human wisdom," he said. "It is the hardest of all
+problems; no one solves it."
+
+Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly. "That's all the more reason
+why it ought to be solved," he declared, with slow emphasis.
+
+The other expressed by look and tone an augmented consciousness of the
+unexpected. "I did not know," he remarked cautiously, "that this was a
+matter in which you were specially concerned. It pleases me very much to
+hear it. Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have as many
+as possible turning the problem over in their minds."
+
+"Oh, but I'm going to solve it!" Thorpe told him, with round confidence.
+
+The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. "Do not think
+me a cynic," he began at last. "You are a man of affairs; you have made
+your own way; you should be even more free from illusions than I am.
+If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one
+to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional
+importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me.
+I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs
+as we think it has--for that matter, if it has any power at all.
+The shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the
+moment--change it about and alter it in many ways--but its effect is
+only temporary. As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms
+rearrange themselves as they were before, and the old conditions return.
+I think the only force which really makes any permanent difference is
+character--and yet about even that I am not sure. The best man I have
+ever known--and in many respects the ablest--devoted untold energy and
+labour, and much money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in
+Somerset, on land of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and
+worked out. Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his
+System?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head.
+
+"He had worked tremendously for years at it. He fell ill and went
+away--and in a day all the results of his labours and outlay were flat
+on the ground. The property is mine now, and it is farmed and managed
+again in the ordinary way, and really the people there seem already
+to have forgotten that they had a prophet among them. The marvelous
+character of the man--you look in vain for any sign of an impress that
+it left upon them. I never go there. I cannot bear those people. I have
+sometimes the feeling that if it were feasible I should like to oppress
+them in some way--to hurt them."
+
+"Oh! 'the people' are hogs, right enough," Thorpe commented genially,
+"but they ARE 'the people,' and they're the only tools we've got to work
+with to make the world go round."
+
+"But if you leave the world alone," objected the Duke, "it goes round
+of itself. And if you don't leave it alone, it goes round just the
+same, without any reference whatever to your exertions. Some few men are
+always cleverer or noisier or more restless than the others, and
+their activity produces certain deviations and peculiarities in their
+generation. The record of these--generally a very faulty and foolish
+record--we call history. We say of these movements in the past that some
+of them were good and some were bad. Our sons very likely will differ
+totally from us about which were good and which were bad; quite
+possibly, in turn, their sons may agree with us. I do not see that it
+matters. We cannot treat anything as final--except that the world goes
+round. We appear out of the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried
+across and pitched off into the darkness at the other edge of it. We are
+certain about nothing else."
+
+"Except that some of us have to pay for our ride, and others don't," put
+in Thorpe. The tone in which he spoke made his meaning so clear that his
+Grace sat up.
+
+"Ah, you think we do not pay?" he queried, his countenance brightening
+with the animation of debate. "My dear sir, we pay more than anyone
+else. Our fares are graduated, just as our death-duties are. No doubt
+there are some idle and stupid, thick-skinned rich fellows, who escape
+the ticket-collector. But for each of them there are a thousand idle
+poor fellows who do the same. You, for example, are a man of large
+wealth. I, for my sins, carry upon my back the burden of a prodigious
+fortune. Could we not go out now, and walk down the road to your nearest
+village, and find in the pub, there a dozen day-labourers happier than
+we are? Why--it is Saturday night. Then I will not say a dozen, but
+as many as the tap will hold. It is not the beer alone that makes them
+happy. Do not think that. It is the ability to rest untroubled,
+the sense that till Monday they have no more responsibility than a
+tree-toad. Does the coming of Sunday make that difference to you or to
+me? When night comes, does it mean to us that we are to sleep off into
+oblivion all we have done that day, and begin life afresh next morning?
+No-o! We are the tired people; the load is never lifted from our backs.
+Ah, do we not pay indeed!"
+
+"Oh-ho!" ejaculated Thorpe. He had been listening with growing
+astonishment to the other's confession. He was still surprised as he
+spoke, but a note of satisfaction mounted into his voice as he went on.
+"You are unhappy, too! You are a young man, in excellent health; you
+have the wife you want; you understand good tobacco; you have a son.
+That is a great deal--but my God! think what else you've got. You're the
+Duke of Glastonbury--one of the oldest titles in England. You're one of
+the richest men in the country--the richest in the old peerage, at any
+rate, I'm told. And YOU'RE not happy!"
+
+The other smiled. "Ah, the terms and forms survive," he said, with a
+kind of pedagogic affability, "after the substance has disappeared.
+The nobleman, the prince, was a great person in the times when he
+monopolized wealth. It enabled him to monopolize almost everything
+else that was pleasant or superb. He had the arts and the books and the
+musicians and the silks and velvets, and the bath-tubs--everything that
+made existence gorgeous--all to himself. He had war to amuse himself
+with, and the seven deadly sins. The barriers are down now. Everything
+which used to be exclusively the nobleman's is now within everybody's
+reach, including the sins. And it is not only that others have levelled
+up to him; they have levelled him down. He cannot dress now more
+expensively than other people. Gambling used to be recognized as one of
+his normal relaxations, but now, the higher his rank, the more sharply
+he is scolded for it. Naturally he does not know what to do with
+himself. As an institution, he descends from a period when the only
+imaginable use for wealth was to be magnificent with it. But now in this
+business age, where the recognized use of wealth is to make more
+wealth, he is so much out of place that he has even forgotten how to
+be magnificent. There are some illustrated articles in one of the
+magazines, giving photographs of the great historic country-houses of
+England. You should see the pictures of the interiors. The furniture and
+decorations are precisely what a Brixton dressmaker would buy, if she
+suddenly came into some money."
+
+"All the same," Thorpe stuck to his point, "you are not happy."
+
+The Duke frowned faintly, as if at the other's persistency. Then he
+shrugged his shoulders and answered in a lighter tone. "It hardly
+amounts to that, I think. I confess that there are alleviations to
+my lot. In the opinion of the world I am one of its most fortunate
+citizens--and it is not for me to say that the world is altogether
+wrong. The chief point is--I don't know if you will quite follow
+me--there are limits to what position and fortune can give a man. And so
+easily they may deprive him of pleasures which poorer men enjoy! I may
+be wrong, but it seems impossible to me that any rich man who has acres
+of gardens and vineries and glass can get up the same affection for
+it all that the cottager will have for his little flower-plot, that he
+tends with his own hands. One seems outside the realities of life--a
+mere spectator at the show."
+
+"Ah, but why not DO things?" Thorpe demanded of him. "Why merely stand,
+as you say, and look on?"
+
+The other leant his head back again. "Pray what do you recommend?" he
+asked almost listlessly.
+
+"Why--politics, for example."
+
+The Duke nodded, with an air of according to the suggestion a certain
+respect. "Unhappily I am too much of a foreigner," he commented. "I know
+Englishmen and their affairs too imperfectly. Sometime--perhaps."
+
+"And philanthropic work--you don't care about that," pursued the other.
+
+"Oh--we go not so far as that," said his Grace, with a deprecatory wave
+of the hands. "My wife finds many interests in it, only she would not
+like to have you call it philanthropical. She is London-born, and it
+is a great pleasure to her to be of assistance to poorer young women in
+London, who have so little done for them by the community, and can do
+so little for themselves. I am much less skeptical about that particular
+work, I may tell you, than about philanthropy in general. In fact, I am
+quite clear that it is doing good. At least it is doing a kindness, and
+that is a pleasant occupation. We are really not so idle as one might
+think. We work at it a good deal, my wife and I."
+
+"So am I London-born," Thorpe remarked, with a certain irrelevancy.
+After a moment's pause he turned a sharply enquiring glance upon his
+guest. "This thing that you're doing in London--does it give you any
+'pull' there?" "Pull?" repeated the other helplessly.
+
+"If there was something you wanted the people of London to do, would
+they do it for you because of what you've been doing for them--or for
+their girls?"
+
+The Duke looked puzzled for a moment. "But it isn't conceivable that I
+should want London to do anything--unless it might be to consume its own
+smoke," he observed.
+
+"Quite so!" said Thorpe, rising bulkily to his feet, but signifying by a
+gesture that his companion was to remain seated. He puffed at his cigar
+till its tip gleamed angrily through the smoke about him, and moved a
+few steps with his hands in his pockets. "That is what I wanted to get
+at. Now I'm London-born, I've got the town in my blood. The Thorpes have
+been booksellers there for generations. The old name is over the old
+shop still. I think I know what Londoners are like; I ought to. It's my
+belief that they don't want gifts. They'll take 'em, but it isn't what
+they want. They're a trading people--one of the oldest in the world.
+Commercial traditions, the merchant's pride--these are bred in their
+bones. They don't want something for nothing. They like an honest
+bargain--fair on both sides. 'You help me and I'll help you.' And it's
+the only way you can do anything worth doing."
+
+"Well," said the Duke, passively.
+
+Thorpe halted, and still with the cigar between his teeth, looked down
+at him.
+
+"I can go into London, and study out the things that are to be
+done--that need to be done--and divide these into two parts, those that
+belong to private enterprise and those that ought to be done publicly.
+And I can say to Londoners--not in so many words, mind you, but in a way
+the sharper ones will understand: 'Here, you fellows. I'll begin doing
+out of my own pocket one set of these things, and you in turn must put
+yourselves at my back, and stand by me, and put me in a position where
+I can make the Government do this other set of things.' That will appeal
+to them. A poor man couldn't lead them any distance, because he could
+always be killed by the cry that he was filling his pockets. They will
+believe in a man whose ambition is to win an earldom and five thousand
+a year out of politics, but they will stone to death the man who merely
+tries to get a few hundreds a year out of it for his wife and children.
+And a man like you can't do anything in London, because they can't see
+that there's anything you want in return--and besides, in their hearts,
+they don't like your class. Don't forget it! This is the city that
+chopped off the king's head!"
+
+"Ah, but this is also the city," retorted the other, with placid
+pleasure in his argument, "which decked itself in banners and ribbons to
+welcome back the son of that same king. And if you think of it, he was
+rather a quaint thing in sons, too."
+
+"It was the women did that," Thorpe affirmed with readiness. "They get
+their own way once in a while, when the men are tired out, and they have
+their little spell of nonsense and monkey-shines, but it never lasts
+long. Charles II. doesn't matter at all--but take my word for it, his
+father matters a great deal. There was a Thorpe among the judges who
+voted to behead him. I am descended in a straight line from him."
+
+His Grace shrugged his slight shoulders again. "It happens that my
+ancestors had extremely large facilities for doing unpleasant things,
+and, God knows, they did them--but I don't quite see what that goes to
+prove, now."
+
+"No, you don't grasp the idea," said Thorpe, resignedly. After a
+moment's pause he took the cigar from his lips, and straightened himself
+"All the same," he declared roundly, "I am going to do the trick. London
+has been waiting for an organizer--a leader--for a hundred years. The
+right kind of a man, going the right way to work, can stand London on
+its head, as surely as I can burn this cigar. And I'm going to have a
+try at it."
+
+"It is very interesting," remarked the Duke, with vagueness. "But--are
+the ladies waiting for us? And if so, aren't we keeping them up
+unconscionably?"
+
+As if in comment upon his words, there was the sound of a faint rap at
+the door. Then it opened, and through the dense blue haze of the room
+they saw some shadowed forms softly indistinct save where the light from
+the ceiling outside shone down upon a group of coiffured heads. A
+noise of mingled coughing and laughter specifically completed the
+introduction.
+
+"Oh, I'm--it's unendurable in there," spoke the voice of the hostess.
+"We WERE coming in to smoke with you," she called out through the cloud,
+"since you wouldn't stop with us."
+
+"Come along!" answered Thorpe, cheerily. He strode to the end of the
+room and raised a window. From the same corner he turned on some added
+lights.
+
+Under this more effective illumination, the lady of the house advanced,
+with Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred close behind her. "Frank has gone
+to bed," she explained to the Duke, who had risen. Then she turned to
+her husband a bright-eyed glance: "You don't mind--our coming?" she
+asked.
+
+"Mind!" he called out, with robust impressiveness. "Mind!" As if to
+complete the expression of his meaning, he threw his arm loosely
+about her, where she stood, and brought her to his side. They remained
+standing thus, before the fireplace, after the others were all seated.
+
+"Mr. Thorpe has been outlining to me the most wonderful plans," said the
+Duke, looking from one face to another, with a reserved smile. "It
+seems that philanthropy fails unless it is combined with very advanced
+politics. It is a new idea to me--but he certainly states it with
+vigour. Do you understand it, Edith?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly," replied the wife, smilingly. "I am his first convert.
+Behold in me the original disciple."
+
+"The worst of that is," commented Thorpe, with radiant joviality, "she
+would subscribe to any other new doctrine of mine just as readily." He
+tightened the arm encircling her by a perceptible trifle. "Wouldn't you,
+sweetheart?" he demanded.
+
+She seemed in nowise embarrassed by these overt endearments.
+There was indeed the dimmest suggestion in her face and voice of a
+responsive mood. "Really," she began, with a soft glance,
+half-deprecation, half-pride, bent upon the others, and with thoughtful
+deliberation,--"really the important thing is that he should pursue some
+object--have in view something that he is determined to master. Without
+that, he is not contented--not at his best. He should have been a
+soldier. He has a passion for battle in his blood. And now that he sees
+something he is eager to do--I am very glad. It makes it none the less
+acceptable that good is to come from it."
+
+"I still maintain," said Miss Madden, interpolating her words through
+the task of lighting a cigarette, and contriving for them an effect of
+drollery which appealed to Thorpe most of all--"I shall always insist,
+just the same, that crime was his true vocation."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Market-Place by Harold Frederic
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Market-Place, by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+THE MARKET-PLACE
+by Harold Frederic
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+
+
+THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the
+field--sitting alone with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.
+
+His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to
+be somewhat shapeless to the view.  He had a sense
+of fascinated pain when he tried to define to himself
+what its limits would probably be.  Vistas of unchecked,
+expanding conquest stretched away in every direction.
+He held at his mercy everything within sight.  Indeed, it
+rested entirely with him to say whether there should be any
+such thing as mercy at all--and until he chose to utter
+the restraining word the rout of the vanquished would go
+on with multiplying terrors and ruin.  He could crush
+and torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired.
+The responsibility of having to decide when he would stop
+grinding their faces might come to weigh upon him later on,
+but he would not give it room in his mind to-night.
+
+A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself
+out of the flames in the grate.  They were moulded
+in a family likeness, these phantom visages: they were
+all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright. 
+They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself
+above rage and cunning.  Only here and there did he recall
+a name with which to label one of these countenances;
+very few of them raised a memory of individual rancour. 
+The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt,
+but their persecution of him had been impersonal;
+his great revenge was equally so.  As he looked, in truth,
+there was only one face--a composite mask of what he
+had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample
+implacably under foot.  He stared with a conqueror's
+cold frown at it, and gave an abrupt laugh which started
+harsh echoes in the stillness of the Board Room.  Then he
+shook off the reverie, and got to his feet.  He shivered
+a little at the sudden touch of a chill. 
+
+A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the
+table where the two least-considered of his lieutenants,
+the dummy Directors, had left it.  He poured a small quantity
+and sipped it.  During the whole eventful day it had not
+occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat
+liquor seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain. 
+With more deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad,
+floridly-decorated open box beside the bottle, lit it,
+and blew a long draught of smoke thoughtfully through
+his nostrils.  Then he put his hands in his pockets,
+looked again into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile. 
+God in heaven! it was actually true!
+
+This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel
+exhilaration, which yet was not novel.  Upon reflection,
+he perceived that he felt as if he were a boy again--a
+boy excited by pleasure.  It surprised as much as it
+delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy
+of a child.  He caught the inkling of an idea that
+perhaps his years were an illusion.  He had latterly
+been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the grey hairs
+thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him. 
+Now all at once he saw that he was not old at all. 
+The buoyancy of veritable youth bubbled in his veins. 
+He began walking up and down the room, regarding new
+halcyon visions with a sparkling eye.  He was no longer
+conscious of the hated foe beneath his feet; they trod
+instead elastic upon the clouds. 
+
+The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside,
+and of trying a door near by, suddenly caught his attention. 
+He stood still and listened with alertness for a surprised
+instant, then shrugged his shoulders and began moving again.
+It must be nearly seven o'clock; although the allotment
+work had kept the clerks later than usual that day,
+everybody connected with the offices had certainly gone home. 
+He realized that his nerves had played him a trick in
+giving that alarmed momentary start--and smiled almost
+tenderly as he remembered how notable and even glorious
+a warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state.
+They would be all right after a night's real rest.
+He would know how to sleep NOW, thank God!
+
+But yes--there was somebody outside--and this time
+knocking with assurance at the right door, the entrance
+to the outer office.  After a second's consideration,
+he went into this unlighted outer office, and called
+out through the opaque glass an enquiry.  The sound
+of his voice, as it analyzed itself in his own ears,
+seemed unduly peremptory.  The answer which came back
+brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes.  He hurriedly
+unlocked and opened the door.
+
+"I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room,"
+said the newcomer, as he entered.  "I assumed it must be you.
+Hope I don't interrupt anything."
+
+"Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden,"
+replied the other, leading the way back to the inner apartment.
+"In fact, I couldn't have asked anything better."
+
+The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it
+not quite in harmony with this declaration.  He turned,
+under the drop-light overhanging the Board-table, and shook
+hands with his guest, as if to atone for this doubtful accent. 
+"I shake hands with you again," he said, speaking rapidly,
+"because this afternoon it was what you may call formal;
+it didn't count.  And--my God!--you're the man I owe it
+all to."
+
+"Oh, you mustn't go as far as that--even in the absence
+of witnesses," replied Lord Plowden, lightly.  "I'll take
+off my coat for a few minutes," he went on, very much
+at his ease.  "It's hot in here.  It's by the merest
+chance I happened to be detained in the City--and I saw
+your lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity
+whatever for a quiet talk.  No--I won't drink anything
+before dinner, but I'll light a cigar.  I want to say
+to you, Thorpe," he concluded, as he seated himself
+"that I think what you've done is very wonderful.
+The Marquis thinks so too--but I shouldn't like to swear
+that he understands much about it."
+
+The implication that the speaker did understand remained
+in the air like a tangible object.  Thorpe took a chair,
+and the two men exchanged a silent, intent look. 
+Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from the fire,
+pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them
+from above, had for a moment a mysterious something
+in common.  Then the tension of the glance was relaxed--and
+on the instant no two men in London looked less alike. 
+
+Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man.
+Thorpe had even heard him called the handsomest man in
+England--though this seemed in all likelihood an exaggeration. 
+But handsome he undoubtedly was--tall without suggesting
+the thought of height to the observer, erect yet graceful,
+powerfully built, while preserving the effect of slenderness. 
+His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful
+guardsman-type--regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness. 
+When he talked, or followed with interest the talk
+of others, it revealed almost an excess of animation. 
+Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his glance,
+the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows,
+and saw that it was not the guardsman face at all. 
+His skin was fresh-hued, and there was a shade of warm
+brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche, but his hair,
+wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black. 
+There were perceptible veins of grey in it, though he
+had only entered his thirty-fifth year.  He was dressed
+habitually with the utmost possible care. 
+
+The contrast between this personage and the older man
+confronting him was abrupt.  Thorpe was also tall,
+but of a burly and slouching figure.  His face,
+shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard,
+invited no attention.  One seemed always to have known
+this face--thick-featured, immobile, undistinguished.
+Its accessories for the time being were even more than
+ordinarily unimpressive.  Both hair and beard were
+ragged with neglect.  His commonplace, dark clothes
+looked as if he had slept in them.  The hands resting
+on his big knees were coarse in shape, and roughened,
+and ill-kept.
+
+"I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in,
+"he repeated now, speaking with a drag, as of caution,
+on his words.  "Witnesses or no witnesses, I'm anxious
+to have you understand that I realize what I owe to you."
+
+"I only wish it were a great deal more than it is,"
+replied the other, with a frank smile.
+
+"Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands,"
+said Thorpe.
+
+He could hear that there was a kind of reservation
+in his voice; the suspicion that his companion detected
+it embarrassed him.  He found himself in the position
+of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings impelled
+him to be perfectly open.  He paused, and was awkwardly
+conscious of constraint in the silence which ensued. 
+"You are very kind to put it in that way," said Lord Plowden,
+at last.  He seemed also to be finding words for his thoughts
+with a certain difficulty.  He turned his cigar round
+in his white fingers meditatively.  "I gather that your
+success has been complete--as complete as you yourself
+could have desired.  I congratulate you with all my heart."
+
+"No--don't say my success--say our success," put in Thorpe. 
+
+"But, my dear man," the other corrected him, "my interest,
+compared with yours, is hardly more than nominal. 
+I'm a Director, of course, and I'm not displeased
+that my few shares should be worth something instead
+of nothing, but----"
+
+Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands.  "That isn't my
+view of the thing at all.  To be frank, I was turning
+over in my mind, just awhile ago, before you came in,
+some way of arranging all that on a different footing.
+If you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's
+all right."
+
+Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore
+to Lord Plowden his accustomed fluency of speech.
+
+"I came here to say precisely that thing," he began--"that
+I do trust it to you.  We have never had any very definite
+talk on the subject--and pray don't think that I want
+to go into details now.  I'd much rather not, in fact. 
+But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe
+in you.  I feel sure that you are going to go far,
+as the saying is.  Well, I want to tie myself to your star. 
+Do you see what I mean? You are going to be a power
+in finance.  You are going to be able to make and unmake
+men as you choose.  I should be very much obliged indeed
+if you would make me."
+
+Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion
+with what seemed to the other a lethargic gaze.  In truth,
+his mind was toiling with strenuous activity to master,
+in all its bearings, the significance of what had been said. 
+This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye,
+the while he was hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous
+asset which he had never up to that time learned that
+he possessed.  Unconsciously, he dampened the spirits of
+his companion. 
+
+"Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you,"
+Lord Plowden said, growing cool in the face of this slow stare. 
+"I'm asking nothing at all.  I had the impulse to come and
+say to you that you are a great man, and that you've done
+a great thing--and done it, moreover, in a very great way."
+
+"You know how it was done!" The wondering exclamation
+forced itself from Thorpe's unready lips.  He bent
+forward a little, and took a new visual hold, as it were,
+of his companion's countenance.
+
+Lord Plowden smiled.  "Did you think I was such
+a hopeless duffer, then?" he rejoined. 
+
+For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs,
+and patted his knee contentedly.  All at once his face
+had lightened; a genial speculation returned to his
+grey eyes. 
+
+"Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see,"
+he began to explain.  The relief with which he spoke
+was palpable.  "I could not for the life of me make up my
+mind whether to tell you about it or not.  Let's see--this
+is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the scheme
+didn't dawn on me myself until toward evening Tuesday. 
+But yesterday, of course, I could have told you--and again
+this afternoon--but, as I say, I couldn't make up my mind. 
+Once I had it on the tip of my tongue--but somehow I didn't.
+And you--you never gave me a hint that you saw what was
+going on."
+
+Again Lord Plowden smiled.  "I voted with you," he put
+in softly. 
+
+Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar.  "Well, I couldn't have
+asked anything better than this, "he declared once again. 
+"It beats all the rest put together, to my mind."
+
+"Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning," commented the
+other tentatively.
+
+"Why man," Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his
+choice of words, but speaking with evident fervour;
+"I was more anxious about you--and the way you'd take it--
+than about anything else.  I give you my word I was. 
+I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing. 
+You might think that it was all right, and then again
+you might round on me--or no, I don't mean quite that--
+but you might say it wasn't good enough for you, and wash
+your hands of the whole affair.  And I can't tell you what
+a relief it is to find that you--that you're satisfied. 
+Now I can go ahead."
+
+"Ah, yes--ahead," said the younger man, thoughtfully. 
+"Do you mind telling me--you see I'm quite in the dark
+as to details--how much further ahead we are likely
+to go? I comprehend the general nature of our advance--
+but how far off is the goal you have in sight?"
+
+"God knows!" answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of
+excitement in his voice.  "I don't give it any limit.
+I don't see why we should stop at all.  We've got
+them in such a position that--why, good heavens! we
+can squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz."
+He chuckled grimly at the suggestion of his simile. 
+"We'll get more ounces to the ton out of our crushings
+than they ever heard of on the Rand, too."
+
+"Might I ask," interposed the other, "who may 'they' be?"
+
+Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort
+to remember names.  "Oh, there are a lot of them,"
+he said, vaguely.  "I think I told you of the way that
+Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let
+me believe they were going to take me up, and then,
+because I wouldn't give them everything--the very shirt
+off my back--turned and put their knife into me. 
+I don't know them apart, hardly--they've all got names
+like Rhine wines--but I know the gang as a whole, and if I
+don't lift the roof clean off their particular synagogue,
+then my name is mud."
+
+Lord Plowden smiled.  "I've always the greatest difficulty
+to remember that you are an Englishman--a Londoner born,"
+he declared pleasantly.  "You don't talk in the least
+like one.  On shipboard I made sure you were an American--a
+very characteristic one, I thought--of some curious
+Western variety, you know.  I never was more surprised
+in my life than when you told me, the other day, that you
+only left England a few years ago."
+
+"Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen," Thorpe
+corrected him.  He studied his companion's face with
+slow deliberation.
+
+"I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss,"
+he remarked, after a little pause.  "If you'd known that I
+was an Englishman, when we first met, there on the steamer,
+I kind o' suspect that you and I'd never have got much beyond
+a nodding acquaintance--and even that mostly on my side. 
+I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything--that is,
+not specially--but I've often thought since that it
+was a mighty good thing I did.  Now isn't that true--that
+if you had taken me for one of your own countrymen you'd
+have given me the cold shoulder?"
+
+"I dare say there's a good deal in what you say,"
+the other admitted, gently enough, but without contrition. 
+"Things naturally shape themselves that way, rather,
+you know.  If they didn't, why then the whole position
+would become difficult.  But you are an American,
+to all intents and purposes."
+
+"Oh, no--I never took any step towards getting naturalized,"
+Thorpe protested.  "I always intended to come back here.
+Or no, I won't say that--because most of the time I
+was dog-poor--and this isn't the place for a poor man. 
+But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it off--if
+I ever found my self a rich man--THEN I'd come piking across
+the Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would
+carry me."
+
+The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam
+in his eye.  "And you ARE a rich man, now," he observed,
+after a momentary pause. 
+
+"We are both rich men," replied Thorpe, gravely. 
+
+He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken. 
+"This is how it seems to me the thing figures itself out:
+It can't be said that your name on the Board, or the
+Marquis's either, was of much use so far as the public
+were concerned.  To tell the truth, I saw some time ago
+that they wouldn't be.  Titles on prospectuses are played
+out in London.  I've rather a notion, indeed, that they're
+apt to do more harm than good--just at present, at least. 
+But all that aside--you are the man who was civil to me
+at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about
+my scheme, and you are the man who was good to me later on,
+when I didn't know where to turn for a friendly word. 
+Very well; here I am! I've made my coup! And I'd be a sweep,
+wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so glad to remember
+a week ago.  But you see, I don't forget! The capital
+of the Company is 500,000 pounds, all in pound shares. 
+We offered the public only a fifth of them.  The other
+four hundred thousand shares are mine as vendor--and I
+have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of them
+to be yours."
+
+Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words. 
+"It is too much--you don't reflect what it is you
+are saying," he murmured confusedly.  "Not a bit of it,"
+the other reassured him.  "Everything that I've said goes."
+
+The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet.  "It is a
+preposterously big reward for the merest act of courtesy,"
+he insisted.  "Of course it takes my breath away for joy--and
+yet I feel I oughtn't to be consenting to it at all. 
+And it has its unpleasant side--it buries me under a mountain
+of obligation.  I don't know what to do or what to say."
+
+"Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then," replied Thorpe,
+with a gesture before which the other resumed his seat. 
+"Just a word more--and then I suppose we'd better be going. 
+Look at it in this way.  Your grandfather was Lord
+Chancellor of England, and your father was a General
+in the Crimea.  My grandfather kept a small second-hand
+book-shop, and my father followed him in the business. 
+In one sense, that puts us ten thousand miles apart. 
+But in another sense, we'll say that we like each other,
+and that there are ways in which we can be of immense
+use to each other, and that brings us close together. 
+You need money--and here it is for you.  I need--what
+shall I say?--a kind of friendly lead in the matter
+of establishing myself on the right footing, among the
+right people--and that's what you can do for me. 
+Mind--I'd prefer to put it all in quite another way;
+I'd like to say it was all niceness on your part,
+all gratitude on mine.  But if you want to consider it on
+a business basis--why there you have it also--perfectly plain
+and clear."
+
+He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well. 
+The two men shook hands in silence. 
+
+When the latter spoke, it was to say: "Do you know
+how to open one of those soda-water bottles? I've tried,
+but I can never get the trick.  I think I should like
+to have a drink--after this."
+
+When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man
+was getting into his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy
+and cigars within a cabinet at the corner of the room,
+and carefully turned a key upon them. 
+
+"If you're going West, let me give you a lift,"
+said Lord Plowden, hat in hand.  "I can set you down
+wherever you like.  Unfortunately I've to go out to dinner,
+and I must race, as it is, to get dressed."
+
+Thorpe shook his head.  "No, go along," he bade him. 
+"I've some odds and ends of things to do on the way."
+
+"Then when shall I see you?"--began the other, and halted
+suddenly with a new thought in his glance.  "But what
+are you doing Saturday?" he asked, in a brisker tone. 
+"It's a dies non here.  Come down with me to-morrow evening,
+to my place in Kent.  We will shoot on Saturday,
+and drive about on Sunday, if you like--and there we can
+talk at our leisure.  Yes, that is what you must do. 
+I have a gun for you.  Shall we say, then--Charing Cross
+at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will dine
+at home."
+
+The elder man pondered his answer--frowning at the problem
+before him with visible anxiety.  "I'm afraid I'd better
+not come--it's very good of you all the same."
+
+"Nonsense," retorted the other.  "My mother will be
+very glad indeed to see you.  There is no one else
+there--unless, perhaps, my sister has some friend down. 
+We shall make a purely family party."
+
+Thorpe hesitated for only a further second.  "All right. 
+Charing Cross, 5:15," he said then, with the grave brevity
+of one who announces a momentous decision. 
+
+He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments
+after his companion had gone.  Then, going to a closet
+at the end of the room, he brought forth his coat and hat;
+something prompted him to hold them up, and scrutinize
+them under the bright light of the electric globe.  He put
+them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused,
+playing in his beard. 
+
+The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. 
+He made his way out, and downstairs to the street. 
+It was a rainy, windy October night, sloppy underfoot,
+dripping overhead.  At the corner before him, a cabman,
+motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening
+rubber cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. 
+Thorpe hailed him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the
+brusque order, "Strand!" as he clambered into the hansom. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe,
+half an hour later: "you never did believe in me,
+as a sister should do."
+
+He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low,
+rather dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted
+by two flickering gasjets.  They sat somewhat apart,
+confronting a fireplace, where only the laid materials for
+a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.  Above the
+mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man. 
+Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals
+to this portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon
+him of responsibility for the cheerlessness of the room. 
+There were other pictures on the walls of which he was
+dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about Dido
+and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back
+to him out of the mists of his childhood. 
+
+Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood
+strayed with quaint inconsequence across the field of his
+preoccupied mind.  The peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop
+on the floor below remained like snuff in his nostrils. 
+Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at the side,
+he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat.  Was it
+the same rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used
+to keep him awake nights, in one of the rooms next to this,
+with that same foolish noise, when he was a boy?
+
+"I know you always say that," replied Louisa, impassively. 
+
+She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace
+of artifice or intention, contrived to look the younger
+of the two.  Her thick hair, drawn simply from her temples
+into a knot behind, was of that palest brown which
+assimilates grey.  Her face, long, plain, masculine in
+contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. 
+Long and spare of figure, she sat upright in her
+straight-backed chair, with her large, capable hands
+on her knees.
+
+"I believed in you as much as you'd let me," she went on,
+indifferently, almost wearily.  "But I don't see that it
+mattered to you whether I did or didn't. You went your own
+way: you did what you wanted to do.  What had I to do
+with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the
+world you were in more than once in two or three years. 
+How should I know whether you were going to succeed,
+when I didn't even know what it was you were at? Certainly
+you hadn't succeeded here in London--but elsewhere you
+might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover,
+I don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown
+into something very different from the boy Joel that left
+the shop--it must be twenty years ago.  I can only know
+about you and your affairs what you tell me."
+
+"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with
+a curiously intent glance, "you never said to yourself:
+'I KNOW he's going to succeed.  I KNOW he'll be a rich
+man before he dies.'"
+
+She shook her head dispassionately.  Her manner expressed
+fatigued failure to comprehend why he was making so much
+of this purposeless point. 
+
+"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself,"
+she admitted, listlessly.  Then a comment upon his words
+occurred to her, and she spoke with more animation:
+"You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was very
+important to you, didn't occupy me at all.  You were
+always talking about getting rich; you kept the idea
+before you of sometime, at a stroke, finding yourself
+a millionaire.  That's been the idea of your life. 
+But what do I know about all that? My work has been
+to keep a roof over my head--to keep the little business
+from disappearing altogether.  It's been hard enough,
+I can tell you, these last few years, with the big
+jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. 
+I had the invalid husband to support for between three
+and four years--a dead weight on me every week--and then
+the children to look after, to clothe and educate."
+
+At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked
+at him.  "Don't think I'm ungrateful"--she went on,
+with a troubled effort at a smile--"but I almost wish
+you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. 
+What it means is that they've had two years at schools
+where now I shan't be able to keep them any longer. 
+They'll be spoiled for my kind of life--and they won't have
+a fair chance for any other.  I don't know what will become
+of them."
+
+The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not
+dull the gleam in Thorpe's eyes.  He even began a smile
+in the shadows of his unkempt moustache. 
+
+"But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago,
+and over," he persisted, doggedly--"and I told you there'd
+be more where that came from, and that I stood to pull
+off the great event--even then, now, you didn't believe
+in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking about,
+did you?"
+
+She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. 
+"For heaven's sake, Joel," she said, sharply--"you become
+a bore with that stupid nonsense.  I want to be patient
+with you--I do indeed sympathize with you in your
+misfortunes--you know that well enough--but you're very
+tiresome with that eternal harping on what I believed and
+what I didn't believe.  Now, are you going to stop to supper
+or not?--because if you are I must send the maid out. 
+And there's another thing--would it be of any help to you
+to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have
+Alfred's room as well as not--till Christmas, at least."
+
+"Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel
+till I'd settled my bill," suggested Thorpe tentatively,
+in a muffled voice. 
+
+The practical woman reflected for an instant. 
+"I was thinking," she confessed then, "that it might
+be cheaper to leave your things there, and buy what
+little you want--I don't imagine, from what I've seen,
+that your wardrobe is so very valuable--but no, I suppose
+the bill ought to be paid.  Perhaps it can be managed;
+how much will it be?"
+
+Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over
+to her chair.  With his thick hands on his sister's
+shoulders he stooped and kissed her on the forehead. 
+
+"You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?" he said,
+as he straightened himself behind her. 
+
+The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from
+the perfunctory salute with which he had greeted her
+on his arrival from foreign parts, six months before--
+brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain face. 
+Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted
+gaze she was bending upon the fireless grate. 
+Something extraordinary, unaccountable, was in the manner
+of her brother.  She recalled that, in truth, he was
+more than half a stranger to her.  How could she tell
+what wild, uncanny second nature had not grown up in him
+under those outlandish tropical skies? He had just told
+her that his ruin was absolute--overwhelming--yet there
+had been a covert smile in the recesses of his glance. 
+Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle from him,
+there as he stood behind her!
+
+The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain
+loomed up and possessed her.  She flung herself out
+of the chair, and, wheeling, seized its back and drew
+it between them as she faced him.  It was with a stare
+of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her. 
+
+"What"--she began, stammering--"What is the matter, Joel?"
+
+He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly
+at her for a further moment.  Then he tossed his head,
+and laughed abruptly. 
+
+"Sit down, old girl," he adjured her.  "Try and hold
+yourself together, now--to hear some different kind of news. 
+I've been playing it rather low down on you, for a fact. 
+Instead of my being smashed, it's the other way about."
+
+She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp
+upon the chair-back. Her breathing troubled her as she
+regarded him, and tried to take in the meaning of his words. 
+
+"Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about
+your Company?" she asked, confusedly. 
+
+"No--no--not at all," he replied, now all genial heartiness. 
+"No--what I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking
+a rise out of you all the same." He seemed so unaffectedly
+pleased by his achievement in kindly duplicity that she
+forced an awkward smile to her lips. 
+
+"I don't understand in the least," she said, striving to
+remember what he had told her.  "What you said was
+that the public had entirely failed to come in--that
+there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
+flotation expenses--those were your own words.  Of course,
+I don't pretend to understand these City matters--but it
+IS the case, isn't it, that if people don't subscribe
+for the shares of a new company, then the company is a failure?"
+
+"Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule,"
+he nodded at her, still beaming. 
+
+"Well, then--of course--I don't understand," she owned. 
+
+"I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've
+explained it to you," he said, seating himself, and motioning
+her to the other chair.  "But yes, of course you will. 
+You're a business woman.  You know what figures mean. 
+And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You
+remember that I told you----"
+
+"But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie
+out before the shops close."
+
+"Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything.  I'm too worked
+up for that.  I'll get something at the hotel before I
+go to bed, if I feel like it.  But say!"--the thought
+suddenly struck him--"if you want to come out with me,
+I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London. 
+What d'ye say?"
+
+She shook her head.  "I shall have some bread and cheese
+and beer at nine.  That's my rule, you know.  I don't
+like to break it.  I'm always queer next day if I do. 
+But now make haste and tell me--you're really not broken
+then? You have really come out well?"
+
+For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height,
+and spread his bulky shoulders backward.  His grey-blue
+eyes looked down upon her with a triumphant glow. 
+
+"Broken?" he echoed her word, with emphasis. 
+"My dear Louisa, I'm not the sort that gets broken. 
+I break other people.  Oh, God, how I shall break them!"
+
+He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before
+the fender, excitedly telling his story to her. 
+Sometimes he threw the words over his shoulder;
+again he held her absorbed gaze with his.  He took his
+hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce
+by gestures the meaning of his speech--and then she found
+it peculiarly difficult to realize that he was her brother. 
+
+Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected,
+with which he prefaced this story of the day, was vaguely
+familiar to her.  He sketched now for her in summary,
+and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with the
+dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his
+wanderings in strange lands--and these he had frequently
+told her about before.  Soon she perceived, however,
+that he was stringing them together on a new thread. 
+One after another, these experiences of his, as he
+related them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls
+which treachery and malice had put in his path.  He seemed,
+by his account, to have been a hundred times almost
+within touch of the goal.  In China, in the Dutch Indies,
+in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
+waste when he knew them and might have owned them,
+and now were yielding fabulous millions to fellows who
+had tricked and swindled him--everywhere he had missed
+by just a hair's breadth the golden consummation. 
+In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself. 
+There had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before
+the Empire fell, in Colorado when the Silver boom was on,
+in British Columbia when the first rumours of rich ore
+were whispered about--many times when fortune seemed
+veritably within his grasp.  But someone had always
+played him false.  There was never a friendship for him
+which could withstand the temptation of profitable treason. 
+
+But he had hung dauntlessly on.  He had seen one concession
+slipping through his fingers, only to strain and tighten
+them for a clutch at another.  It did not surprise
+his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly attract
+her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
+comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the
+wage-earning sort.  Apparently, he had done no work at all,
+in the bread-winner's sense of the word.  This was so like
+Joel that it was taken for granted in his sister's mind. 
+All his voyages and adventures and painful enterprises
+had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer--the
+passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst,
+to get something for nothing. 
+
+The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate
+itself when at last it reached Mexico.  The sister changed
+her position in her chair, and crossed her knees when
+Tehuantepec was mentioned.  It was from that place that Joel
+had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago. 
+Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his
+narrative that he now became vague as to details. 
+There were concessions of rubber forests mentioned,
+and the barter of these for other concessions with money
+to boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about
+where the true boundary of Guatemala ran--but she failed
+clearly to understand much about it all.  His other
+schemes and mishaps she had followed readily enough. 
+Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw
+everything jumbled and distorted, as through a haze. 
+Once or twice she interrupted him to ask questions,
+but he seemed to attach such slight importance to her
+comprehending these details that she forbore.  Only one
+fact was it necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode,
+apparently.  When he quitted Tehuantepec, to make his way
+straight to London, at the beginning of the year, he left
+behind him a rubber plantation which he desired to sell,
+and brought with him between six and seven thousand pounds,
+with which to pay the expenses of selling it. 
+How he had obtained either the plantation or the money
+did not seem to have made itself understood.  No doubt,
+as his manner indicated when she ventured her enquiries,
+it was quite irrelevant to the narrative. 
+
+In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that
+no villain had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans. 
+He at least mentioned no one who had wronged him there. 
+When he came to London, however, there were villains
+and to spare.  He moved to the mantel, when he arrived
+at this stage of the story, and made clear a space for his
+elbow to rest among the little trinkets and photographs
+with which it was burdened.  He stood still thereafter,
+looking down at her; his voice took on a harsher note. 
+
+Much of this story, also, she knew by heart.  This strange,
+bearded, greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often
+during the past half-year to the little book-shop, and the
+widow's home above it, his misshapen handbag full of papers,
+his heart full of rage, hope, grief, ambition, disgust,
+confidence--everything but despair.  It was true,
+it had never been quite real to her.  He was right in his
+suggestion that she had never wholly believed in him. 
+She had not been able to take altogether seriously
+this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who talked
+about millions.  It was true that he had sent her four
+hundred pounds for the education of her son and daughter;
+it was equally true that he had brought with him to London
+a sum which any of his ancestors, so far as she knew
+about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he
+treated as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate
+the machinery of his great enterprise.  She had heard,
+at various times, the embittered details of the disappearance
+of this money, little by little.  Nearly a quarter of it,
+all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart
+of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the
+belief that London could be best approached through him. 
+When at last this wretch was kicked downstairs, the effect
+had been only to make room for a fresh lot of bloodsuckers. 
+There were so-called advertising agents, so-called journalists,
+so-called "men of influence in the City,"--a swarm
+of relentless and voracious harpies, who dragged from
+him in blackmail nearly the half of what he had left,
+before he summoned the courage and decision to shut them out. 
+
+Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands
+he stumbled next--a group of City men concerned in the
+South African market, who impressed him very favourably
+at the outset.  He got to know them by accident, and at the
+time when he began to comprehend the necessity of securing
+influential support for his scheme.  Everything that he
+heard and could learn about them testified to the strength
+of their position in the City.  Because they displayed
+a certain amiability of manner toward him and his project,
+he allowed himself to make sure of their support. 
+It grew to be a certainty in his mind that they would see
+him through.  He spent a good deal of money in dinners and
+suppers in their honour, after they had let him understand
+that this form of propitiation was not unpleasant to them. 
+They chaffed him about some newspaper paragraphs,
+in which he was described as the "Rubber King," with an
+affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed
+that he detected a genuine respect for his abilities. 
+
+Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for
+the better part of two months, he laid before them,
+at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a dinner in a private
+room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition. 
+They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property,
+and place it upon the market; in consideration of their
+finding the ready money for this exploitation, they were to
+have for themselves two-fifths of the shares in the Company
+ultimately to be floated.  They listened to these details,
+and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself,
+with rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves
+that evening to nothing definite.  It took him nearly
+a week thereafter to get an answer from any of them. 
+Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at all,
+it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving
+nine-tenths of the shares. 
+
+He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his
+original amazement, that they named these preposterous
+terms merely because they expected to be beaten down,
+and he summoned all his good nature and tact for the task
+of haggling with them.  He misunderstood their first
+show of impatience at this, and persevered in the face
+of their tacit rebuffs.  Then, one day, a couple of them
+treated him with overt rudeness, and he, astonished out of
+his caution, replied to them in kind.  Suddenly, he could
+hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his. 
+They closed their office doors to him; even their clerks
+treated him with contemptuous incivility. 
+
+This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him,
+curiously enough, as no other misadventure of his life
+had done. 
+
+Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her,
+at the time, of this affair.  She had hardly understood why
+it should disturb him so profoundly: to her mind, these men
+had done nothing so monstrous after all.  But to him,
+their offense swallowed up all the other indignities
+suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. 
+A sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his
+very soul.  He hated nobody else as he hated them. 
+How often she had heard him swear, in solemn vibrating tones,
+that to the day of his death his most sacred ambition
+should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust
+and mire!
+
+And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant
+against the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took
+point and shape.  It was about these very men that he was talking. 
+
+"And think of it!" he was saying, impressively.  "It's magnificent
+enough for me to make this great hit--but I don't count it
+as anything at all by comparison with the fact that I make it
+at their expense.  You remember the fellows I told you about?"
+he asked abruptly, deferring to the confused look on her face.
+
+"Yes--you make it out of them," she repeated, in an
+uncertain voice.  It occurred to her that she must
+have been almost asleep.  "But did I miss anything?
+Have you been telling what it is that you have made?"
+
+"No--that you shall have in good time.  You don't seem
+to realize it, Louisa.  I can hardly realize it myself. 
+I am actually a very rich man.  I can't tell how much
+I've got--in fact, it can be almost as much as I like--
+half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want
+to make it that much.  Yes--it takes the breath away,
+doesn't it? But best of all--a thousand times best of
+all--practically every dollar of it comes out of those Kaffir
+swine--the very men that tried to rob me, and that have been
+trying to ruin me ever since.  I tell you what I wish,
+Louise--I wish to God there could only be time enough,
+and I'd take it all in half-sovereigns--two millions
+of them, or three millions--and just untwist every coin,
+one by one, out from among their heart-strings. Oh--but
+it'll be all right as it is.  It's enough to make a man
+feel religious--to think how those thieves are going
+to suffer."
+
+"Well" she said, slowly after reflection, "it all rather
+frightens me."
+
+As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had
+suddenly accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-
+box from the mantel, and, stooping, lit the fire. 
+
+He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff
+awkwardness over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. 
+Then he took fresh note of the room--the faded,
+threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that had
+seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste,
+the dingy walls and begrimed low ceiling--all pathetic
+symbols of the bleak life to which she had been condemned. 
+
+"Frightens you?" he queried, with a kind of jovial
+tenderness, as she got to her feet; "frightens you,
+eh? Why, within a month's time, old lady, you'll be
+riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers
+folding their arms up behind, and you'll be taking
+it all as easy and as natural as if you'd been born
+in a barouche."
+
+He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows:
+"Barouche? That's what we'd call in England a landau."
+
+She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired,
+passive face inclined meditatively, her rusty old black
+gown drawn back by one hand from the snapping sparks. 
+"No," she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling with
+pride in her voice.  "I was born here over the shop."
+
+"Well, good God! so was I," he commented, lustily. 
+"But that's no reason why I shouldn't wind up in Park
+Lane--or you either."
+
+She had nothing to say to this, apparently.  After a little,
+she seated herself again, drawing her chair closer
+to the hearth.  "It's years since I've lit this
+fire before the first of November," she remarked,
+with the air of defending the action to herself. 
+
+"Oh, we're celebrating," he said, rubbing his hands
+over the reluctant blaze.  "Everything goes, tonight!"
+
+Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment
+of her mind.  "You set out to tell me what it was all about,"
+she reminded him.  "You see I'm completely in the dark. 
+I only hear you say that you've made a great fortune. 
+That's all I know.  Or perhaps you've told me as much as you
+care to."
+
+"Why, not at all," he reassured her, pulling his own
+chair toward him with his foot, and sprawling into it
+with a grunt of relief.  "If you'll draw me a glass
+of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. 
+It's not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed
+to a human being, for that matter--but you'll enjoy it,
+and it'll be safe enough with you."
+
+As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily
+after her: "No more beer when that keg runs dry, you know. 
+Nothing but champagne!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister
+brought him. 
+
+"Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty," he said, when he
+put the glass down.  "Truth is--I've lost track of
+myself altogether since--since the big thing happened. 
+I seem to be somebody else--a comparative stranger,
+so to speak.  I've got to get acquainted with myself,
+all over again.  You can't imagine what an extraordinary
+feeling it is--this being hit every few minutes with
+the recollection that you're worth half a million. 
+It's like being struck over the head.  It knocks you down. 
+There are such thousands of things to do--you dance about,
+all of a flutter.  You don't know where to begin."
+
+"Begin where you left off," suggested Louisa.  "You were
+going to tell me how--how 'the big thing' happened. 
+You're always coming to it--and never getting any further."
+
+Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification,
+he plunged forthwith into the tale. 
+
+"You remember my telling you at the time how I got my
+Board together.  I'm speaking now of the present Company--after
+I'd decided to be my own promoter, and have at least some kind
+of 'a look-in' for my money.  There wasn't much money left,
+by the way; it was considerably under three thousand. 
+But I come to that later.  First there was the Board. 
+Here was where that Lord Plowden that I told you about--the
+man that came over on the ship with me--came in. 
+I went to him.  I--God! I was desperate--but I hadn't
+much of an idea he'd consent.  But he did! He listened
+to me, and I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the
+Syndicate would have cut my throat if I hadn't pulled
+away,--and he said, 'Why, yes, I'll go on your Board.'
+Then I told him more about it, and presently he said he'd
+get me another man of title--a sky-scraper of a title
+too--to be my Chairman.  That's the Marquis of Chaldon,
+a tremendous diplomatic swell, you know, Ambassador at
+Vienna in his time, and Lord Lieutenant and all sorts
+of things, but willing to gather in his five hundred a year,
+all the same."
+
+"Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?"
+asked the sister. 
+
+"Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten
+quid a week, and a few extras.  The other Directors get
+three hundred.  This Lord Plowden is one of them--but I'll
+tell you more about him later on.  Then there's Watkin,
+he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson,
+he's a wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm
+in Dundee, but gets along the best way he can on a very
+dicky business here in London, now.  And then there's
+General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say,
+but I guess he needs all he can get.  He's started wearing
+his fur-coat already.  Well, that's my Board.  I couldn't
+join it, of course, till after allotment--that's because I'm
+the vendor, as they call it--but that hasn't interfered
+at all with my running the whole show.  The Board doesn't
+really count, you know.  It only does what I want it to do. 
+It's just a form that costs me seventeen hundred a year,
+that's all."
+
+"Seventeen hundred a year," she repeated, mechanically. 
+
+"Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see. 
+Or first, there were other things to be done.  I saw that
+a good broker's name counted for a lot on a prospectus. 
+I picked out one that I'd heard was reasonable--it'd been
+a splendid name if I could have got it--but he calmly said
+his price was two thousand pounds, all cash down--and I
+came away.  Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much
+of anything yet, and so wasn't so stiff about his figure. 
+He agreed to take 500 pounds cash, and 2,000 in shares. 
+It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned out,
+at the pinch, to be the one man in a million for me. 
+But I'll tell you about him later.  He's the Broker, mind;
+you mustn't forget him.  Well, then, he and I got a
+Solicitor--he took 200 pounds cash, but he had to have 2,000
+shares--and the firm of Auditors--they were 100 pounds
+cash and 1,000 shares.  Every company has to have these
+people pasted on to it, by law.  Oh yes, and then you must
+have your Bankers.  You don't pay them anything, though,
+thank God! Well, then, there was the machinery complete,
+all ready to start.  I took a handsome set of offices,
+and furnished them up to the nines--but that I was able
+to do pretty well on credit.  You see, ready money was
+getting short. 
+
+"And now came the biggest pull of all.  There was
+the press to be worked."
+
+He spoke as if there were no other papers in London
+but the financial journals. 
+
+"I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up.  You've got
+no more idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have
+of--of a coil of snakes thawing out hungry in the spring. 
+Why, if one blackmailer came to me, I swear a hundred did.
+They scared the life out of me, the first month or so. 
+And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say
+they can keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it
+worth their while.  But they all wanted too much money
+for me--and for a while I was at my wits' ends.  At last
+I got a fellow--he's not behaved so badly, all things
+considered--who had some sporting blood in his veins,
+and he was willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds,
+if I could pay 1,500 pounds down, and the rest in shares. 
+But that was just what I couldn't do, you see, so finally
+he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in shares--and as I
+say he's done it tolerably well.  There was one editor
+that I had to square personally--that is to say, 100 pounds
+cash--it had to be in sovereigns, for notes could be
+traced--and a call of 2,000 shares at par,--he's the boss
+pirate that everybody has to square--and of course there
+were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule I
+just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out. 
+The moment a fellow came in, and handed me his card,
+and said he had proofs of two kinds of articles in his pocket,
+one praising me, one damning me, I told him to go and see
+my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then to go
+to hell.  That's the way you've got to talk in the City,"
+he added, as if in apologetic explanation. 
+
+Louisa looked impassively at her brother.  "Oh, I've heard
+the expression as far west as the Strand," she remarked. 
+
+"Well, then came the issue.  That was last Saturday. 
+You saw the prospectus in Saturday morning's papers,
+and in the weeklies.  The list was to be kept open,
+it said, till Wednesday morning--that was yesterday. 
+That is to say, during all that time, people could apply
+for shares."
+
+"Which they didn't do--according to your account,"
+the sister suggested, dryly. 
+
+Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair,
+and eyed her with a momentary quizzical gleam in his eye. 
+Then he became serious again.  The recollection of what he
+was now to narrate brought a frown to his brows.
+
+"On Tuesday afternoon," he began, with portentous
+deliberation--"Or no, first I must explain something. 
+You see, in bringing out a company, you can't put up too
+stout a bluff.  I mean, you've got to behave as if you were
+rolling in wealth--as if everything was coming your way,
+and fortunes were to be made by fastening to you. 
+I don't know that it often fools anybody very much,
+but it's part of the game, and you must play it. 
+Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday
+morning, and has his jobber shout out that he'll buy
+'Rubber Consols'--that's what our shares are called
+on the street--at an eighth premium; that is to say,
+he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were
+offering to the public for twenty shillings.  Of course,
+you see, the object of that was to create the impression
+that there was a regular God-almighty rush for our shares. 
+As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled anybody--but
+at least there was the chance that it might start up
+some dealing in the shares--and all those things help. 
+Besides, you got the sales noticed in the papers,
+and that might start up applications from the public. 
+Well, the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday. 
+On Monday, when it might still be possible to change
+the luck, he bought 3,500 more, still at that premium
+of an eighth.  He bought some Tuesday morning too--say
+4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and keep
+an eye on the Broker.  He's worth watching--as you'll see."
+
+"What's his name?" asked the sister, with an accession
+of alertness in her face.  "You call him 'Broker'--and
+that doesn't mean anything to me.  They're all brokers,
+aren't they?"
+
+"Semple--Colin Semple, that's his name.  He's a young
+Scotchman--father's a Presbyterian minister.  He's a little,
+insignificant runt of a chap to look at--but I learned
+a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by his looks. 
+However--where was I?"
+
+"You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon,
+weren't you?"
+
+He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long
+breath in preparation for the dramatic recital before him. 
+"On Tuesday afternoon," he began again, with impressive
+slowness, "I was walking on Throgmorton Street, about four
+o'clock. It was raining a little--it had been raining
+on and off all day--a miserable, rotten sort of a day,
+with greasy mud everywhere, and everybody poking
+umbrellas into you.  I was out walking because I'd 'a'
+cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office another
+ten minutes.  All that day I hadn't eaten anything. 
+I hadn't slept worth speaking of for three nights. 
+The whole game was up for me.  I was worse than ruined. 
+I had half a crown in my pocket.  I had ten or twelve pounds
+in the bank--and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. 
+I tell you, I was just plumb busted. 
+
+"There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen
+the cuss before during the day, walking up and down
+near my offices.  I took notice of him, because he was
+the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking cripple you
+ever saw in your life.  Now I read what was on his boards. 
+It was the bill of a paper that I had refused to be bled by,
+and there it was in big letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!'
+'Thorpe's Audacity Punished!' Those were the words. 
+I can see them with my eyes shut.  I stood there,
+looking at the fellow, and I suppose there was something
+in the way I looked, for he stopped too. 
+
+Of course, he didn't know me from Adam, but all the same,
+I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me--as if we two
+had a joke between us.  And at that I burst out laughing--I
+simply roared with laughter, like a boy at a pantomime--and
+I took that last half-crown out of my pocket, and I gave
+it to the sandwich-man. God! you should have seen his face."
+
+"I don't particularly mind, Joel," said his sister,
+"but I never heard you swear so much before."
+
+"Oh, what the--what the deuce!" he protested, impatiently. 
+"Don't interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street. 
+The members of the Stock Exchange were coming out of
+'the house,' and making up little groups on the pavement. 
+They do business inside, you know, until closing
+time--this day it happened to be four o'clock--and then
+they come out and deal in the street with one another,
+with the kerb-stone mob, who are not allowed inside,
+standing round to watch the thing.  I came along into the
+thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts
+of things--'East Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,'
+and what not, but these went in one ear and out the other. 
+If there ever was a man with no stomach for the market it
+was me.  But then someone roared out:
+
+"'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five
+hundred Rubber at seven-eighths! Sell five hundred
+at three-quarters! At three-quarters you have 'em!
+Rubber Consols! Sell a thou.  at three-quarters!'
+
+"This thing went into my brain like a live coal.  I stopped
+and looked up at the fellow--and by God, it was one of the men
+I've been talking about--one of those Kaffir scoundrels. 
+I wish I was better at remembering names--but I knew his face.
+There were some of the others around him, and they
+laughed at me, and he laughed at me.  Oh, they had a heap
+of fun out of me--for a minute or two.  Pretty good fun,
+too! I guess they'll remember it quite a while."
+
+"Go on!" Louisa adjured him.  The obvious proximity
+of the dramatic climax drew her forward in her chair,
+and brought a glow of expectation to her eyes. 
+
+"I got myself away from that crowd somehow--l think I
+was afraid if I stayed I'd strangle the one who was
+shouting on the steps--and I went toward my office. 
+But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage
+to go in.  I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any
+other office in Austin Friars, and I had a kind of feeling
+that the sight of those carpets, and oak-tables and desks,
+and brass-railings and so on would make me sick. 
+I owed for 'em all, bear in mind----"
+
+"But--Joel," the sister interposed.  "One thing
+I don't understand.  How many people had applied
+for shares? You haven't mentioned that."
+
+A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of
+his present mood.  "It was hardly worth mentioning,"
+he answered, with bitter mirth.  "Between five
+and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. 
+I think the withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to
+practically five thousand.  We offered a hundred thousand,
+you know.--But let me go on with my story.  I stood there,
+in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance. 
+The words of that Jew--'Sell Rubber Consols at three-
+quarters!'--buzzed inside my head as if they would burst
+it open.  I turned--and I happened to see my Broker--the
+Scotchman, Semple, you know--coming along toward me. 
+Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on me. 
+In less than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten
+outfit turned upside down, with me on top.  I made a jump,
+and ran to meet Semple. 
+
+"'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him,
+with a grip tight on his arm.
+
+"The little chap was looking mighty sick.  He figured up
+in his mind.  'I'm afraid it's eight thousand five hundred,
+all told,' he said, in a sort of Presbyterian whimper. 
+
+"'Well--how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver
+their goods--that is, supposing we got a settlement?'
+
+"I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face. 
+He looked puzzled for a minute.  Then he put out his lip. 
+Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a razor, and we looked
+into one another's eyes. 
+
+"'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters,
+a minute ago,' I told him. 
+
+"He was onto the game like lightning.  'Wait for me
+in the office,' he whispered.  'We'll go nap on this!'
+
+"With that he was off like a streak.  He stopped
+running just before he got to the corner, though,
+and began walking slowly, sauntering along, you know,
+as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books. 
+I watched him out of sight--and then I went back, and up
+to the offices.  The furniture didn't scare me a bit
+this time.  Why, I stopped and felt of the brass-railing
+just outside the Board Room, and I said to myself--'Pshaw!
+We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'"
+
+He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she
+felt was intended to be a significant look.  She shrank
+from the confession that its meaning was Greek to her. 
+"Well--and what next?" she asked, guardedly. 
+
+"Semple came back in twenty minutes or so--and the
+next morning he was at it again--and what with him
+and his jobber, by George, on the quiet, they picked up
+nearly eighteen thousand of our shares.  Some they paid
+fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six
+and even ten.  That doesn't matter; it's of no more
+importance than the coppers you give to crossing-sweepers. 
+The thing was to get the shares--and by God we've
+got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares,
+that's what we've got.  Now, do you see what that means?"
+
+"Why yes," she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption
+of confidence.  "Of course, you know the property is so
+good that you'll make a profit on the shares you've bought
+far below their value.  But I don't think I quite see----"
+
+He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter. 
+"Don't think you quite see?" he gurgled at her, with tears
+of pleasure in his eye.  "Why, you dummy, you haven't got
+the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's all about. 
+The value of the property's got nothing in the world
+to do with it.  That's neither here nor there.  If there
+wasn't any such property in existence, it would be just
+the same."
+
+He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this,
+and explained more gently: "Why, don't you see, Lou,
+it's this way.  This is what has happened.  We've got
+what's called a corner on the bears.  They're caught short,
+and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content. 
+What--you don't understand now? Why, see here! These
+fellows who've sold twenty-six thousand of our shares--
+they haven't got them to sell, and they can't get them. 
+That is the point--they can't get them for love nor
+money--they must pay me my own price for them, or be
+ruined men.  The moment they realize the situation,
+they will begin offering a premium for Rubber Consols. 
+The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds,
+then four--six--ten--twenty--thirty--whatever I want
+to drive it to."
+
+Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes.  It seemed
+to her that she understood now.  It was very exciting. 
+
+"You see," he went on, taking approving note of the new
+light of comprehension in her glance, "we did something
+that Tuesday afternoon beside buy up these shares.
+Semple rushed off to his office, and he and his clerks
+got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out
+in all the different names they could be safe in using,
+and they put these into the bank with the application
+money--Semple found that--and next day he went and
+saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
+auditors--and got them to pool the shares that I've
+promised to give them.  A pool? That means they agree
+to transfer their shares to me as trustee, and let me
+deal with them as I like--of course to their advantage. 
+In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't
+be dealt with in this transaction.  So you see the thing
+is hermetically sealed.  Nobody can get a share except
+from me, and at my price.  But these fellows that have
+sold them--they've got to have them, don't you see. 
+They had their little temporary joke with me on the street
+that afternoon--and now they must walk up to the captain's
+office and settle.  They've got to pay me at least half
+a million pounds for that few minutes' fun of theirs. 
+I may make it a good deal more; I don't know yet."
+
+"Oh, Joel!" she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction. 
+His rather languid indecision as to whether half a million
+was going to be enough, impressed her more powerfully than
+had any detail of his narrative. 
+
+In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for
+her what there was to tell.  "This afternoon my Board
+met to allot the shares.  They saw the applications,
+amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares. 
+It took their breath away--they had heard that things
+were going quite the other way with us.  They were
+so tickled that they asked no questions The allotment
+went through like a greased pig.  About 5,000 shares
+went to those who had actually applied for them,
+and 88,000 were solemnly given to the dummy applicants. 
+Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these dummies. 
+Nobody winked so much as an eyelash.  But I've found
+since that one of the directors--that Lord Plowden I
+told you about--was onto the thing all the while. 
+But he's all right.  Everybody's all right.  Of course
+the dummies' shares still stand in their names--on paper--
+but in reality I've got them all in my safe--in my pocket
+you might say.  They are really mine, you understand. 
+So now there's nothing for us to do but to apply to the
+Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and meanwhile
+lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. 
+Or fry in their own fat, eh? That's better."
+
+"But," she commented slowly, "you say there are no shares
+to be bought--and yet as I understand it, there are those five
+thousand that were sent out to the people who really applied."
+
+"Bravo, Lou!" he answered her jovially.  "You actually
+do understand the thing.  You've put your finger straight
+on the point.  It is true that those shares are out
+against us--or might be turned against us if they could
+be bought up.  But in reality, they don't count at all. 
+In the first place, you see, they're scattered about
+among small holders, country clergymen and old maids
+on an annuity and so on--all over the country.  Even if
+these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose it
+was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell. 
+The bigger the price they were offered, the more mulish
+they would be about holding.  That's always the way
+with them.  But even if they did all sell, their five
+thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket.  There would
+be over twenty thousand others to be accounted for. 
+That would be quite enough for my purposes.  Oh, I figured
+all that out very carefully.  My own first notion was
+to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand,
+and even a little over.  Then, you see, we might have
+allotted everything to the dummies, and sent back the
+money and applications of the genuine ones.  But that
+would have been rather hard to manage with the Board. 
+The Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made
+pro rata--that is, giving everybody a part of what they
+applied for--and that would have mixed everything up. 
+And then, too, if anybody suspected anything, why the Stock
+Exchange Committee would refuse us a special settlement--and,
+of course, without that the whole transaction is moonshine. 
+It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny."
+
+"It's all pretty risky, I should think," she declared
+as she rose.  "I should think you'd lie awake more than
+ever now--now that you've built your hopes so high
+and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing."
+
+He smilingly shook his head.  "No, it can no more fail
+than that gas can fail to burn when you put a light to it. 
+It's all absolute.  My half-million is as right as if
+it were lying to my credit in the Bank of England. 
+Oh, that reminds me," he went on in a slightly
+altered tone--" it's damned comical, but I've got to ask
+you for a little money.  I've only got about seven
+pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it would give
+me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. 
+Of course he'd let me have anything I wanted--but,
+you can see--I don't like to ask him just at the moment."
+
+She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a
+wistful gaze.  "You're quite sure, Joel?"--she began--
+"and you haven't told me--how long will it be before
+you come into some of this money?"
+
+"Well,"--he in turn paused over his words--"well, I suppose
+that by next week things will be in such shape that my
+bank will see I'm good for an overdraft.  Oh heavens,
+yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some ready. 
+But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I
+tell you what I'll do, Lou.  I'll give you a three months bill,
+paying one hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me
+have now.  Come, old lady: you don't get such interest
+every day, I'll bet."
+
+"I don't want any interest from you, Joel,"
+she replied, simply.  "If you're sure I can have it back
+before Christmas, I think I can manage thirty pounds. 
+It will do in the morning, I suppose?"
+
+He nodded an amused affirmative.  "Why--you don't imagine,
+do you," he said, "that all this gold is to rain down,
+and none of it hit you? Interest? Why of course you'll get
+interest--and capital thrown in.  What did you suppose?"
+
+"I don't ask anything for myself," she made answer,
+with a note of resolution in her voice.  "Of course if you
+like to do things for the children, it won't be me who'll
+stand in their light.  They've been spoiled for my kind
+of life as it is."
+
+"I'll do things for everybody," he affirmed roundly. 
+"Let's see--how old is Alfred?"
+
+"He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months
+older than he is."
+
+"Gad!" was Thorpe's meditative comment.  "How they shoot
+up! Why I was thinking she was a little girl." "She never
+will be tall, I'm afraid," said the literal mother. 
+"She favours her father's family.  But Alfred is more
+of a Thorpe.  I'm sorry you missed seeing them last
+summer--but of course they didn't stop long with me. 
+This was no place for them--and they had a good many
+invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in the country. 
+Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age:
+he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's
+not a bit fonder of hard work."
+
+"There's one mighty big difference between us, though,"
+remarked Thorpe.  "He won't start with his nose held
+down to the grindstone by an old father hard as nails. 
+He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich man."
+
+"I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,"
+she replied, with visible apprehension.  "You mustn't encourage
+him to build too high hopes, Joel.  It's speculation,
+you know--and anything might happen to you.  And then--you
+may marry, and have sons of your own."
+
+He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new
+to his mind.  A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles
+about his eyes.  He opened his lips as if to speak,
+and then closed them again. 
+
+"Well," he said at last, abruptly straightening himself,
+and casting an eye about for his coat and hat. 
+"I'll be round in the morning--on my way to the City. 
+Good-bye till then."
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon,
+Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he
+had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.  This deviation
+from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at
+the last possible moment did not take him by surprise. 
+He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial,
+as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty. 
+This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece
+with what had been happening all day--merely one more token
+of the general upheaval in the routine of his life. 
+
+From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the
+feeling that his old manners and usages and methods
+of thought--the thousand familiar things that made up
+the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to him. 
+They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away
+from him.  Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform,
+it was as if they had all disappeared--been left somewhere
+behind him outside the station.  With the two large bags
+which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
+disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat
+and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being,
+embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown. 
+
+Even his face was new.  A sudden and irresistible
+impulse had led him to the barber-shop in his hotel
+at the outset; he could not wait till after breakfast
+to have his beard removed.  The result, when he beheld
+it in the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. 
+The over-long, thin, tawny moustasche which survived
+the razor assumed an undue prominence; the jaw and chin,
+revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years,
+seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
+misshapen.  Many times during the day, at his office,
+at the restaurant where he lunched, at various outfitters'
+shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of getting
+reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-glass.
+The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him
+most in this endeavour.  Each returned to him an image
+so different from all the others--some cadaverous,
+some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion
+of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike
+an average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it. 
+
+His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he
+entered the old book-shop to get the money promised overnight,
+but in the City his own clerks had not known him at first. 
+There was in this an inspiring implication that he had
+not so much changed his appearance as revived his youth. 
+The consciousness that he was in reality still a young
+man spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt
+that it was effacing all earlier impressions.  Why, when he
+thought of it, the delight he had had during the day
+in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and embroidered
+braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors,
+toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like,
+and telling the gratified tradesmen to give him the best
+of everything--this delight had been distinctively boyish. 
+He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could have risen
+to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he
+reflected upon the contents of his portmanteaus. 
+To apprehend their full value one must have been without them
+for such a weary time! He had this wonderful advantage--that
+he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
+nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald
+existence could be without them.  It was worth having
+lived all those forty obscure and mostly unpleasant years,
+for this one privilege now of being able to appreciate
+to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear. 
+
+It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go
+to a good tailor.  The suit he had on was right enough for
+ordinary purposes, and his evening-clothes were as good as new,
+but the thought of a costume for shooting harassed his mind. 
+He had brought along with him, for this eventful visit,
+an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and leather,
+much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable
+by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange
+and romantic country.  At least it had seemed to him,
+in the morning, when he had packed it, to be secure
+in this salvation.  Uneasy doubts on the subject had
+soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume
+and poignancy as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded
+in the course of the day's investigations and purchases. 
+He had reached the point now of hoping that it would
+rain bitterly on the morrow. 
+
+It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for
+Lord Plowden, since he did not know the name of the station
+they were to book for, and time was getting short.  He dwelt
+with some annoyance upon his oversight in this matter,
+as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another. 
+He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have
+everything in readiness on the arrival of his host. 
+As it was, he could not even tell the porter how his
+luggage was to be labelled, and there was now less than
+two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought
+of intercepting his friend at the front of the station;
+then halted, and went back, upon the recollection
+that while he was going out one way, Plowden might come
+in by the other.  The seconds, as they passed now,
+became severally painful to his nerves.  The ringing
+of a bell somewhere beyond the barrier provoked within
+him an impulse to tearful profanity. 
+
+Then suddenly everything was all right.  A smooth-faced,
+civilly-spoken young man came up, touched his hat, and asked:
+"Will you kindly show me which is your luggage, sir?"
+
+Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was,
+indicated the glaringly new bags--and then only half
+repressed a cry of pleasure at discovering that Lord
+Plowden stood beside him. 
+
+"It's all right; my man will look out for your things,"
+said the latter, as they shook hands.  "We will go and get
+our places."
+
+The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. 
+A lean, elderly man in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled
+obsequiously before them down the platform, opened to them
+a first-class compartment with a low bow and a deprecatory
+wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door
+upon them.  "The engine will be the other way, my Lord,
+after you leave Cannon Street," he remarked through
+the open window, with earnest deference.  "Are there any
+of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?"
+
+Plowden had nodded to the first remark.  He shook
+his head at the second.  The elderly man at this,
+with still another bow, flapped out a green flag which he
+had been holding furled behind his back, and extended
+it at arm's length.  The train began slowly to move. 
+Mr. Thorpe reflected to himself that the peerage was by no
+means so played-out an institution as some people imagined. 
+
+"Ho-ho!" the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed
+his hat into the rack above his head.  "We shall both be
+the better for some pure air.  London quite does me up. 
+And you--you've been sticking at it months on end,
+haven't you? You look rather fagged--or at all events you
+did yesterday.  You've smartened yourself so--without
+your beard--that I can't say I'd notice it to-day. 
+But I take it every sensible person is glad to get away
+from London."
+
+"Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put
+my nose outside London since I landed here." Thorpe rose
+as he spoke, to deposit his hat also in the rack. 
+He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's was
+an ordinary low black bowler.  "I can tell you, I SHALL
+be glad of the change.  I would have bought the tickets,"
+he went on, giving words at random to the thought which he
+found fixed on the surface of his mind, "if I'd only known
+what our station was."
+
+Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss
+the subject.  He took a cigar case from his pocket,
+and offered it to Thorpe. 
+
+"It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether,"
+he said, as they lighted their cigars.  "I was up late last
+night--turned out late this morning, been late all day,
+somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock for the life of me. 
+Your statement to me last night--you know it rather
+upset me."
+
+The other smiled.  "Well, I guess I know something about
+that feeling myself.  Why, I've been buzzing about today
+like a hen with her head cut off.  But it's fun, though,
+aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every once
+in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course
+it means a thousand times more to me than it does to you."
+
+The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern
+of Cannon Street.  Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro
+on the platform, and a number of them shook the handle of
+the locked door.  There was an effect of curses in the sound
+of their remarks which came through the closed window. 
+Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them. 
+
+"Ah, that's where you mistake," said Plowden,
+contemplating the mouthful of smoke he slowly blew forth. 
+"My dear man, you can't imagine anybody to whom it would
+mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those fellows
+have a key.  They're an awful bore on this train.
+I almost never go by it, for that reason.  Ah, thank God
+we're off!--But as I was saying, this thing makes a greater
+difference to me than you can think of.  I couldn't sleep
+last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me so. 
+I take it you--you have never had much money before;
+that is, you know from experience what poverty is?"
+
+Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity. 
+
+"Well--but you"--the other began, and then paused. 
+"What I mean is," he resumed, "you were never, at any rate,
+responsible to anybody but yourself.  If you had only a
+sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for that matter,
+you could accommodate yourself to the requirements
+of the situation.  I don't mean that you would enjoy
+it any more than I should--but at least it was open
+to you to do it, without attracting much attention. 
+But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty
+has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine. 
+You see, there is no way in which I can earn a penny. 
+I had to leave the Army when I was twenty-three--the
+other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it
+was impossible for me to drag along with a title and an
+empty pocket.  I daresay that I ought to have stuck to it,
+because it isn't nearly so bad now, but twelve years ago
+it was too cruel for any youngster who had any pride
+about him--and, of course, my father having made rather
+a name in the Army, that made it so much harder for me. 
+And after that, what was there? Of course, the bar and medicine
+and engineering and those things were out of the question,
+in those days at least.  The Church?--that was more so still. 
+I had a try at politics--but you need money there as much
+as anywhere else--money or big family connections. 
+I voted in practically every division for four years,
+and I made the rottenest speeches you ever heard of at
+Primrose League meetings in small places, and after all
+that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet
+in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took
+in depreciated rupees.  When I tried to talk about
+something at home, they practically laughed in my face. 
+I had no leverage upon them whatever.  They didn't care
+in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home.
+Their majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty
+to one.  So that door was shut in my face.  I've never
+been inside the House since--except once to show it to an
+American lady last summer--but when I do go again I rather
+fancy"--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome
+head significantly--"I rather fancy I shall turn up on the
+other side."
+
+"I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics," interposed Thorpe. 
+
+Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection.  They had left
+London Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions,
+and leant back comfortably.  "Of course there was the City,"
+he went on, speaking diagonally across to his companion,
+between leisurely intervals of absorption in his cigar. 
+"There have been some directors' fees, no doubt,
+and once or twice I've come very near to what promised
+to be a big thing--but I never quite pulled it off. 
+Really, without capital what can one do?--I'm curious to
+know--did you bring much ready money with you to England?"
+
+"Between six and seven thousand pounds."
+
+"And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you
+got left?"
+
+Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this
+was a fair question, but he smothered them under the
+smile with which he felt impelled to answer the twinkle
+in Plowden's eyes.  "Oh, less than a hundred," he said,
+and laughed aloud. 
+
+Plowden also laughed.  "By George, that's fine!"
+he cried.  "It's splendid.  There's drama in it. 
+I felt it was like that, you know.  Something told me it
+was your last cartridge that rang the bell.  It was that
+that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you
+were a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. 
+Ah, that kind of courage is so rare! When a man has it,
+he can stand the world on its head." "But I was plumb scared,
+all the while, myself," Thorpe protested, genially. 
+"Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots."
+
+"Ah, yes, but that's the great thing," insisted the other. 
+"You didn't look as if you were frightened.  From all
+one could see, your nerve was sublime.  And nothing else
+matters--it was sublime."
+
+"Curious--that thing happened to me once before,"
+commented Thorpe, with ruminating slowness.  "It was
+out on the plains, years ago, and I was in pretty
+hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north,
+and some cowboys held me up, and were going to make
+kindling wood of me, they being under the impression
+that I was a horse-thief they were looking after. 
+There was five or six minutes there when my life wasn't
+worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was
+the scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life. 
+And then something happened to be said that put
+the matter right--they saw I was the wrong man--and
+then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. 
+They half emptied their flasks down my throat, and they
+rode with me all the way to the next town, and there they
+wanted to buy everything liquid in the place for me. 
+But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows
+got a tremendous notion of my nerve.  It wasn't so much
+that they told me so, but they told others about it. 
+They really thought I was game to the core--when in reality,
+as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you ever
+heard of"
+
+"That's just it," said Plowden, "the part of you which was
+engaged in making mental notes of the occasion thought you
+were frightened; we will say that it was itself frightened. 
+But the other part of you, the part that was transacting
+business, so to speak--that wasn't in the least alarmed. 
+I fancy all born commanders are built like that. 
+Did you ever see General Grant?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head. 
+
+"What reminded me of him--there is an account in his
+Memoirs of how he felt when he first was given a command,
+at the beginning of the Civil War.  He was looking about
+for the enemy, who was known to be in the vicinity,
+and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was,
+the more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed
+as if cowardice were getting complete mastery of him. 
+And then suddenly it occurred to him that very likely
+the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of the enemy,
+and that moment his bravery all returned to him. 
+He went in and gave the other man a terrible thrashing. 
+It doesn't apply to your case, particularly--but I fancy
+that all really brave men have those inner convictions
+of weakness, even while they are behaving like lions. 
+Those must have been extraordinarily interesting
+experiences of yours--on the plains.  I wish I could
+have seen something of that part of America when I
+was there last year.  Unfortunately, it didn't come
+my way."
+
+"I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West."
+
+Plowden smiled.  "I'm afraid I did think it was West
+at the time.  But since my return I've been warned
+that I mustn't call Chicago West.  That was as far as
+I went.  I had some business there, or thought I had. 
+When my father died, that was in 1884, we found
+among his papers a lot of bonds of some corporation
+purporting to be chartered by the State of Illinois. 
+Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find
+out nothing about them, and there the matter rested. 
+Finally, last year, when I decided to make the trip,
+I recollected these old bonds, and took them with me. 
+I thought they might at least pay my expenses.  But it
+wasn't the least good.  Nobody knew anything about them. 
+It seems they related to something that was burned up in the
+Great Fire--either that, or had disappeared before that time. 
+That fire seems to have operated like the Deluge--it
+cancelled everything that had happened previously. 
+My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment. 
+I shall have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow,
+a very picturesque and comprehensive collection of
+Confederate Bonds.  Their face value is, as I remember it,
+eighty thousand dollars--that is, sixteen thousand pounds. 
+I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings
+for the lot.  My dear father bought them--I should not
+be surprised to learn that he bought them at a premium. 
+If they ever touched a premium for a day, that is
+certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. 
+Oh, it was too rare! Too inspired! He left nearly
+a hundred thousand pounds' worth of paper--that is,
+on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I think
+it was thirteen hundred pounds.  It's hard to imagine
+how he got them--but there were actually bonds among
+them issued by Kossuth's Hungarian Republic in 1848. 
+Well--now you can see the kind of inheritance I came into,
+and I have a brother and sister more or less to look after,
+too."
+
+Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost
+exaggerated expression of sympathy upon his face. 
+The voice in which he spoke now betrayed, however, a certain
+note of incredulity. 
+
+"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked.  "But what I
+don't perhaps quite understand--well, this is it.
+You have this place of yours in the country, and preserve
+game and so on--but of course I see what you mean. 
+It's what you've been saying.  What another man would think
+a comfortable living, is poverty to a man in your position."
+
+"Oh, the place," said Plowden.  "It isn't mine at all. 
+I could never have kept it up.  It belongs to my mother. 
+It was her father's place; it has been in their family
+for hundreds of years.  Her father, I daresay you know,
+was the last Earl of Hever.  The title died with him. 
+He left three daughters, who inherited his estates,
+and my mother, being the eldest, got the Kentish properties. 
+Of course Hadlow House will come to me eventually,
+but it is hers during her lifetime.  I may speak of it
+as my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't
+necessary to explain to everybody that it's my mother's.
+It's my home, and that's enough.  It's a dear old place. 
+I can't tell you how glad I am that you're going to see
+it."
+
+"I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.
+
+"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman
+went on, sitting upright now, and speaking with a
+confidential seriousness, "centre round Hadlow. 
+That is the part of me that I'm keen about.  The Plowdens
+are things of yesterday.  My grandfather, the Chancellor,
+began in a very small way, and was never anything more
+than a clever lawyer, with a loud voice and a hard heart,
+and a talent for money-making and politics.  He got
+a peerage and he left a fortune.  My father, for all
+he was a soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart. 
+He gave a certain military distinction to the peerage,
+but he played hell-and-tommy with the fortune.  And then
+I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General,
+and I haven't a penny to bless myself with.  You can't think
+of a more idiotic box for a man to be in.  But now--thanks
+to you--there comes this prospect of an immense change. 
+If I have money at my back--at once everything is different
+with me.  People will remember then promptly enough that I
+am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden.  I will make the party
+whips remember it, too.  It won't be a Secretary's billet
+in India at four hundred a year that they'll offer me,
+but a Governorship at six thousand--that is, if I wish
+to leave England at all.  And we'll see which set of
+whips are to have the honour of offering me anything. 
+But all that is in the air.  It's enough, for the moment,
+to realize that things have really come my way.  And about
+that--about the success of the affair--I suppose there can
+be no question whatever?"
+
+"Not the slightest," Thorpe assured him.  "Rubber Consols
+can go up to any figure we choose to name."
+
+Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more
+helped himself after he had given his companion a light. 
+Then he threw himself back against the cushions,
+with a long sigh of content.  "I'm not going to say
+another word about myself," he announced, pleasantly. 
+"I've had more than my legitimate innings.  You mustn't
+think that I forget for a moment the reverse of the medal. 
+You're doing wonderful things for me.  I only wish it
+were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I
+can do for you."
+
+"Oh, that'll be all right," said the other, rather vaguely. 
+
+"Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your
+mind just what you want to do," Plowden reflected aloud. 
+"Of course it has come suddenly upon you--just as it has
+upon me.  There are things in plenty that we've dreamed
+of doing, while the power to do them was a long way off. 
+It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we shall
+proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands. 
+But have you any plans at all? Do you fancy going
+into Parliament, for example?"
+
+"Yes," answered Thorpe, meditatively.  "I think I should
+like to go into Parliament.  But that would be some
+way ahead.  I guess I've got my plans worked out a trifle
+more than you think.  They may not be very definite,
+as regards details, but their main direction I know
+well enough.  I'm going to be an English country gentleman."
+
+Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. 
+He seemed annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so,
+turning abruptly first to stare out of the window,
+then shifting his position on the seat, and at last stealing
+an uneasy glance toward his companion.  Apparently his
+tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment. 
+
+Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. 
+Plowden saw that at once, but it relieved even more than
+it surprised him to see also that Thorpe appeared not
+to mind.  The older man, indeed, smiled in good-natured
+if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.
+
+"Oh, that'll be all right, too," he said, with the evident
+intention of reassurance.  "I can do it right enough,
+so far as the big things are concerned.  It'll be in the
+little things that I'll want some steering."
+
+"I've already told you--you may command me to the utmost
+of my power," the other declared.  Upon reflection,
+he was disposed to be ashamed of himself.  His nerves
+and facial muscles had been guilty of an unpardonable
+lapse into snobbishness--and toward a man, too, who had
+been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its
+courtesy and generosity than any he had encountered
+in all the "upper circles" put together.  He recalled all
+at once, moreover, that Thorpe's "h's" were perfect--aud,
+for some occult reason, this completed his confusion. 
+
+"My dear fellow"--he began again, confronting with verbal
+awkwardness the other's quizzical smile--"don't think I
+doubt anything about you.  I know well enough that you
+can do anything--be anything--you like."
+
+Thorpe laughed softly. 
+
+"I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-
+school man," he said. 
+
+Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. 
+"No--I didn't know that," he admitted, frankly. 
+
+"Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon," Thorpe went on, "as they
+called them in my day.  That's gone out now, I'm told,
+since they've moved to the big buildings in Hammersmith. 
+I did very well at school, too; came out in the first fourteen. 
+But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further. 
+He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's
+and learning the book-business.  He had precisely the same
+kind of dynastic idea, you know, that you fellows have. 
+His father and his grand-father had been booksellers,
+and he was going to hand on the tradition to me,
+and my son after me.  That was his idea.  And he thought
+that Paul's would help this--but that Oxford would
+kill it. 
+
+"Of course, he was right there--but he was wrong in supposing
+there was a bookseller in me.  I liked the books well enough,
+mind you--but damn the people that came to buy them,
+I couldn't stand it.  You stood two hours watching to see
+that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and at
+the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. 
+While you were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off
+with a book worth eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. 
+I didn't hit it off with the old man, either.  We didn't
+precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook. 
+I hung about London for some years, trying this thing
+and that.  Once I started a book-shop of my own--but I
+did no good here.  Finally I turned it up altogether,
+and went to Australia.  That was in 1882.  I've been
+in almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known
+what it was to be shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've
+lain down in a desert not expecting to get up again,
+with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger--but
+I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my
+father's book-shop."
+
+Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the
+other's mood.  He was silent for a moment, then lifted
+his head as if something had occurred to him. 
+"You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed
+to your father's business--and your son after you--you're
+not married, are you?"
+
+Thorpe slowly shook his head. 
+
+"Our station is the next," said the younger man. 
+"It's a drive of something under two miles.  You'd better
+light another cigar." He added, as if upon a casual
+afterthought: "We can both of us think of marrying now."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost
+wholly occupied with various phases of the large subject of
+domestic service.  He seemed suddenly to have been transported
+to some region populated exclusively by clean-shaven men
+in brown livery.  One of these was holding a spirited
+horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken
+the reins, and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his
+knees and feet, this menial silently associated himself
+with the young man who had accompanied them from town,
+on the back seat of the trap.  With these people so close
+behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation
+was out of the question.  Indeed, talk of any sort
+was not invited; the big horse burst forth with high,
+sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
+once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's
+energies to regulate.  He kept up a continual murmuring
+monologue to the animal--"So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--
+so--easy, my beauty---so--so"--and his wrists and gloved
+hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of strain,
+as they held their own against the rigid arched neck
+and mouth of steel.  Thorpe kept a grip on the side of
+the trap, and had only a modified pleasure in the drive. 
+The road along which they sped seemed, in the gathering dusk,
+uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good deal
+as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. 
+But silence was such a law of their life that, though he
+strained his ears, he could not so much as hear them
+sigh or gasp. 
+
+It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off,
+with but the most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a
+private road, which speedily developed into an avenue
+of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower than ever. 
+Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out
+all at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the
+crescent of a gravel road, and halted before what seemed
+to be the door of a greenhouse.  Thorpe, as he stood up
+in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a low,
+pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing
+behind curtains in several widely separated windows;
+what he had taken to be a conservatory revealed itself now
+to be a glass gallery, built along the front of the central
+portion of this house. 
+
+A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles
+in brackets among the vines against the trellised wall--
+gave to this outlying entrance what the stranger felt
+to be a delightful effect.  Its smooth tiled floor,
+comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the
+path outside.  There were low easy-chairs here, and a little
+wicker table bearing books and a lady's work-basket.
+Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were massed beneath
+the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis. 
+Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this
+glazed vestibule, the broad doorway of the house proper
+stood open--with warm lights glowing richly upon dark
+woods in the luxurious obscurity within. 
+
+What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants
+who seemed to swarm everywhere.  The two who had alighted
+from the trap had contrived somehow mysteriously to multiply
+themselves in the darkness.  All at once there were a
+number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back and
+sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second,
+and beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid,
+brown-clad replica of all the others that Thorpe knew
+he should never be able to tell them apart. 
+
+Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to
+look at his watch.  "We did it in a bit over eight minutes,"
+he remarked, with obvious satisfaction.  "With four
+people and heavy roads that's not so bad--not so bad.
+But come inside."
+
+They moved forward through the wide doorway into an
+apartment the like of which Thorpe had not seen before. 
+It was a large, square room, with a big staircase at
+the end, which separated and went off to right and left,
+half-way up its visible course.  Its floor was of
+inlaid woods, old and uneven from long use, and carpeted
+here and there by the skins of tigers and leopards. 
+There were many other suggestions of the chase about
+the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands
+of archaic weapons caught the eye at various points;
+the heads of foxes and deer peeped out on the blackened
+panels of the walls, from among clusters of hooks crowded
+with coats, hats, and mackintoshes.  At the right,
+where a fire glowed and blazed under a huge open
+chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up
+to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation. 
+The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table
+in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter
+of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches;
+the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the
+benches at the sides--all this self-renewing disorder of a
+careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise. 
+It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
+to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman,
+filled to overflowing with servants, amazed him. 
+
+The glances that he cast about him, however, were
+impassive enough.  His mind was charged with the ceaseless
+responsibility of being astonished at nothing. 
+A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat. 
+Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags. 
+
+"If you will follow Pangbourn," said his host,
+indicating this second domestic, "he will look after you. 
+You would like to go up and change now, wouldn't you?
+There's a fire in your room."
+
+Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake
+of his portmanteaus, taking the turning to the left,
+and then proceeding by a long, low passage, round more than
+one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing of the house. 
+The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite
+of himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. 
+The prettiest and most charming of rooms it seemed
+to him to be--spacious and quaintly rambling in shape,
+with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
+effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and
+bed-hangings and chair-covers, and with a bright fire
+in the grate throwing its warm, cozy glow over everything. 
+He looked at the pictures on the walls, at the photographs
+and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
+posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in
+the averted face of the servant, smiled richly to himself. 
+
+This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened
+the new bags.  Thorpe looked to see him quit the room,
+this task accomplished, and was conscious of something
+like dismay at the discovery that he intended to unpack
+them as well.  Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one
+paper parcel after another and to assort their contents
+in little heaps on the sofa beside him.  He did it deftly,
+imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he had ever seen
+carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen. 
+
+Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words
+on the tip of his tongue--but he did not utter these words. 
+After circling idly, hands in pockets, about the man
+and the bags for a little time, he invented something
+which it seemed better for him to say. 
+
+"I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,"
+he remarked, casually.  "My man has been buying them
+today--and I don't know what he mayn't have forgotten. 
+My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray or was
+stolen at some station or other--the first part of the
+week--I think it must have been Leeds."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Pangbourn, without emotion. 
+"They're very careless, sir."
+
+He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments
+and spreading them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie
+beside them, and arranging the razors, strop, and brushes
+on the dressing-table. He seemed to foresee everything--for
+there was not an instant's hesitation in the clock-like
+assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs,
+in one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire,
+and set the patent-leather pumps against the fender. 
+Even the old Mexican shooting-suit seemed in no way to
+disconcert him.  He drew forth its constituent elements
+as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
+sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall,
+they had the trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle
+look as if it had been fashioned expressly for them. 
+
+Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his
+admiration for Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. 
+The delighted thought that now he would be needing a man
+like this for himself crossed his mind.  Conceivably he might
+even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though he were. 
+Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why
+not Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket,
+as it became apparent that the man's task was nearing
+completion--and then frowned at himself for forgetting
+that these things were always reserved for the end of a visit. 
+
+"Will you dress now, sir?" asked Pangbourn.  His soft,
+distinct enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries
+of training. 
+
+"Eh?" said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind
+the other's thought. 
+
+"Shall you require me any further, sir?" the man reframed
+the question, deferentially. 
+
+"Oh! Oh--no," replied Thorpe.  "No--I'll get along all right."
+
+Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving
+and dressing.  The candles on either side of the thick,
+bevelled swinging mirror presented a somewhat embarrassing
+contrast to the electric light he was used to--but upon second
+thought he preferred this restrained aristocratic glimmer. 
+
+He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the
+bay-window, with his shoulder holding back the edge
+of the curtain, looking out upon the darkened lawn and
+wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait for
+someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. 
+Before he could answer, the door opened, and he made
+out in the candle-and firelight that it was Lord Plowden
+who had come in.  He stepped forward to meet his host who,
+clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a cigarette. 
+
+"Have they looked after you all right?" said Plowden,
+nonchalantly.  "Have a cigarette before we go down? Light
+it by the candle.  They never will keep matches in a bedroom."
+
+He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire,
+as he spoke, and stretched out his shining slippers
+toward the grate.  "I thought I'd tell you before we went
+down"--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the mantel,
+looked down at his handsome head--"my sister has a couple
+of ladies visiting her.  One of them I think you know. 
+Do you remember on shipboard a Miss Madden--an American,
+you know--very tall and fine, with bright red hair--rather
+remarkable hair it was?"
+
+"I remember the lady," said Thorpe, upon reflection,
+"but we didn't meet." He could not wholly divest his tone
+of the hint that in those days it by no means followed
+that because he saw ladies it was open to him to know them. 
+
+Lord Plowden smiled a little.  "Oh, you'll like her. 
+She's great fun--if she's in the mood.  My mother and sister--I
+had them call on her in London last spring--and they took
+a great fancy to her.  She's got no end of money, you know--at
+least a million and a half--dollars, unfortunately. 
+Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
+waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if
+they'd crossed over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no,
+the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous country for assimilation,
+that America is! You remember what I told you--it's put
+such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you were English."
+
+Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke,
+in silence.  This insistence upon the un-English nature
+of the effect he produced was not altogether grateful
+to his ears. 
+
+"The other one," continued Plowden, "is Lady Cressage. 
+You'll be interested in her--because a few years ago she
+was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in London. 
+She married a shocking bounder--he would have been
+Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he
+was drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. 
+Oh! by the way!" he started up, with a gleam of aroused
+interest on his face--"it didn't in the least occur
+to me.  Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. 
+How did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick
+him up?"
+
+Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines.  "Why, you introduced
+me to him yourself, didn't you?" he asked, slowly. 
+
+Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion,
+as he turned it over in his mind.  "By George! I think
+you're right," he said.  "I'd quite forgotten it. 
+Of course I did.  Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
+readily enough now.  Poor old chappie--he needs all he
+can get.  He was bothering her about money--that was it,
+I remember now--but what an idiot I was to forget it. 
+But what I was saying--there's no one else but my mother
+and sister, and my brother Balder.  He's a youngster--twenty
+or thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams
+for the Army.  If they opened his head, though, I doubt
+if they'd find anything but cricket and football,
+unless it might be a bit of golf.  Well--that's the party. 
+I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. 
+If you've finished your cigarette"--he threw his own
+into the grate, and rose as he spoke--"we may as well be
+moving along.  By the way," he concluded, as they walked
+toward the door, "I've an idea that we won't say anything,
+just at the moment, about our great coup.  I should like
+to keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister,
+you know."
+
+Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the
+restored equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey
+of his surroundings.  He had become temporarily detached
+from the group over by the fireplace in the big drawing-room
+and was for the first time that evening very much at
+his ease.  It was all much simpler, upon experiment,
+than he had feared.  He stood now in a corner of the
+ornate apartment, whither he had wandered in examining
+the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with serenity
+the five people whom he had left behind him.  He was
+conscious of the conviction that when he rejoined them,
+it would be on a new footing of assured equality. 
+He knew now the exact measure of everything. 
+
+The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth,
+with enormous shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale
+straw-coloured hair and brows and eyelashes--had amiably
+sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for his benefit now,
+in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
+connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds
+of terriers toward rats.  Across the room, just within
+reach of the flickering ruddy firelight from the hearth,
+the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated at the piano,
+playing some low and rather doleful music.  Thorpe bent
+his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he
+listened to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. 
+His thoughts were concentrated jealously upon his own
+position in this novel setting.  He said to himself that it
+was all right.  Old Lady Plowden had seemed to like him
+from the start.  The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
+motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet
+anchor throughout the evening.  She had not once failed
+to nod her head and smile and twinkle her little kind eyes
+through their spectacles at him, whenever by word or look he
+had addressed her.  Nor did his original half-suspicion,
+that this was her manner to people in general, justify itself
+upon observation.  She was civil, even excessively civil,
+to the other two guests, but these ladies did not get
+the same eager and intent smile that he could command. 
+He reasoned it out that Plowden must have said something
+pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to the point
+of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
+fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable
+warmth to that.  It was dear to him to believe that she
+liked him on his own merits--and he did believe it,
+as his softened glance rested upon her where she sat
+almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
+white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating
+a kind of alert placidity which somehow made him feel
+at home. 
+
+He had not been as much at home with the others. 
+The Honourable Balder, of course, didn't count; nobody paid
+attention to him, and least of all a busy Rubber King. 
+He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
+young woman with the red hair and the million and a half
+of dollars.  She was plainly a visitor like himself,
+not at all identified with the inner life of the household. 
+He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired to be
+thus identified.  She seemed to carry herself with a
+deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability. 
+Then he had spoken his few words with her, once or twice,
+he had got this effect of stony reserve close beneath
+her smile and smooth words.  True, this might mean only
+that she felt herself out of her element, just as he
+did--but to him, really it did not matter what she felt. 
+A year ago--why, yes, even a fortnight ago--the golden
+rumour of millions would have shone round her auburn hair
+in his eyes like a halo.  But all that was changed. 
+Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune
+shrank to a mere three hundred thousand pounds.  It was
+a respectable sum for a woman to have, no doubt, but it
+did nothing to quicken the cool indifference with which he
+considered her. 
+
+The two other young women were different.  They were seated
+together on a sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view,
+that he saw only in part the shadowed profiles of the faces
+they turned toward the piano.  Although it was not visible
+to him, the posture of their shoulders told him that they
+were listening to the music each holding the other's hand. 
+This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way
+they hung together, these two young women.  It had been
+forced upon his perceptions all the evening, that this
+fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady Cressage,
+and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter
+of the house, peering through her pince-nez from under
+unduly thick black brows, formed a party of their own. 
+Their politeness toward him had been as identical in all
+its little shades of distance and reservation as if they
+had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would
+be unfair to them to assume from their manner that they
+disliked him, or were even unfavourably impressed by him. 
+The finesse of that manner was far too delicate a thing
+to call into use such rough characterizations.  It was
+rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. 
+He thought he could see that they united upon a common
+demeanour toward the American girl, although of course they
+knew her much better than they knew him.  It was not even
+clear to him that there were not traces of this combination
+in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. 
+The bond between them had twisted in it strands of social
+exclusiveness, and strands of sex sympathy. 
+
+He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts,
+but the impressions of it were distinct enough to him.
+He rather enjoyed these impressions than otherwise. 
+Women had not often interested him consecutively
+to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. 
+He had formulated, among other loose general notions
+of them, however, the idea that their failure to stand
+by one another was one of their gravest weaknesses. 
+This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
+his attention.  It became apparent to him, all at once,
+that his opinions about women would be henceforth
+invested with a new importance.  He had scarcely before
+in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
+which included ladies--certainly never in the presence
+of such certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. 
+His future, however, was to be filled with experiences
+of this nature.  Already, after this briefest of ventures
+into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of the great
+subject springing up in his thoughts.  In this matter
+of women sticking together, for example--here before his
+eyes was one of the prettiest instances of it imaginable. 
+As he looked again at the two figures on the sofa,
+so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit to each
+other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle
+really touching. 
+
+Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more
+toward the piano.  Thorpe was not stirred at all by
+the music, but the spirit of it as it was reflected upon
+this beautiful facial outline--sensitive, high-spirited,
+somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. 
+He moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen
+restricted paces, and halted again at the corner of a table. 
+It was a relief that the Honourable Balder, though he
+followed along, respected now his obvious wish for silence. 
+But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
+the music said less than nothing to his ears--that
+it was the face that had beckoned him to advance. 
+
+Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him,
+he studied this face and mused upon it.  The white candle-light
+on the shining wall beyond threw everything into a soft,
+uniform shadow, this side of the thread of dark tracery
+which outlined forehead and nose and lips and chin.
+It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie;
+he could not be sure. 
+
+So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had
+lived! He said to himself that he had never seen before,
+or imagined, a face which belonged so indubitably
+beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in diamonds. 
+The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy,
+of the great lady--they were all there in their supreme
+expression.  And yet--why, she was no great lady at all. 
+She was the daughter of his old General Kervick--the
+necessitous and haughtily-humble old military gentleman,
+with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat,
+who did what he was told on the Board without a question,
+for a pitiful three hundred a year.  Yes--she was his daughter,
+and she also was poor.  Plowden had said so. 
+
+Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving
+her from her father's importunities? He must have had
+it very much at heart, to have invented the roundabout
+plan of getting the old gentleman a directorship.
+But no--there was nothing in that.  Why, Plowden had even
+forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. 
+It would have been his sister, of course, who was
+evidently such chums with Lady Cressage, who gave him
+the hint to help the General to something if he could. 
+And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
+military men and so on, had no other notion of making money
+save by directorships.  Clearly, that was the way of it. 
+Plowden had remembered Kervick's name, when the chance
+arose to give the old boy a leg up, and then had clean
+forgotten the circumstance.  The episode rather increased
+his liking for Plowden. 
+
+He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought,
+to where the peer sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair
+before the fire.  He was so nearly recumbent in it, indeed,
+that there was nothing to be seen of him but an elbow,
+and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender. 
+Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of
+General Kervick's daughter.  He wondered if she knew
+about the Company, and about him, and about his ability
+to solidify to any extent her father's financial position. 
+Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was
+very fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful
+to one who should render him securely comfortable for
+life? Miss Madden rose from the piano before Thorpe noted
+that the music had ceased.  There came from the others
+a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity
+and enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. 
+He had evidently been deaf to something that deeply
+moved the rest.  Even Balder made remarks which seemed
+to be regarded as apposite. 
+
+"What IS it?" asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. 
+"I don't know when anything has touched me so much."
+
+"Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai
+in Paris for a franc or two," replied Miss Madden. 
+"I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly enough,
+the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?"
+
+"We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and
+musicians--like this," affirmed Lord Plowden, who had
+scrambled to his feet. 
+
+With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined
+the conversation. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs
+next morning before anybody else in the house, apparently,
+was astir.  At all events, he saw no one in either the hall
+or the glass vestibule, as he wandered about.  Both doors
+were wide open, however, to the mild, damp morning air.
+He found on one of the racks a cap that was less uncomfortable
+than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.
+
+His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason
+told him they ought to be.  The disquieting impression of bad
+dreams hung about him.  The waking hour--always an evil
+time for him in these latter days of anxiety--had been this
+morning a peculiarly depressing affair.  It had seemed
+to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness,
+that he was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man;
+the illusion of disaster had been, indeed, so complete
+and vivid that, even now, more than an hour later,
+he had not shaken off its effects. 
+
+He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along
+the gravel paths, to the task of reassuring himself. 
+There were still elements of chance in the game,
+of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight,
+to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum--that
+it was nonsense to borrow trouble about them.  He reviewed
+the situation in painstaking detail, and at every point
+it was all right, or as nearly all right as any human
+business could be.  He scolded himself sharply for this
+foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. 
+"Look at Plowden!" he bade his dolorous spirit. 
+"See how easy he takes things."
+
+It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very
+easily indeed.  He had talked with eloquence and feeling
+about the miseries and humiliations of a peerage inadequately
+endowed with money, but no traces of his sufferings were
+visible to Thorpe's observant eye.  The nobleman himself looked
+the very image of contented prosperity--handsome, buoyant,
+light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London. 
+And this ancestral home of his--or of his mother's, since he
+seemed to insist upon the distinction--where were its signs
+of a stinted income? The place was overrun with servants. 
+There was a horse which covered a distance of something
+like two miles in eight minutes.  Inside and out,
+Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty. 
+Yet its master told the most unvarying tales of poverty,
+and no doubt they were in one sense true.  What he wished
+to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for himself from,
+was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved
+as if they were rich. 
+
+The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by
+high hedges and trees from what seemed to be a public
+road beyond, were fairly spacious, but the sleek decorum
+of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was scarcely
+interesting.  He liked better to study the house itself,
+which in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal
+of what a historic English country-house of the minor
+class should be.
+
+There had been a period in his youth when architecture
+had attracted him greatly as offering a congenial and
+lucrative career.  Not much remained to him now of the
+classifications and phraseology which he had gone to the trouble
+of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked
+at buildings with a kind of professional consciousness. 
+Hadlow House said intelligible things to him, and he
+was pleased with himself for understanding them. 
+It was not new in any part, apparently, but there was
+nothing pretentious in its antiquity.  It had never
+been a castle, or a fortified residence.  No violent
+alteration in habits or needs distinguished its present
+occupants from its original builders.  It had been
+planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
+not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle
+people to have homes, without fighting to defend them. 
+One could fancy that its calm and infinitely comfortable
+history had never been ruffled from that day to this. 
+He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening
+that the house stood upon the site of an old monastery.
+No doubt that accounted for its being built in a hollow,
+with the ground-floor on the absolute level of the
+earth outside.  The monks had always chosen these low-lying
+sheltered spots for their cloisters.  Why should they
+have done so? he wondered--and then came to a sudden
+mental stop, absorbed in a somewhat surprised contemplation
+of a new version of himself.  He was becoming literary,
+historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open again,
+to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors.
+He had read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old
+book-shop! For many years that boyhood of eager concern
+in the printed page had seemed to him to belong to
+somebody else.  Now, all at once, it came back to him as his
+own possession; he felt that he could take up books again
+where he had dropped them, perhaps even with the old rapt,
+intent zest.
+
+Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he
+would gather for himself.  And it should be in no wise
+for show--the gross ostentation of the unlettered
+parvenu--but a genuine library, which should minister
+to his own individual culture.  The thought took instant
+hold upon his interest.  By that road, his progress to the
+goal of gentility would be smooth and simple.  He seemed
+not to have reasoned it out to himself in detail before,
+but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough.
+Why should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings
+about himself, as if he had come out of the gutter?
+
+Why indeed? He had passed through--and with credit,
+too--one of the great public schools of England. 
+He had been there on a footing of perfect equality,
+so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic families
+or of great City potentates.  And as to birth, he had
+behind him three generations at least of scholarly men,
+men who knew the contents, as well as the commercial value,
+of the books they handled.
+
+His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling. 
+The tradition of Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of
+how he requited it by securing Caxton's "Golden Legend"
+for the library of that distinguished collector, under the
+very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of Marlborough,
+was tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop. 
+And Thorpe's father, too, though no such single achievement
+crowned his memory, had been the adviser and, as one might say,
+the friend of many notable writers and patrons of literature. 
+The son of such forbears needed only money to be recognized
+by everybody as a gentleman. 
+
+On his mother's side, now that he thought of it,
+there was something perhaps better still than a heritage
+of librarians' craft and tastes.  His mother's maiden
+name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the
+solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact,
+in the course of domestic discussions.  Who the Stormonts
+were he could not recall that he had ever learned,
+but his mother had been very clear indeed about their
+superiority to the usual ruck of people.  He would
+ask his sister whether she knew anything about them. 
+In the meantime there was no denying that Stormont was
+a fine-sounding name.  He reflected that it was his own
+middle name--and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him
+a card-plate on which appeared the legend--"Mr. Stormont Thorpe."
+
+It was an inspiration! "Joel" he had not used for so many
+years that now, after six months' familiarity with it
+on his sister's lips, he could not get accustomed to it. 
+The colourless and non-committal style of "J. S. Thorpe,"
+under which he had lived so long, had been well enough
+for the term of his exile--the weary time of obscure toil
+and suspense.  But now, in this sunburst of smiling fortune,
+when he had achieved the right to a name of distinction--here
+it was ready to his hand.  A fleeting question as to
+whether he should carry the "J" along as an initial put
+itself to his mind.  He decided vigorously against it. 
+He had always had a prejudice against men who, in the
+transatlantic phrase, parted either their hair or their
+names in the middle.
+
+He had made his unheeding way past the house to the
+beginning of the avenue of trees, which he remembered
+from the previous evening's drive.  To his right, an open
+space of roadway led off in the direction of the stables. 
+As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take,
+the sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear,
+and he stood still.  In a moment there came into view,
+round a curve in the leafy distance, two horses with riders,
+advancing at a brisk canter.  Soon he perceived that the
+riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him,
+and then it was to be seen that they were the pair he had
+judged to be such close friends last night--Lady Cressage
+and the daughter of the house. 
+
+They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his
+cap and bowed.  Their cheeks were glowing and their
+eyes sparkling with the exhilaration of their ride. 
+Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished
+in his eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity. 
+She seemed to carry herself better in the saddle than she
+did out of it; the sweep of her habit below the stirrup
+lent dignity to her figure. 
+
+But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly
+toward the stepping-block--how should he bring within the
+compass of thought the impressions he had had of her as she
+passed? There seemed to have been no memory in his mind
+to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she had made. 
+Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like
+some queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable. 
+He stared after her, mutely bewildered at the effect she
+produced upon him--until he saw that a groom had run from
+the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity to dismount. 
+The angry thought that he might have done this himself
+rose within him--but there followed swiftly enough
+the answering conviction that he lacked the courage. 
+He did not even advance to proffer his services to the other
+young lady, while there was still time.  The truth was,
+he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him. 
+
+He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company
+of which they made part, the previous evening.  There had
+been an hour or more, indeed, before the party broke up,
+in which he had borne the lion's share of the talk--and
+they had appeared as frankly entertained as the others. 
+In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he
+had addressed his monologue of reminiscences--curious
+experiences and adventures in Java and the Argentine,
+in Brazil and the Antilles and Mexico and the far West--it
+was in the face of Lady Cressage that he seemed to discern
+the most genuine interest. 
+
+Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The
+whimsical theory that the wine at dinner had given him
+a spurious courage occurred to him.  He shrugged his
+shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his pockets,
+turned toward the stables. 
+
+The stable-yard is, from some points of view,
+the prettiest thing about Hadlow.  There is a big,
+uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of which,
+from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous
+girth and height.  All around this enclosure are buildings
+of the same pale yellowish brick as the mansion itself,
+but quaintly differing one from another in design and size. 
+Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a laundry, a brewery,
+and half a dozen structures the intention of which is
+now somewhat uncertain--some flat-topped, some gabled,
+others with turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging
+timbered upper stories--form round this unkempt, shadowed
+green a sort of village, with a communal individuality of its own. 
+
+A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence
+upon, the great house behind which it nestles;
+some of the back-kitchens and offices of this
+great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and
+merge themselves into this quadrangle.  None the less,
+it presents to the enquiring gaze a specific character,
+of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak itself. 
+Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned
+the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck. 
+Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here;
+half the buildings on the side nearest the house belong to
+their time, and one of them still bears a partially-defaced
+coat of arms that must have belonged to an Abbot. 
+And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb and
+vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. 
+Its population crossed themselves less, and worked much harder,
+but they remained in a world of their own, adjacent aud
+subject to the world of their masters, yet separated
+from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances. 
+
+Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. 
+He counted three men and a boy who visibly belonged
+to this department.  The dog-cart of the previous evening
+had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained
+the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now
+beneath the sponge of one of the hostlers.  Under cover,
+he discerned two other carriages, and there seemed to be
+at least half a dozen horses.  The men who, in the half
+gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these
+animals made a curious whistling noise as they worked. 
+Everybody in the yard touched a forelock to him as he passed. 
+
+From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at
+his leisure, through an open gate in the wall at the back,
+into the gardens behind the house.  There was not much
+in the way of flowers to look at, but he moved about quite
+unconscious of any deprivation.  A cluster of greenhouses,
+massed against the southern side of the mansion,
+attracted his listless fancy, and he walked toward what
+appeared to be an entrance to them.  The door was locked,
+but he found another further on which opened to his hand. 
+The air was very hot and moist inside, and the place was
+so filled with broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants
+that he had to stoop to make his way through to the end. 
+The next house had a more tolerable atmosphere, and contained
+some blossoms to which he gave momentary attention. 
+In the third house, through the glass-door, he could
+see a man--evidently a gardener--lifting some pots to a
+shelf overhead. 
+
+The thought occurred to him that by entering into
+conversation with this man, he might indirectly obtain
+a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at Hadlow.  It was
+now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry. 
+Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something?
+he wondered.  Perhaps there had been some such summons,
+and he had not heard it.  It might be the intelligent
+thing for him to return to the house, at all events,
+and sit in the hall where the servants could see him,
+in case the meal was in progress. 
+
+Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile,
+it suddenly dawned upon him that the face and figure
+were familiar.  He stared more intently at the man,
+casting about in his memory for a clue to his identity. 
+It came to him that the person he had in mind was a
+fellow named Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished
+and down-at-the-heels sort of hotel and general store on
+the road from Belize to Boon Town, in British Honduras. 
+Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson.  What on earth
+was he doing here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration
+to this problem.  It was of more immediate importance
+to recall the circumstances of his contact with the man. 
+He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel his
+headquarters for the better part of a month--the base
+of supplies from which he made numerous prospecting
+tours into the mountains of the interior.  Had he paid
+his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about that. 
+He could even recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like
+scale of charges, and the lack of perception of opportunity,
+which characterized the bill in question.  He remembered
+now his impression that Gafferson would never do any good. 
+It would be interesting to know what kind of an impression he,
+in turn, had produced on his thriftless host.  At any rate,
+there was no good reason why he should not find out. 
+He opened the door and went in. 
+
+The gardener barely looked up from his occupation,
+and drew aside to let the newcomer pass with no sign
+of a gesture toward his cap.  Thorpe halted, and tried
+to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about
+such things. 
+
+"What are you doing?" he asked, in the tentative tone
+of one who is in no need of information, but desires
+to be affable. 
+
+"Drying off the first lot of gloxinias," answered the other. 
+"Some people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright,
+close to the glass.  It stands to reason, if you think
+about it."
+
+"Why, certainly," said Thorpe, with conviction. 
+In his mind he contrasted the independence of Gafferson's
+manner with the practised servility of the stable-yard--
+and thought that he liked it--and then was not so sure. 
+He perceived that there was no recognition of him. 
+The gardener, as further desultory conversation about his
+work progressed, looked his interlocutor full in the face,
+but with a placid, sheep-like gaze which seemed to be entirely
+insensible to variations in the human species. 
+
+"How did you ever get back here to England?" Thorpe was
+emboldened to ask at last.  In comment upon the other's
+stare of puzzled enquiry, he went on: "You're Gafferson,
+aren't you? I thought so.  When I last saw you, you were
+running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize. 
+That was in '90."
+
+Gafferson--a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a
+straggling reddish beard--turned upon him a tranquil but
+uninformed eye.  "I suppose you would have been stopping
+at Government House," he remarked.  "That was in Sir
+Roger Goldsworthy's time.  They used to come out often
+to see my flowers.  And so you remembered my name. 
+I suppose it was because of the Gaffersoniana hybrids. 
+There was a good bit in the papers about them last spring."
+Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put
+into words.  "Well, it beats all," he mused aloud. 
+"Why, man, there's gold in those mountains! You had an inside
+track on prospecting, placed as you were.  And there's
+cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in rubber, too. 
+All that country's waiting for is better communications. 
+And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the
+land--and yet here you are back in England, getting so much
+a month for messing about in the mud."
+
+He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond
+his earlier limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness. 
+"No, I wasn't in the Governor's outfit at all.  I was
+looking for gold then--with occasionally an eye on rubber. 
+I stopped at your place.  Don't you remember me? My
+name's Thorpe.  I had a beard then.  Why, man, you and one
+of your niggers were with me three or four days once,
+up on the ridge beyond the Burnt Hills--why, you remember,
+the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was forever
+bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those
+on the mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby
+wrinkle his nose, and you found a pepper coming through
+the swamp, and you tipped me the wink, and you handed
+that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him. 
+Hell! You must remember that!"
+
+"That would have been the Chavica pertusum," said Gafferson,
+thoughtfully.  He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in
+the story itself with some difficulty.  "Yes--I remember it,"
+he admitted, finally.  "I shouldn't have known you though. 
+I'm the worst in the world about remembering people.
+It seems to be growing on me.  I notice that when I go
+up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men
+that I had the longest talks with the time before. 
+Once you get wrapped up in your flowers, you've got
+no room in your head for anything else--that's the way of it."
+
+Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye.  "So this
+is the sort of thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be
+doing this, eh? than making your pile in logwood and mahogany
+out there, or floating a gold mine?" Gafferson answered
+quite simply: "I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile. 
+I got led into going out there when I was a youngster,
+and there didn't seem to be any good in trying to get back,
+but I wasn't making more than a bare living when you
+were there, and after that I didn't even do that much. 
+It took me a good many years to find out what my
+real fancy was.  I hated my hotel and my store,
+but I was crazy about my garden.  Finally an American
+gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place,
+and he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em,
+and he says to me, 'You're no good to run a hotel,
+nor yet a store, and this aint your country for a cent. 
+What you're born for is to grow flowers.  You can't
+afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it,
+but you gather up your seeds and roots and so on, and come
+along with me to Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll put fat on
+your bones.'
+
+"That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word,
+and I was with him two years, and then I thought I'd like to
+come to England, and since then I've worked my way up here,
+till now I take a Royal Horticultural medal regular,
+and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll
+be in the market next spring that's named after my master. 
+And what could I ask more 'n that?"
+
+"Quite right," said Thorpe.  "What time do they have
+breakfast here?"
+
+The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had
+taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative. 
+It relapsed into lethargy at the advent of this new topic.
+
+"It seems to me they eat at all hours," he said. 
+"But if you want to see his Lordship," he went on,
+considering, "about noon would be your best time."
+
+"See his Lordship!" repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin. 
+"Why I'm a guest here in the house.  All I want is
+something to eat."
+
+"A guest," Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly.  There was
+nothing unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp
+glance failed to detect any trace of offensive intention
+in his companion's fatuous visage.  Yet it seemed to
+pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised,
+and that there were abundant grounds for his surprise. 
+
+"Why, yes," said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he
+could summon, "your master is one of my directors. 
+I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm going to make a rich
+man of him.  He was keen about my seeing his place here,
+and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away
+over Sunday to oblige him.  By the way--I shall buy an
+estate in the country as soon as the right thing offers,
+and I shall want to set up no end of gardens and greenhouses
+and all that.  I see that I couldn't come to a better
+man than you for advice.  I daresay I'll put the whole
+arrangement of it in your hands.  You'd like that,
+wouldn't you?"
+
+"Whatever his Lordship agrees to," the gardener
+replied, sententiously.  He turned to the staging,
+and took up one of the pots. 
+
+Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the
+further door, which he could see opened upon the lawn. 
+He was conscious of annoyance with this moon-faced,
+dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a splendid
+chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship--it might even
+be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship--and
+who had so clumsily failed to rise to the situation. 
+The bitter thought of going back and giving him a half-crown
+rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he paused for
+an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. 
+The gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place,
+but then the spirit in which it was offered would be wholly
+lost on his dull brain.  And moreover, was it so certain
+that he would take it? He had not said "sir" once, and he
+had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. 
+The rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting
+a tip, of course, but if there was no more than one chance
+in twenty of it, Thorpe decided that he could not afford
+the risk. 
+
+He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his
+steps toward the front of the mansion.  As he entered the hall,
+a remarkably tuneful and resonant chime filled his ears
+with novel music.  He looked and saw that a white-capped,
+neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him beside
+the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune
+with two padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on
+a stand of Indian workmanship.  The sound was delightful,
+but even more so was the implication that it betokened breakfast. 
+
+With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he
+had been fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl
+as she turned.  "That's the kind of concert I like,"
+he declared, bestowing the patronage of a jovial smile upon
+her pleased and comely face.  "Show me the way to this
+breakfast that you've been serenading about."
+
+Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued
+to regard blankly the shrivelled, fatty leaves of
+the plant he had taken up.  "Thorpe," he said aloud,
+as if addressing the tabid gloxinia--"Thorpe--yes--I
+remember his initials--J. S. Thorpe.  Now, who's the
+man that told me about him? and what was it he told me?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed.
+Thorpe found himself the only man present, and, after the
+first few minutes of embarrassment at this discovery,
+it filled him with surprised delight to note how perfectly
+he was at his ease.  He could never have imagined
+himself seated with four ladies at a table--three
+of them, moreover, ladies of title--and doing it all so well. 
+
+For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner,
+so to speak, which differed widely from the impressions
+he had had of their deportment the previous evening. 
+They seemed now to be as simple and fresh and natural
+as the unadorned frocks they wore.  They listened with an
+air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled
+at the right places; they acted as if they liked him,
+and were glad of his company.
+
+The satisfied conviction that he was talking well,
+and behaving well, accompanied him in his progress
+through the meal.  His confession at the outset of his
+great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which
+had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place,
+proved a most fortuitous beginning; after that,
+they were ready to regard everything he said as amusing. 
+
+"Oh, when we're by ourselves," the kindly little old
+hostess explained to him, "my daughter and I breakfast
+always at nine.  That was our hour yesterday morning,
+for example.  But when my son is here, then it's farewell
+to regularity.  We put breakfast back till ten, then,
+as a kind of compromise between our own early habits
+and his lack of any sort of habits.  Why we do it I
+couldn't say--because he never comes down in any event. 
+He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps
+very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining. 
+We're only too glad--for his sake."
+
+"And Balder," commented the sister, "he's as bad the other way. 
+He gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a
+sandwich from the still-room, and goes off with his rod
+or his gun or the dogs, and we never see him till luncheon."
+
+"I've been on the point of asking so many times,"
+Miss Madden interposed--"is Balder a family name,
+or is it after the Viking in Matthew Arnold's poem?"
+
+"It was his father's choice," Lady Plowden made answer. 
+"I think the Viking explanation is the right one--it
+certainly isn't in either family.  I can't say that it
+attracted me much--at first, you know."
+
+"Oh, but it fits him so splendidly," said Lady Cressage. 
+"He looks the part, as they say.  I always thought it
+was the best of all the soldier names--and you have only
+to look at him to see that he was predestined for a soldier
+from his cradle."
+
+"I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long
+look at him, then," put in the mother with earnestness
+underlying the jest of her tone.  "The poor boy will
+never pass those exams in the world.  It IS ridiculous,
+as his father always said.  If there ever was a man who
+was made for a soldier, it's Balder.  He's a gentleman,
+and he's connected by tradition with the Army, and he's
+mad about everything military--and surely he's as clever
+as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
+of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and
+yet that suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. 
+And all over England there are young gentlemen like that--the
+very pick of the hunting-fields, strong and brave as lions,
+fit to lead men anywhere, the very men England wants
+to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
+in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief
+over last time?--because they can't remember whether
+it's Ispahan or Teheran that's the capital of Persia. 
+
+"They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both
+places at the point of the bayonet--and find out their
+names afterward--but it seems that's not what the Army
+wants nowadays.  What is desired now is superior clerks,
+and secretaries and professors of languages--and much
+good they will do us when the time of trouble comes!"
+
+"Then you think the purchase-system was better?"
+asked the American lady.  "It always seemed to me
+that that must have worked so curiously."
+
+"Prefer it?" said Lady Plowden.  "A thousand times
+yes! My husband made one of the best speeches in the
+debate on it--one do I say?--first and last he must
+have made a dozen of them.  If anything could have kept
+the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched
+Radical outcry, it would have been those speeches. 
+He pointed out all the evils that would follow the change. 
+You might have called it prophetic--the way he foresaw
+what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular,
+of course, but that whole class of young gentlemen. 
+
+"As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind
+of people the lower classes naturally look up to and
+obey and follow.  Will they be ordered about by a man
+simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do
+they respect the village schoolmaster, for example,
+on account of his learning? Not in the very slightest! On
+the contrary, they regard him with the greatest contempt. 
+The man they will serve is the man whose birth gives him
+the right to command them, or else the man with money
+in his pockets to make it worth their while.  These two
+are the only leaders they understand.  And if that's true
+here in England, in times of peace, among our own people,
+how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away from England,
+in a time of war?"
+
+"But, mamma," the Hon. Winifred intervened, "don't you
+see how badly that might work nowadays? now that the good
+families have so little money, and all the fortunes are
+in the hands of stockjobbing people--and so on? It would
+be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and
+I'm sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot."
+
+Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness.
+"You see so little of the world, Winnie dear,
+that you don't get very clear ideas of its movements. 
+The people who make fortunes in England are every whit
+as important to its welfare as those who inherit names,
+and individually I'm sure they are often much more deserving. 
+Every generation sniffs at its nouveaux riches, but by
+the next they have become merged in the aristocracy. 
+It isn't a new thing in England at all.  It has always been
+that way.  Two-thirds of the peerage have their start
+from a wealthy merchant, or some other person who made
+a fortune.  They are really the back-bone of England. 
+You should keep that always in mind."
+
+"Of course--I see what you mean"--Winnie replied,
+her dark cheek flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. 
+She had passed her twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had
+in it the docile self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke
+with diffident slowness, her gaze fastened upon her plate. 
+"Of course--my grandfather was a lawyer--and your point
+is that merchants--and others who make fortunes--would
+be the same."
+
+"Precisely," said Lady Plowden.  "And do tell us,
+Mr. Thorpe"--she turned toward where he sat at her right
+and beamed at him over her spectacles, with the air of
+having been wearied with a conversation in which he bore no
+part--"is it really true that social discontent is becoming
+more marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?"
+
+"I'm not an American, you know," he reminded her. 
+"I only know one or two sections of the country--and
+those only as a stranger.  You should ask Miss Madden."
+
+"Me?" said Celia.  "Oh, I haven't come up for my
+examinations yet.  I'm like Balder--I'm preparing."
+
+"What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us,"
+suggested Lady Cressage, mildly, "is about the flowers
+in the tropics--in Java, for example, or some
+of the West Indies.  One hears such marvelous tales about them."
+
+"Speaking of flowers," Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact;
+"I met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning,
+an old acquaintance of mine, the gardener, Gafferson.
+The last time I saw him, he was running the worst hotel
+in the world in the worst country in the world--
+out in British Honduras."
+
+"But he's a wonderful gardener," said Lady Cressage. 
+"He's a magician; he can do what he likes with plants. 
+It's rather a hobby of mine--or used to be--and I never saw
+his equal."
+
+Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn
+environment on the Belize road, and his success in
+making them laugh drew him on to other pictures of the
+droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. 
+The ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen
+to him; the charm of having them all to himself,
+and of holding them in interested entertainment by his
+discourse--these ladies of supremely refined associations
+and position--seemed to provide an inspiration of its own. 
+He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating
+itself to their critical ears.  His language was producing
+itself with as much delicacy of selection as if it came
+out of a book--and yet preserving the savour of quaint,
+outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly liked. 
+Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts,
+and glance across the table, warned him that they were
+to rise, he said deliberately to himself that this had
+been the most enjoyable episode of his whole life. 
+
+There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel,
+out in the hall, and Winnie indicated them to him with
+the obvious suggestion that he was expected to smoke. 
+He looked her over as he lit his cigar--where she
+stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs,
+and concluded that she was much nicer upon acquaintance
+than he had thought.  Her slight figure might not
+be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were ladylike. 
+The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind
+to her thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features. 
+They bore the stamp of caste, and so did the way she looked
+at one through her eye-glasses, from under those over-heavy
+black eyebrows, holding her head a little to one side. 
+Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit
+of her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her
+mother had shown that she had it under admirable control. 
+
+He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's
+book-shop the previous day.  Unfortunately it did not
+give her age, but that was not so important, after all.
+She was styled Honourable.  She was the daughter of one
+Viscount and the sister of another.  Her grandfather
+had been an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess
+a bewildering number of relationships among titled folks.
+All this was very interesting to him--and somewhat suggestive.
+Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in his brain as he
+looked at her.
+
+"I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions
+of entertaining his guests," she remarked to him,
+over her shoulder.  The other ladies had not joined them. 
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," he protested cordially.  "I should
+hate to have him put himself out in the slightest."
+Upon consideration he added: "I suppose he has given up
+the idea of shooting to-day."
+
+"I think not, "she answered." The keeper was about this morning,
+that is--and he doesn't often come unless they are to go
+out with the guns.  I suppose you are very fond of shooting."
+
+"Well--I've done some--in my time," Thorpe replied, cautiously. 
+It did not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire
+his first gun on English soil.  "It's a good many years,"
+he went on, "since I had the time and opportunity to do much
+at it.  I think the last shooting I did was alligators. 
+You hit 'em in the eye, you know.  But what kind of
+a hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't
+the least idea.  Is the shooting round I here pretty good?"
+
+"I don't think it's anything remarkable.  Plowden says
+my brother Balder kills all the birds off every season. 
+Balder's by way of being a crack-shot, you know. 
+There are some pheasants, though.  We saw them flying
+when we were out this morning."
+
+Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her
+upon the question of apparel.  Clearly, he ought to make
+some difference in his garb, yet the mental vision
+of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed itself
+now as ridiculously impossible.  He must have been out
+of his mind to have conceived anything so preposterous
+as rigging himself out, among these polished people,
+like a cow-puncher down on his luck. 
+
+"I wonder when your brother will expect to start,"
+he began, uneasily.  "Perhaps I ought to go and get ready."
+
+"Ah, here comes his man," remarked the sister.
+A round-faced, smooth-mannered youngster--whom Thorpe
+discovered to be wearing cord-breeches and leather
+leggings as he descended the stairs--advanced toward him
+and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. 
+"His Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes--and he
+hopes you'll be ready, sir," the valet said. 
+
+"Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room," Miss Winnie
+bade him, and with a gesture of comprehensive submission
+he went away. 
+
+The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution
+for his difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. 
+It would never have occurred to him that Pangbourn
+was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
+obvious it had been to her.  These old families did
+something more than fill their houses with servants;
+they mastered the art of making these servants an integral
+part of the machinery of existence.  Fancy having a man
+to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then
+dress you, into the bargain.  Oh, it was all splendid.
+
+"It seems that we're going shooting," Thorpe found
+himself explaining, a few moments later in his bedroom,
+to the attentive Pangbourn.  He decided to throw himself
+with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful good-feeling.
+"I haven't brought anything for shooting at all.  Somehow I
+got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead--and
+so I fetched along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make
+me feel more at home in the saddle than anything else would. 
+You know how fond a man gets of old, loose things like that. 
+But about this shooting--I want you to fix me out. 
+What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You
+can manage them for me, can't you?"
+
+Pangbourn could and did--and it was upon his advice that the
+Mexican jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its
+shape was beyond doubt uncommon, but it had big pockets,
+and it looked like business.  Thorpe, as he glanced up
+and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe,
+felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify
+the effect of pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent
+to his appearance. 
+
+"We will find a cap below, sir," Pangbourn announced,
+with serenity, and Thorpe, who had been tentatively
+fingering the big, flaring sombrero, thrust it back upon
+its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle. 
+
+Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done,
+and there was nobody now to bear him company.  He lit
+another cigar, tried on various caps till he found a leathern
+one to suit him, and then dawdled about the room and the
+adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than half
+an hour.  This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt,
+did not commend itself so warmly to him as did some others. 
+Everybody else, however, seemed to regard it as so wholly
+a matter of course that Plowden should do as he liked,
+that he forbore formulating a complaint even to himself. 
+
+At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs
+once more.  "His Lordship will be down very shortly
+now, sir," he declared--"and will you be good enough
+to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?"
+
+Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase--the
+existence of which he had not suspected--into a
+bare-looking apartment fitted like a pantry with shelves. 
+After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost
+glaringly lighted.  The windows and another door opened,
+he saw, upon a court connected with the stable-yard. 
+By this entrance, no doubt, had come the keeper,
+a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature years,
+with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood
+looking at the contents of the shelves.  He mechanically
+saluted Thorpe in turn, and then resumed his occupation. 
+There were numerous gun cases on the lower shelf,
+and many boxes and bags above. 
+
+"Did his Lordship say what gun?" the keeper demanded
+of the valet.  He had a bright-eyed, intent glance,
+and his tone conveyed a sense of some broad, impersonal,
+out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.
+
+The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders
+and eloquently shook his head. 
+
+"Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?" the keeper turned
+to Thorpe. 
+
+To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out
+the meaning of the query.  "Oh, anything'll do for me,"
+he said, awkwardly smiling.  "It's years since I've shot--I
+daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another to me."
+
+He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking
+all his measurements as a sportsman.  "You'd do best
+with 'B,' sir, I fancy," the functionary decided at last,
+and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the notion that "B"
+must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys.
+He watched the operation of putting the gun together,
+and then took it, and laid it over his arm, and followed
+the valet out into the hall again, in dignified silence. 
+To the keeper's remark--"Mr. Balder has its mate with
+him today, sir," he gave only a restrained nod.
+
+There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord
+Plowden appeared.  He came down the stairs then with
+the brisk, rather impatient air of a busy man whose plans
+are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others.  He was
+fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat
+and cap, gloves, scarf round his throat and all--and he
+behaved as if there was not a minute to lose.  He had barely
+time to shake perfunctorily the hand Thorpe offered him,
+and utter an absent-minded "How are you this morning?"
+
+To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door,
+bearing his master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully,
+"We are very late today, Barnes." They went out,
+and began striding down the avenue of trees at such a pace
+that the keeper and his following of small boys and dogs,
+who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot
+to keep up with it. 
+
+Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would
+afford exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate
+talk with his host, but he perceived very soon that this
+was not to be the case.  They walked together for half
+a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and then
+across some fields, but the party was close at their heels,
+and Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort,
+save an occasional remark about the birds and the
+covers between him and the keeper, was impracticable. 
+The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
+leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course
+was deflected toward him, but even when they came up to him,
+the expedition seemed to gain nothing of a social character. 
+The few curt words that were exchanged, as they halted
+here to distribute cartridges and hold brief consultation,
+bore exclusively upon the subject in hand. 
+
+The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe,
+breathing heavily over the unwonted exercise and hoping
+for nothing so much as that they would henceforth take
+things easy, thought intolerable.  He was amazed that the
+two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders
+of this elderly peasant.  He bade Lord Plowden proceed
+to a certain point in one direction, and that nobleman,
+followed by his valet with the gun and the stool,
+set meekly off without a word.  Balder, with equal docility,
+vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the
+bidding of the keeper.  Neither of them had intervened
+to mitigate the destiny of their guest, or displayed
+any interest as to what was going to become of him. 
+
+Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and
+though afterward, when he had also climbed the gate and taken
+up his station under a clump of trees at the autocrat's behest,
+he strove to soothe his ruffled feelings by the argument
+that it was probably the absolutely correct deportment
+for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced. 
+Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped
+a blunt injunction about firing up or down the lane,
+the tone even more than the matter of which nettled him. 
+
+To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a
+little from the spot on which he had been planted, he caught
+a glimpse against the skyline of the distant Lord Plowden,
+comfortably seated on the stool which his valet had
+been carrying.  It seemed to Thorpe at that moment that he
+had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and
+he turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure. 
+
+This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. 
+The remote sounds had begun to come to him, of boys
+shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses of the strip
+of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he hastened
+back to his post.  It did not seem to him a good place,
+and when he heard the reports of guns to right and left
+of him, and nothing came his way, he liked it less
+than ever; it had become a matter of offended pride
+with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom
+of the responsibility he had taken upon himself. 
+If Lord Plowden's guest had no sport, the blame for it
+should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant keeper. 
+Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears,
+punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!"
+These cries, and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone
+wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at
+once a most urgent affair of his own.  He strained his eyes
+upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by instinct,
+the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze,
+and followed automatically the thundering course of the
+big bird, and then, taking thought to itself, leaped ahead
+of it and fired.  Thorpe's first pheasant reeled in the air,
+described a somersault, and fell like a plummet. 
+
+He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand
+shaking for joy.  From where he stood he could see the
+dead bird; there could never have been a cleaner "kill."
+In the warming glow of his satisfaction in himself,
+there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden
+and Balder.  He owed to them, at this belated hour
+of his life, a novel delight of indescribable charm. 
+There came to him, from the woods, the shrill bucolic
+voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog.  He was
+conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and
+again the cry of "mark!" rose, strenuously addressed to him. 
+
+Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe
+saw the rest of the party assembling by the gate.  He did
+not hurry to join them, but when Lord Plowden appeared he
+sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with as indifferent
+an air as he could simulate.  It pleased him tremendously
+that no one had thought it worth while to approach the
+rendezvous by way of the spot he had covered.  His eye
+took instant stock of the game carried by two of the boys;
+their combined prizes were eight birds and a rabbit,
+and his heart leaped within him at the count. 
+
+"Well, Thorpe?" asked Plowden, pleasantly.  The smell
+of gunpowder and the sight of stained feathers had co-
+operated to brighten and cheer his mood.  "I heard you
+blazing away in great form.  Did you get anything?"
+
+Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. 
+"Let some of the boys run over," he said slowly. 
+"There are nine birds within sight, and there are two or
+three in the bushes--but they may have got away."
+
+"Gad!" said Balder.
+
+"Magnificent!" was his brother's comment--and Thorpe
+permitted himself the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming
+sigh of triumph. 
+
+The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really
+to tint everything that remained of Thorpe's visit. 
+He set down to it without hesitation the visible
+augmentation of deference to him among the servants. 
+The temptation was very great to believe that it had
+affected the ladies of the house as well.  He could not
+say that they were more gracious to him, but certainly
+they appeared to take him more for granted.  In a hundred
+little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer
+held mentally at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. 
+Of course, his own restored self-confidence could account
+for much of this, but he clung to the whimsical conceit
+that much was also due to the fact that he was the man
+of the pheasants. 
+
+Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of
+the house.  He was alone again with the ladies at breakfast,
+and during the long day he was much in their company. 
+It was like no other day he had ever imagined to himself. 
+
+On the morrow, in the morning train by which he
+returned alone to town, his mind roved luxuriously
+among the fragrant memories of that day.  He had been
+so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were
+some things which came uppermost again and again--but
+of them all he dwelt most fixedly upon the recollection
+of moving about in the greenhouses and conservatories,
+with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his guide,
+and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. 
+Of what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind,
+but the music of the voice lingered in his ears. 
+
+"And she is old Kervick's daughter!" he said to himself
+more than once. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train
+to London nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud
+to fellow-sufferers in indignation, at the time consumed
+in making what, by the map, should be so brief a journey. 
+In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage irony
+of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road,
+and exchanged dark prophecies as to the novelties in
+imbecility and helplessness which the line would be preparing
+for the Christmas holidays.  The old joke about people
+who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
+to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent,
+revived itself amid gloomy approbation.  The still older
+discussion as to whether the South Eastern or the Brighton
+was really the worst followed naturally in its wake,
+and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however,
+upon this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious
+stranger who said he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover,
+and who rejected boisterously the idea that any other
+railway could be half so bad. 
+
+The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment,
+and the champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton,
+having piled up additional defenses in the shape of
+personal recollections of delay and mismanagement quite
+beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the newcomer. 
+He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied,
+of knowing a bad railway when he saw one.  To suggest
+that the characterless and inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover,
+so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to be mentioned
+in the same breath with the daringly inventive and
+resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge,
+showed either a weak mind or a corrupt heart.  Did this man
+really live on the Dover line at all? Angry countenances
+plainly reflected the doubt. 
+
+But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost
+too short.  The conversation interested him not at all;
+if he had ever known the Southern lines apart, they were
+all one to him now.  He looked out of the window,
+and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the
+visit from which he was returning. 
+
+When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was
+to discover that his mind was full of a large, new,
+carefully-prepared project.  It came to him, ready-made and
+practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
+superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. 
+He turned it over and over in his thoughts, in the hansom,
+more to familiarize himself with its details than to add
+to them.  He left the cab to wait for him at the mouth
+of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad
+Street through towering walls of commercial buildings,
+old and new. 
+
+Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small,
+huddled rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway
+of its own in a corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his
+room at the end like one who is assured of both his way and his welcome. 
+
+The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter
+to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe
+he proceeded to finish this task.  He looked more than
+once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied,
+impersonal way.  To the other's notion, he seemed the
+personification of business--without an ounce of distracting
+superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame,
+without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour,
+or sensibility of any sort.  He was the machine perfected
+and fined down to absolute essentials.  He could understand
+a joke if it was useful to him to do so.  He could drink,
+and even smoke cigarettes, with a natural air, if these
+exercises seemed properly to belong to the task he had
+in hand.  Thorpe did not conceive him doing anything
+for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. 
+There was more than a touch of what the rustic calls "ginger"
+in his hair and closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had
+the complementary florid skin.  His eyes--notably direct,
+confident eyes--were of a grey which had in it more brown
+than blue.  He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
+and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness. 
+
+He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious,
+thin lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. 
+"Well?" he asked, impassively. 
+
+"Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?" asked Thorpe in turn. 
+"I want a talk with you."
+
+For answer, Semple left the room.  Returning after a minute
+or two, he remarked, "Go ahead till we're stopped,"
+and seated himself on the corner of the desk with the light
+inconsequence of a bird on a twig.  Thorpe unbuttoned
+his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself. 
+
+"I've worked out the whole scheme," he began, as if introducing
+the product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. 
+"I'm going to leave England almost immediately--go
+on the Continent and loaf about--I've never seen the Continent."
+
+Semple regarded him in silence.  "Well?" he observed
+at last. 
+
+"You see the idea, don't you?" Thorpe demanded. 
+
+The broker twitched his shoulders slightly.  "Go on,"
+he said. 
+
+"But the idea is everything," protested the other. 
+"We've been thinking of beginning the campaign straight
+away--but the true game now is to lie low--silent as the grave. 
+I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular is said about it,
+of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
+I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody
+else--and so there gets to be the impression that things
+haven't gone well with me, d'ye see? On the same plan,
+I let all the clerks at my office go.  The Secretary'll
+come round every once in a while to get letters, of course,
+and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show,
+but practically the place'll be shut up.  That'll help
+out the general impression that I've gone to pieces. 
+Now d'ye see?"
+
+"It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,"
+commented Semple. 
+
+"Of course.  The fellows that we're going to squeeze would
+move heaven and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement,
+if they got wind of what was going on.  The only weak point
+in our game is just there.  Absolutely everything hangs
+on the Settlement being granted.  Naturally, then, our play
+is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. 
+We don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion
+of what we're up to, till after we're safe past that rock. 
+So we go on in the way to attract the least possible attention. 
+You or your jobber makes the ordinary application for a
+Special Settlement, with your six signatures and so on;
+and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as
+shut up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols--
+and the thing works itself.  You do see it, don't you?"
+
+"I see well enough the things that are to be seen,"
+replied Semple, with a certain brevity of manner. 
+"There was a sermon of my father's that I remember, and it
+had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are seen,
+but at the things which are not seen.'"
+
+Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. 
+"Semple," he said, bringing his chair forward to the desk,
+"that's what I've come for.  I want to spread my cards on
+the table for you.  I know the sum you've laid out already,
+in working this thing.  We'll say that that is to be paid
+back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that
+to one side.  Now then, leaving that out of consideration,
+what do you think you ought to have out of the winnings,
+when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not thinking of your
+2,000 vendor's shares----"
+
+"No--I'm not thinking much of them, either," interposed Semple,
+with a kind of dry significance. 
+
+"Oh, they'll be all right," Thorpe affirmed.  He laughed
+unconsciously as he did so.  "No, what I want to get
+at is your idea of what should come to you, as a bonus,
+when I scoop the board."
+
+"Twenty thousand pounds," said Semple, readily. 
+
+Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle.  "I had
+thought thirty would be a fairer figure," he remarked,
+with an effort at simplicity. 
+
+The broker put out his under-lip. "You will find people
+rather disposed to distrust a man who promises more than
+he's asked," he remarked coldly. 
+
+"Yes--I know what you mean," Thorpe hurried to say,
+flushing awkwardly, even though the remark was so undeserved;
+"but it's in my nature.  I'm full of the notion of
+doing things for people that have done things for me. 
+That's the way I'm built.  Why"--he halted to consider
+the advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do
+for Lord Plowden, and decided against it--"why, without you,
+what would the whole thing have been worth to me? Take
+one thing alone--the money for the applications--I could
+have no more got at it than I could at the Crown Jewels
+in the Tower.  I've wondered since, more than once--if
+you don't mind the question--how did you happen to have
+so much ready money lying about."
+
+"There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to
+invest for them," the broker explained.  "If they get five
+per cent.  for the four months, they'll be very pleased. 
+And so I shall be very pleased to take thirty thousand
+instead of twenty--if it presents itself to your mind
+in that way.  You will give me a letter to that effect,
+of course."
+
+"Of course," assented Thorpe.  "Write it now, if you like."
+He pushed his chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped
+a pen in the ink.  "What I want to do is this," he said,
+looking up.  "I'll make the promise for thirty-two thousand,
+and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in cash
+now--a personal advance.  I shall need it, if I'm to hang
+about on the Continent for four months.  I judge you think
+it'll be four months before things materialize, eh?"
+
+"The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events,
+would come shortly after the Christmas holidays. 
+That is nearly three months.  Then the work of taking
+fort-nightly profits will begin--and it is for you to say
+how long you allow that to go on."
+
+"But about the two thousand pounds now," Thorpe reminded him. 
+
+"I think I will do that in this way," said Semple,
+kicking his small legs nonchalantly.  "I will buy two thousand
+fully-paid shares of you, for cash down, NOT vendor's shares,
+you observe--and then I will take your acknowledgment
+that you hold them for me in trust up to a given date. 
+In that way, I would not at all weaken your market,
+and I would have a stake in the game." "Your stake's
+pretty big, already," commented Thorpe, tentatively. 
+
+"It's just a fancy of mine," said the other, with his
+first smile.  "I like to hold shares that are making
+sensational advances.  It is very exciting."
+
+"All right," said Thorpe, in accents of resignation.
+He wrote out two letters, accepting the wording which Semple
+suggested from his perch on the desk, and then the latter,
+hopping down, took the chair in turn and wrote a cheque. 
+
+"Do you want it open?" he asked over his shoulder. 
+"Are you going to get it cashed at once?"
+
+"No--cross it," said the other.  "I want it to go
+through my bankers.  It'll warm their hearts toward me. 
+I shan't be going till the end of the week, in any event. 
+I suppose you know the Continent by heart."
+
+"On the contrary, very little indeed.  I've had business
+in Frankfort once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. 
+That is all."
+
+"But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?"
+Thorpe asked him, as he folded the cheque in his pocket-book.
+
+"Oh yes--many things," responded the broker, lightly. 
+"It's a pleasure, for example, to buy Rubber Consols
+at par."
+
+"Oh, if you call it buying," said Thorpe, and then
+softened his words with an apologetic laugh.  "I didn't
+tell you, did I? I've been spending Saturday and Sunday
+with Plowden--you know, the Lord Plowden on my Board."
+
+"I know of him very well," observed the Scotchman. 
+
+"Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That
+isn't the usual form with guinea-pigs."
+
+"Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,"
+Thorpe asserted, warmly.  "He's really a splendid
+fellow--with his little oddities, like the rest of us,
+of course, but a decent chap all through.  Place? I should
+think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
+country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and
+it's kept up as if they had fifty thousand a year. 
+Do you happen to know what his real income is supposed
+to be?"
+
+Semple shook his head.  He had taken his hat, and was
+smoothing it deftly with the palm of his hand. 
+
+"I asked," Thorpe went on, "because he had so much to say
+about his poverty.  To hear him talk, you'd think the
+bailiffs were sitting on his doorstep.  That doesn't prevent
+his having fast horses, and servants all over the place,
+and about the best shooting I've seen in the South
+of England.  As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. 
+God! how I knocked the pheasants!" A clerk showed his head
+at the door, with a meaning gesture.  "I must go now,"
+said Semple, briskly, and led the way out to another room. 
+He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
+brief injunction, "Don't go away without seeing me."
+
+It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades
+of the City's slaves were in the streets on the quest
+for cheap luncheons.  Thorpe noted the manner in which some
+of them studied the large bill of fare placarded beside
+a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him luxuriously
+to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. 
+He had been as anxious about pence as the hungriest
+of those poor devils, only a week before.  And now! He
+thrust up the door in the roof of the cab, and bade
+the driver stop at his bank.  Thence, after some brief
+but very agreeable business, and a hurried inspection
+of the "Court" section of a London Directory, he drove
+to a telegraph station and despatched two messages. 
+They were identical in terms.  One sought General Kervick
+at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover
+Square country--and the other looked for him at his club. 
+Both begged him to lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.
+
+There was time and to spare, now.  Thorpe dismissed the cab
+at his hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street,
+and sent his luggage to his rooms.  There were no letters
+for him on the board in the hallway, and he sauntered up
+to the Strand.  As by force of habit, he turned presently
+into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient
+book-shop of his family. 
+
+In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide,
+the blacks and roans and smoked drabs of the low old
+brick front looked more dingy to his eye than ever. 
+It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a dismal and
+graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift. 
+It was so little like the antiquity, for example,
+of Hadlow House, that the two might have computed their
+age by the chronological systems of different planets. 
+Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and she
+had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years,
+the sign over the doorway bore still its century-old legend,
+"Thorpe, Bookseller."
+
+He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run
+an eye over the books and placards exposed on either
+side of the entrance.  A small boy guarded these wares,
+and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious recollections
+of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
+very spot.  The lad under observation had a loutish
+and sullen face; its expression could not have been more
+devoid of intellectual suggestions if he had been posted
+in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with a rattle,
+instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
+brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. 
+Thorpe wondered if in his time he could have looked such
+a vacant and sour young fool.  No--no. That could not be. 
+Boys were different in his day--and especially boys
+in book-shops. They read something and knew something
+of what they handled.  They had some sort of aspirations,
+fitful and vague as these might be, to become in their
+time bookmen also.  And in those days there still
+were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
+bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it. 
+
+Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better
+able to apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed
+race of literature's servants.  Indeed, it seemed that he
+had never adequately realized before how proud a man might
+well be of descending from a line of such men.  The thought
+struck him that very likely at this identical doorway,
+two generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young
+law-student named Plowden had stood and turned over pages
+of books he could not dream of buying.  Perhaps, even, he had
+ventured inside, and deferentially picked acquaintance
+with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice
+and friendly counsel for nothing.  It was of no real
+significance that the law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor,
+and the bookseller remained a book-seller; in the realm
+of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as the Plowdens. 
+
+A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in,
+squeezing his way along the narrow passage between the
+tall rows of books, to the small open space at the end. 
+His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a high desk. 
+She did not look up. 
+
+"Well--I visited his Lordship all right." He announced
+his presence thus genially. 
+
+"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked,
+turning to him, after a pause, her emotionless, plain face. 
+
+"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity.
+"You should have seen the way they took to me. 
+It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe' there, all over
+the place.  Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself
+at breakfast two days running.  And such ladies--finer
+than silk.  Oh, it's clear as daylight--I was intended
+for a fashionable career."
+
+She smiled in a faint, passive way.  "Well--they say
+'better late than never,' you know." "And after all,
+IS it so very late?" he said, adopting her phrase as an
+expression of his thought.  "I'm just turned forty, and I
+feel like a boy.  I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
+the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger
+than the first Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer?
+Why he didn't even get into the House of Commons until
+he was seven-and-forty."
+
+"You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,"
+she commented. 
+
+"I might have worse things.  You've no idea, Lou, how nice
+it all is.  The mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me
+feel as if I was at the very least a nephew of hers. 
+And so simple and natural! She smiled at me, and listened
+to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
+might have done.  You'll just love her, when you know her."
+
+Louisa laughed in his face.  "Don't be a fool, Joel,"
+she adjured him, with a flash of scornful mirth. 
+He mingled a certain frowning impatience with the buoyancy
+of his smile.  "Why, of course, you'll know her,"
+he protested.  "What nonsense you're thinking of! Do
+you suppose I'm going to allow you to mess about here
+with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in your window
+of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,'
+while I'm a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou.  You annoy
+me by supposing such a thing!"
+
+"There's no good talking about it at all," she observed,
+after a little pause.  "It hasn't come off yet,
+for one thing.  And as I said the other night, if you want
+to do things for the children, that's another matter.
+They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody
+chooses to teach them."
+
+"Where are they now?" he asked.  Upon the instant another
+plan began to unfold itself in the background of his mind. 
+
+"They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at
+different places, of course.  I was recommended to send
+Julia there--one of our old customers is a Governor,
+or whatever it's called--and he got special terms for her. 
+She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged
+it very nicely for her--and there is such a good boys'
+college there, it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. 
+Julia is to finish at Christmas-time--and what I'm
+going to do with her afterward is more than I know."
+
+"Is she pretty?" the uncle of Julia enquired. 
+
+"She's very nice," the mother answered, with vague extenuation
+in her tone.  "I don't know about her looks--she varies
+so much.  Sometimes I think she's pretty--and then again
+I can't think it.  She's got good features, and she holds
+herself well, and she's very much the lady--rather too much,
+I think, sometimes--but it all depends upon what you
+call pretty.  She's not tall, you know.  She takes after
+her father's family.  The Dabneys are all little people."
+
+Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys.  "And what's
+Alfred like?" he asked. 
+
+"He wants to be an artist!" There was a perceptible note
+of apprehension in the mother's confession. 
+
+"Well--why shouldn't he--if he's got a bent that way?"
+demanded Thorpe, with reproof in his tone.  "Did you want
+him to be a shop-keeper?"
+
+"I should like to see him a doctor," she replied with dignity. 
+"It was always my idea for him."
+
+"Well, it's no good--even as an idea," he told her. 
+"Doctors are like parsons--they can't keep up with the times.
+The age is outgrowing them.  Only the fakirs in either
+profession get anything out of it, nowadays.  It's all mystery
+and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick--medicine
+is--and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist,
+you're not in it.  But an artist stands on his merits. 
+There is his work--done by his own hands.  It speaks
+for itself.  There's no deception--it's easy enough to tell
+whether it's good or bad.  If the pictures are good,
+people buy them.  If they're bad, people don't buy them. 
+Of course, it won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking,
+whether his pictures sell well or not.  But probably he'd
+give it up, if he didn't make a hit of it. 
+
+"I don't know that there's any crying need that he should
+do anything.  My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army,
+but I wouldn't dream of forcing it on him against his will. 
+I had a bitter enough dose of that, myself, with father. 
+I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps argue
+with him, if I thought he was making a jack of
+himself--but I wouldn't dictate.  If Alfred thinks he
+wants to be an artist, in God's name let him go ahead.
+It can be made a gentlemanly trade--and the main thing
+is that he should be a gentleman."
+
+Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic
+patience.  "If you don't mind, I don't know that I do,"
+she said when it was finished.  "Perhaps he wouldn't
+have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick temper. 
+He reminds me of father--oh, ever so much more than you do. 
+He contradicts everything everybody says.  He quite knows
+it all."
+
+"But he's a good fellow, isn't he?" urged Thorpe.  "I mean,
+he's got his likable points? I'm going to be able to get
+along with him?"
+
+"I didn't get along with him very well," the mother
+admitted, reluctantly, "but I daresay with a man it would
+be different.  You see, his father was ill all those
+four years, and Alfred hated the shop as bad as you did,
+and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair. 
+I want to be fair to him, you know."
+
+"But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word,"
+Thorpe insisted. 
+
+"Oh, mercy yes," Louisa made ready answer.  "My only fear
+is--whether you won't find him too much of a gentleman."
+
+Thorpe knitted his brows.  "I only hope we're talking
+about the same thing," he said, in a doubtful tone. 
+Before she could speak, he lifted his hand. 
+"Never mind--I can see for myself in ten minutes more
+than you could tell me in a lifetime.  I've got a plan. 
+I'm going on the Continent in a few days' time, to stay
+for three or four months.  I've got nothing special
+to do--just to travel about and see things and kill
+time--I shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland
+and Paris and the Rhine and all sorts of places--and it
+occurred to me that I'd take the two youngsters with me. 
+I could get acquainted with them, that way, and they'd
+be company for me.  I've been lonesome so long, it would
+feel good to have some of my own flesh and blood about
+me--and I suppose they'd be tickled to death to go."
+
+"Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,"
+Mrs. Dabney objected, blankly. 
+
+"Bah!" Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into
+something good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. 
+"What on earth difference does that make? I could go
+and buy their damned colleges, and let the kids wear them
+for breastpins if I wanted to.  You said the girl was
+going to quit at Christmas in any case.  Won't she learn
+more in four months travelling about on the Continent,
+than she would trotting around in her own tracks there
+at Cheltenham?
+
+"And it's even more important for the boy.  He's of an age
+when he ought to see something of the world, and I ought
+to see something of him.  Whatever he's going to do,
+it's time that he began getting his special start for it."
+He added, upon a luminous afterthought: " Perhaps his seeing
+the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him
+of wanting to be an artist."
+
+The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather
+than conviction.  "Well--if you really think it's best,"
+she began, "I don't know that I ought to object. 
+Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way. 
+Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds,
+it hasn't seemed as if they were my children at all. 
+They've scarcely listened to me.  And now you come,
+and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and
+all I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. 
+And so, shall I write them to come home? When do you think
+of starting? Julia ought to have some travelling clothes."
+
+"I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry
+up about it."
+
+Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book,
+and spread it on the desk.  "I will give you back
+that thirty," he said, as he wrote, "and here's a hundred
+to get the youngsters ready.  You won't waste any time,
+will you? and if you want more tell me."
+
+A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it
+the occasion for leaving. 
+
+His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in
+her hand, was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell
+itself out in visible letters before her mental vision. 
+"Even now I don't believe in him," the impalpable legend ran. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe
+found him hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in
+the neighbourhood of the luncheon-room when he arrived. 
+It indeed still lacked a few minutes of the appointed
+hour when they thus met and went in together.  They were
+fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony,
+sufficiently removed from any other to give privacy to
+their conversation. 
+
+By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon,
+speaking French to the waiter throughout.  Divested of his
+imposing great-coat, he was seen to be a gentleman of meagre
+flesh as well as of small stature.  He had the Roman nose,
+narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth and chin
+of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits
+of the Duke of Wellington.  His face and neck were of a
+dull reddish tint, which seemed at first sight uniformly
+distributed: one saw afterward that it approached pallor
+at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in minute
+patches on the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose. 
+Against this flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair
+and small, neatly-waxed moustache were very white indeed. 
+It was a thin, lined, care-worn face, withal, which in repose,
+and particularly in profile, produced an effect of dignified
+and philosophical melancholy.  The General's over-prominent
+light blue eyes upon occasion marred this effect, however,
+by glances of a bold, harsh character, which seemed
+to disclose unpleasant depths below the correct surface. 
+His manner with the waiters was abrupt and sharp,
+but undoubtedly they served him very well--much better,
+in truth, than Thorpe had ever seen them serve anybody before. 
+
+Thorpe observed his guest a good deal during the repast,
+and formed numerous conclusions about him.  He ate with
+palpable relish of every dish, and he emptied his glass
+as promptly as his host could fill it.  There was hardly
+a word of explanation as to the purpose of their meeting,
+until the coffee was brought, and they pushed back
+their chairs, crossed their legs, and lighted cigars. 
+
+"I was lucky to catch you with my wire, at such short notice,"
+Thorpe said then.  "I sent two, you know--to your chambers
+and your club.  Which of them found you?"
+
+"Chambers," said the General.  "I rarely dress till
+luncheon time.  I read in bed.  There's really nothing
+else to do.  Idleness is the curse of my life."
+
+"I've been wondering if you'd like a little occupation--
+of a well-paid sort," said Thorpe slowly.  He realized
+that it was high time to invent some pretext for his
+hurried summons of the General. 
+
+"My dear sir," responded the other, "I should like anything
+that had money in it.  And I should very much like occupation,
+too--if it were, of course, something that was--was suitable to me."
+
+"Yes," said Thorpe, meditatively.  "I've something in my
+mind--not at all definite yet--in fact, I don't think I
+can even outline it to you yet.  But I'm sure it will suit
+you--that is, if I decide to go on with it--and there ought
+to be seven or eight hundred a year for you in it--for life, mind you."
+
+The General's gaze, fastened strenuously upon Thorpe,
+shook a little.  "That will suit me very well," he declared,
+with feeling.  "Whatever I can do for it"--he let the
+sentence end itself with a significant gesture. 
+
+"I thought so, "commented the other, trifling with the
+spoon in his cup.  "But I want you to be open with me. 
+I'm interested in you, and I want to be of use to you. 
+All that I've said, I can do for you.  But first,
+I'm curious to know everything that you can tell me about
+your circumstances.  I'm right in assuming, I suppose,
+that you're--that you're not any too well-fixed."
+
+The General helped himself to another little glass of brandy. 
+His mood seemed to absorb the spirit of the liqueur. 
+"Fixed!" he repeated with a peevish snap in his tone. 
+"I'm not 'fixed' at all, as you call it.  Good God, sir! They
+no more care what becomes of me than they do about their
+old gloves.  I gave them name and breeding and position--and
+everything--and they round on me like--like cuckoos."
+His pale, bulging eyes lifted their passionless veil
+for an instant as he spoke, and flashed with the predatory
+fierceness of a hawk. 
+
+Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom "they" might mean. 
+The temper visibly rising in the old man's mind was what he
+had hoped for.  He proceeded with an informed caution.
+"Don't be annoyed if I touch upon family matters," he said. 
+"It's a part of what I must know, in order to help you. 
+I believe you're a widower, aren't you, General?"
+
+The other, after a quick upward glance, shook his
+head resentfully.  "Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy with HER
+son-in-law--and her daughter.  He is a man of property--
+and also, apparently, a man of remarkable credulity
+and patience." He paused, to scan his companion's face. 
+"They divide him between them," he said then, from clenched
+teeth--"and I--mind you--I made the match! He was
+a young fellow that I found--and I brought him home
+and introduced him--and I haven't so much as an Italian
+postage-stamp to show for it.  But what interest can
+you possibly take in all this?" The unamiable glance
+of his eyes was on the instant surcharged with suspicion. 
+
+"How many daughters have you?" Thorpe ventured the enquiry
+with inward doubts as to its sagacity. 
+
+"Three," answered the General, briefly.  It was evident
+that he was also busy thinking. 
+
+"I ask because I met one of them in the country over Sunday,"
+Thorpe decided to explain. 
+
+The old soldier's eyes asked many questions in the moment
+of silence.  "Which one--Edith?--that is, Lady Cressage?"
+he enquired.  "Of course--it would have been her."
+
+Thorpe nodded.  "She made a tremendous impression upon me,"
+he observed, watching the father with intentness as he let
+the slow words fall. 
+
+"Well she might, "the other replied, simply.  "She's supposed
+to be the most beautiful woman in England."
+
+"Well--I guess she is," Thorpe assented, while the two
+men eyed each other. 
+
+"Is the third sister unmarried?" it occurred to him to ask. 
+The tone of the question revealed its perfunctory character.
+
+"Oh--Beatrice--she's of no importance," the father replied. 
+"She goes in for writing, and all that--she's not a beauty,
+you know--she lives with an old lady in Scotland. 
+The oldest daughter--Blanche--she has some good looks of
+her own, but she's a cat.  And so you met Edith! May I ask
+where it was?"
+
+"At Hadlow House--Lord Plowden's place, you know."
+
+The General's surprise at the announcement was undoubted. 
+"At Plowden's!" he repeated, and added, as if half to himself,
+"I thought that was all over with, long ago."
+
+"I wish you'd tell me about it," said Thorpe, daringly. 
+"I've made it plain to you, haven't I? I'm going
+to look out for you.  And I want you to post me up,
+here, on some of the things that I don't understand. 
+You remember that it was Plowden who introduced you to me,
+don't you? It was through him that you got on the Board. 
+Well, certain things that I've seen lead me to suppose
+that he did that in order to please your daughter. 
+Did you understand it that way?"
+
+"It's quite likely, in one sense," returned the General. 
+He spoke with much deliberation now, weighing all his words. 
+"He may have thought it would please her; he may not have
+known how little my poor affairs concerned her."
+
+"Well, then," pursued Thorpe, argumentatively, "he had
+an object in pleasing her.  Let me ask the question--
+did he want to marry her?"
+
+"Most men want to marry her," was the father's non-
+committal response.  His moustache lifted itself in the
+semblance of a smile, but the blue eyes above remained
+coldly vigilant. 
+
+"Well--I guess that's so too," Thorpe remarked. 
+He made a fleeting mental note that there was something
+about the General which impelled him to think and talk
+more like an American than ever.  "But was HE specially
+affected that way?"
+
+"I think," said Kervick, judicially, "I think it was
+understood that if he had been free to marry a penniless wife,
+he would have wished to marry her."
+
+"Do you know," Thorpe began again, with a kind of diffident
+hesitation--"do you happen to have formed an idea--supposing
+that had been the case--would she have accepted him?"
+"Ah, there you have me," replied the other.  "Who can tell
+what women will accept, and what they will refuse? My daughter
+refused Lord Lingfield--and he is an Under-Secretary,
+and will be Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister,
+and a rich man.  After that, what are you to say?"
+
+"You speak of her as penniless," Thorpe remarked,
+with a casual air. 
+
+"Six hundred a year," the father answered. 
+"We could have rubbed along after a fashion on it,
+if she had had any notions at all of taking my advice.
+I'm a man of the world, and I could have managed her
+affairs for her to her advantage, but she insisted upon
+going off by herself.  She showed not the slightest
+consideration for me--but then I am accustomed to that."
+
+Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the old gentleman read
+in this an encouragement to expand his grievances. 
+
+"In my position," he continued, helping himself to still
+another tiny glass, "I naturally say very little. 
+It is not my form to make complaints and advertise
+my misfortunes.  I daresay it's a fault.  I know it kept
+me back in India--while ever so many whipper-snappers
+were promoted over my head--because I was of the proud
+and silent sort.  It was a mistake, but it was my nature. 
+I might have put by a comfortable provision for my old age,
+in those days, if I had been willing to push my claims,
+and worry the Staff into giving me what was my due. 
+But that I declined to do--and when I was retired, there was
+nothing for me but the ration of bread and salt which they
+serve out to the old soldier who has been too modest.
+I served my Queen, sir, for forty years--and I should
+be ashamed to tell you the allowance she makes me in my
+old age.  But I do not complain.  My mouth is closed. 
+I am an English gentleman and one of Her Majesty's soldiers. 
+That's enough said, eh? Do you follow me? And about my
+family affairs, I'm not likely to talk to the first comer,
+eh? But to you I say it frankly--they've behaved badly,
+damned badly, sir. 
+
+"Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER
+son-in-law. He has large estates in one of the healthiest
+and most beautiful parts; he has a palace, and more money
+than he knows what to do with--but it seems that he's
+not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well--but
+that doesn't enter into anyone's calculations.  No! let
+the worn-out old soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb!
+That's the spirit of woman-kind.  And my daughter
+Edith--does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me--I
+secured for her the very greatest marriage in England. 
+She would have been Duchess of Glastonbury today
+if her husband had not played the fool and drowned himself."
+
+"What's that you say?" put in Thorpe, swiftly. 
+
+"It was as good as suicide," insisted the General,
+with doggedness.  His face had become a deeper red. 
+"They didn't hit it off together, and he left in a huff,
+and went yachting with his father, who was his own sailing-
+master--and, as might be expected, they were both drowned. 
+The title would have gone to her son--but no, of course,
+she had no son--and so it passed to a stranger--an
+outsider that had been an usher in a school, or something
+of that sort.  You can fancy what a blow this was to me. 
+Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless
+widow thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then,
+to cap all, she takes her six hundred a year and goes off
+by herself, and gives me the cold shoulder completely. 
+What is it Shakespeare says? 'How sharper than a serpent's
+teeth'----"
+
+Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an
+emphasis which abruptly broke the quotation in half.
+He had been frowning moodily at his guest for some minutes,
+relighting his cigar more than once meanwhile.  He had
+made a mental calculation of what the old man had had
+to drink, and had reassured himself as to his condition. 
+His garrulity might have an alcoholic basis, but his
+wits were clear enough.  It was time to take a new line
+with him. 
+
+"I don't want to hear you abuse your daughter," he admonished
+him now, with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance. 
+"Damn it all, why shouldn't she go off by herself, and take
+care of her own money her own way? It's little enough,
+God knows, for such a lady as she is.  Why should you
+expect her to support you out of it? No--sit still!
+Listen to me!"--he stretched out his hand, and laid it
+with restraining heaviness upon the General's arm--"you
+don't want to have any row with me.  You can't afford it. 
+Just think that over to yourself--you--can't--afford--it."
+
+Major-General Kervick's prominent blue eyes had bulged
+forth in rage till their appearance had disconcerted the
+other's gaze.  They remained still too much in the foreground,
+as it were, and the angry scarlets and violets of the cheeks
+beneath them carried an unabated threat of apoplexy--but
+their owner, after a moment's silence, made a sign
+with his stiff white brows that the crisis was over. 
+"You must remember that--that I have a father's feelings,"
+he gasped then, huskily. 
+
+Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected. 
+He had learned what he wanted to know about this veteran. 
+If he had the fierce meannesses of a famished old dog,
+he had also a dog's awe of a stick.  It was almost too
+easy to terrorize him. 
+
+"Oh, I make allowances for all that," Thorpe began, vaguely. 
+"But it's important that you should understand me. 
+I'm this sort of a man: whatever I set out to do, and put
+my strength into it, that I do! I kill every pheasant I
+fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It's a way I have. 
+To those that help me, and are loyal to me, I'm the best
+friend in the world.  To those that get in my way,
+or try to trip me up, I'm the devil--just plain devil. 
+Now then--you're getting three hundred a year from
+my Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my
+friend Plowden.  You don't do anything to earn this money;
+you're of no earthly use on the Board.  If I chose,
+I could put you off at the end of the year as easily as I
+can blow out this match.  But I propose not only to keep
+you on, but to make you independent.  Why do I do that?
+You should ask yourself that question.  It can't be on
+account of anything you can do for the Company.  What else
+then? Why, first and foremost, because you are the father
+of your daughter."
+
+"Let me tell you the kind of man I am," said the General,
+inflating his chest, and speaking with solemnity. 
+
+"Oh, I know the kind of man you are," Thorpe interrupted
+him, coolly.  "I want to talk now."
+
+"It was merely," Kervick ventured, in an injured tone,
+"that I can be as loyal as any man alive to a true friend."
+
+"Well, I'll be the true friend, then," said Thorpe,
+with impatient finality.  "And now this is what I want to say. 
+I'm going to be a very rich man.  You're not to say so
+to anybody, mind you, until the thing speaks for itself. 
+We're keeping dark for a few months, d'ye see?--lying low. 
+Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man.  Well now,
+I wouldn't give a damn to be rich, unless I did with my
+money the things that I wanted to do, and got the things
+with it that I wanted to get.  Whatever takes my fancy,
+that's what I'll do."
+
+He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-
+new project which seemed, by some surreptitious agency,
+to have already taken his fancy.  It was a curious project;
+there were attractive things about it, and objections to it
+suggested themselves as well. 
+
+"I may decide," he began speaking again, still revolving
+this hypothetical scheme in his thoughts--"I may want
+to--well, here's what occurs to me as an off-chance.
+I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye see? and it
+seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be
+so poor.  Well, then--I might say to you, here's two
+thousand a year, say, made over to you in your name, on the
+understanding that you turn over half of it, say, to her. 
+She could take it from you, of course, as her father. 
+You could say you made it out of the Company.  Of course
+it might happen, later on, that I might like to have
+a gentle hint dropped to her, d'ye see, as to where it
+really came from.  Mind, I don't say this is what is going
+to be done.  It merely occurred to me."
+
+After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added
+a second thought: "You'd have to set about making friends
+with her, you know.  In any case, you'd better begin
+at that at once."
+
+The General remained buried in reflection.  He lighted
+a cigarette, and poured out for himself still another
+petit verre.  His pursed lips and knitted brows were
+eloquent of intense mental activity.
+
+"Well, do you see any objections to it?" demanded Thorpe,
+at last. 
+
+"I do not quite see the reasons for it,"
+answered the other, slowly.  "What would you gain by it?"
+
+"How do you mean--gain?" put in the other, with peremptory
+intolerance of tone. 
+
+General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture. 
+These hands were withered, but remarkably well-kept. "I
+suppose one doesn't do something for nothing," he said. 
+"I see what I would gain, and what she would gain,
+but I confess I don't see what advantage you would get out
+of it."
+
+"No-o, I daresay you don't," assented Thorpe,
+with sneering serenity.  "But what does that matter? You
+admit that you see what you would gain.  That's enough,
+isn't it?"
+
+The older man's veined temples twitched for an instant. 
+He straightened himself in his chair, and looked hard at
+his companion.  There was a glistening of moisture about
+his staring eyes. 
+
+"It surely isn't necessary--among gentlemen"--he began,
+cautiously picking his phrases--"to have quite so much
+that's unpleasant, is it?"
+
+"No--you're right--I didn't mean to be so rough,"
+Thorpe declared, with spontaneous contrition. 
+Upon the instant, however, he perceived the danger
+that advantage might be taken of his softness.  "I'm a
+plain-spoken man," he went on, with a hardening voice,
+"and people must take me as they find me.  All I said was,
+in substance, that I intended to be of service to you--and
+that that ought to interest you."
+
+The General seemed to have digested his pique. 
+"And what I was trying to say," he commented deferentially,
+"was that I thought I saw ways of being of service to you. 
+But that did not seem to interest you at all."
+
+"How--service?" Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask. 
+
+"I know my daughter so much better than you do,"
+explained the other; "I know Plowden so much better; I am
+so much more familiar with the whole situation than you can
+possibly be--I wonder that you won't listen to my opinion. 
+I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I
+think you should hear it."
+
+"I think so, too," Thorpe declared, readily enough. 
+"What IS your opinion?"
+
+General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave
+an embarrassed little laugh.  "But I can't form what you
+might call an opinion," he protested, apologetically,
+"till I understand a bit more clearly what it is you
+propose to yourself.  You mustn't be annoyed if I return
+to that--'still harping on my daughter,' you know.
+If I MUST ask the question--is it your wish to marry her?"
+
+Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking
+of something else.  When he spoke, it was with no trace
+of consciousness that the question had been unduly intimate. 
+
+"I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry,"
+he replied, thoughtfully.  "I may, and I may not. 
+But--starting with that proviso--I suppose I haven't
+seen any other woman that I'd rather think about marrying
+than--than the lady we're speaking of.  However, you see
+it's all in the air, so far as my plans go."
+
+"In the air be it," the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. 
+"Let us consider it as if it were in the air--a
+possible contingency.  This is what I would say--My--
+'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being
+a difficult lady--'uncertain, coy, and hard to please'
+as Scott says, you know--and it must be a very skilfully-
+dressed fly indeed which brings her to the surface. 
+She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror of it.
+Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian,
+you know.  I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her
+mother carried it through.  But--yes--about her--I think
+she is afraid to marry again.  If she does ever consent,
+it will be because poverty has broken her nerve. 
+If she is kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved,
+so to speak, into taking a husband.  If she had sixteen
+hundred--either she would never marry at all, or she would
+be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught
+her fancy.  That would be particularly like her.  You would
+be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her
+for yourself.  D'ye follow me? If you'll leave it to me,
+I can find a much better way than that--better for all
+of us."
+
+"Hm!" said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. 
+"I see what you mean," he remarked at last.  "Yes--I see."
+
+The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time,
+deferring to the reverie of his host.  When finally he
+offered a diversion, in the form of a remark about the hour,
+Thorpe shook himself, and then ponderously rose to his feet. 
+He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made his way
+out without a word. 
+
+At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the
+Embankment garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him
+the fact of his presence.  "Which way are you going?"
+he asked. 
+
+"I don't know," Thorpe answered absently.  "I think--I
+think I'll take a walk on the Embankment--by myself."
+
+The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. 
+"But when am I to see you again?" he enquired, with an
+effect of solicitude that defied control. 
+
+"See me?" Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him
+by surprise. 
+
+"There are things to be settled, are there not?"
+the other faltered, in distressed doubt as to the judicious
+tone to take.  "You spoke, you know, of--of some employment
+that--that would suit me."
+
+Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort
+to recall his wandering attention.  "Oh yes," he said,
+with lethargic vagueness--"I haven't thought it out yet. 
+I'll let you know--within the week, probably."
+
+With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. 
+Walking heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands
+plunged deep in his overcoat pockets, he went through
+the gateway, and chose a path at random.  To the idlers
+on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed,
+he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. 
+To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say
+which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing
+for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter
+self-disgust.
+
+The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep,
+had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure.
+He stood still regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing
+the events of the day, after the other had vanished. 
+At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of
+his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all,"
+he said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad
+feel that he is a cad, in the presence of a gentleman."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed
+with his niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux. 
+
+The young people, with maps and a guide-book open,
+sat close together at the left side of the compartment. 
+The girl from time to time rubbed the steam from the window
+with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both stared
+a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations
+of petulance.
+
+"Isn't it too provoking!" cried the girl, turning to her
+uncle at last.  "This is where we are now--according
+to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds we enjoy a view
+of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left,
+the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For
+all one can see, we might as well be at Redhill."
+
+"It is pretty hard luck," Thorpe assented, passively glancing
+past her at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured
+the view.  "But hang it all--it must clear up some time. 
+Just you have patience, and you'll see some Alps yet."
+
+"Where we're going," the young man interposed, "the head-porter
+told me it was always cloudier than anywhere else."
+
+"I don't think that can be so," Thorpe reasoned, languidly,
+from his corner.  "It's a great winter resort, I'm told,
+and it rather stands to reason, doesn't it? that people
+wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as all that."
+
+"The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland,"
+said the girl--"they would do anything."
+
+Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour.  "Well, you can
+comfort yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again. 
+The mountains'll stay here, all right," he assured her. 
+The young people smiled back at him, and with this he
+rearranged his feet in a new posture on the opposite seat,
+lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more
+against the hard, red-plush cushion.  Personally, he did
+not in the least resent the failure of the scenery. 
+
+For something more than three months, this purposeless
+pleasure-tour had been dragging him about from point
+to point, sleeping in strange beds, eating extraordinarily
+strange food, transacting the affairs of a sight-seer among
+people who spoke strange languages, until he was surfeited
+with the unusual.  It had all been extremely interesting,
+of course, and deeply improving--but he was getting
+tired of talking to nobody but waiters, and still more
+so of having nothing to do which he could not as well
+leave undone if he chose.  After a few days more of
+Switzerland--for they had already gazed with blank faces
+at this universal curtain of mist from such different points
+of view as Lucerne, Interlaken, and Thun--it was clear
+to him that they would, as he phrased it, to himself,
+make a break for home.  Unless, indeed, something happened
+at Montreux.  Ah, would anything happen at Montreux?
+For four days his mind had been automatically reverting
+to that question; it lurked continually in the background
+of his thoughts, now, as he smoked and idly ruminated,
+on his way southward through the fog. 
+
+All the rest of the prolonged trip had been without
+any specific motive, so far as he was concerned. 
+The youngsters had planned all its routes and halts and
+details of time and connections, and he had gone along,
+with cheerful placidity, to look at the things they bade
+him observe, and to pay the bills.  Perhaps in all things
+their tastes had not been his tastes.  He would have liked
+more of Paris, he fancied, and less of the small Dutch
+and North German towns which they seemed to fancy so much.
+Still, the beer was good--and really their happiness,
+as a spectacle, had given him more satisfaction than
+a thousand miles of boulevards could have done. 
+
+He liked this niece and nephew of his more than he could
+ever have imagined himself liking any young people. 
+They had been shy with him at the outset--and for the first
+week his experiment had been darkened by the belief that,
+between themselves, they did not deem him quite good enough. 
+He had been wise enough, then, to have it out with the
+girl--she was the one to whom he felt it easiest to talk
+frankly--and had discovered, to his immense relief,
+that they conceived him to be regarding them as encumbrances. 
+At breakfast next morning, with tactful geniality, he set
+everything right, and thereafter they were all extremely
+happy together. 
+
+So far as he could judge, they were very superior
+young people, both intellectually and spiritually. 
+The girl spoke French, and her brother German,
+with what seemed to him remarkable proficiency.
+Their young minds were the repositories of an astounding
+amount of information: they knew who Charles the Bold was;
+they pointed out to their uncle the distinction between
+Gothic and Romanesque arches; they explained what was the
+matter with the Anabaptists; they told him that the story
+of the Bishop and the rats at Bingen was a baseless myth,
+and that probably there had never been any such man
+as William Tell.  Nor did they get all this out of the
+guide-books which they pored over with such zest. 
+It was impossible not to see that they were familiar with
+large numbers of the subjects that these books discussed,
+and that the itinerary which they marked out had reference
+to desires and interests that they had cultivated for themselves. 
+
+Julia, upon even first sight, made a much pleasanter
+impression than her mother's hesitating description
+had prepared him for.  As he came to know her well,
+he ceased to remember that there was a question in any mind
+as to her being a pretty girl.  There was less colour
+in her face than he could have wished.  Her smooth,
+pallid skin, almost waxen in texture, had a suggestion
+of delicate health which sometimes troubled him a little,
+but which appealed to the tenderness in his nature all
+the time.  The face was unduly thin, perhaps, but this,
+and the wistful glance of the large grey eyes in repose,
+made up an effect that Thorpe found touched him a good deal. 
+Even when she was in visibly high spirits, the look in these
+eyes seemed to him to be laying claim to his protection. 
+She could be merry upon occasion, in a gentle and tranquil way,
+and as her self-confidence expanded under the shelter
+of their growing intimacy, she disclosed to her uncle
+plenty of initiative and individuality--but what he felt
+in her most was a peculiarly sweet and girlish trustfulness,
+which made him like himself more than he had ever
+done before.  He could feel that he was at his very
+best--a hitherto unsuspected best--when Julia was about. 
+He wanted to buy for her everything in the windows upon
+which she bestowed the most casual approving glance. 
+It was a delight merely to look at her, and to meditate upon
+the felicity of being able to do things for so charming
+a girl. 
+
+Alfred made a less direct demand upon his uncle's admiration,
+but he was a very good fellow all round.  He was big and fair
+and muscular, and nothing about him but his spectacles
+seemed in Thorpe's mind to be related to his choice of art
+as a profession.  That so robust and hearty a young fellow
+should wish to put paint on a canvas with small brushes,
+was to the uncle an unaccountable thing.  It was almost as
+if he had wanted to knit, or do embroidery.  Of the idleness
+and impatience of discipline which his mother had seemed
+to allege against him, Thorpe failed to detect any signs. 
+The young man was never very late in the morning, and,
+beside his tireless devotion to the task of hunting up old
+pictures in out-of-the-way places, did most of the steward's
+work of the party with intelligence and precision. 
+He studied the time-tables, audited the hotel-bills, looked
+after the luggage, got up the street-maps of towns and
+the like, to such good purpose that they never lost a train,
+or a bag, or themselves.  Truly, an excellent young man. 
+Thorpe noted with especial satisfaction his fine,
+kindly big-brother attitude toward his sister Julia--and
+it was impossible for him to avoid the conviction that
+Louisa was a simpleton not to appreciate such children. 
+They did not often allude to their mother; when they did,
+it was in language the terms of which seemed more
+affectionate than the tone--and Thorpe said often to
+himself that he did not blame them.  It was not so much
+that they had outgrown their mother's point of view. 
+They had never occupied it. 
+
+The journey, so far as Thorpe comprehended its character,
+had been shaped with about equal regard for Julia's interest
+in the romance of history, and Alfred's more technical
+and practical interest in art.  Each had sufficient
+sympathy with the tastes of the other, however, to prevent
+any tendency to separation.  They took their uncle one
+day to see where William the Silent was assassinated,
+and the next to observe how Rembrandt's theory of guild
+portrait-painting differed from Van der Helst's, with a
+common enthusiasm.  He scrutinized with patient loyalty
+everything that they indicated to him, and not infrequently
+they appeared to like very much the comments he offered. 
+These were chiefly of a sprightly nature, and when Julia
+laughed over them he felt that she was very near to him indeed. 
+
+Thus they saw Paris together--where Thorpe did relinquish
+some of the multiplied glories of the Louvre to sit
+in front of a cafe by the Opera House and see the funny
+people go past--and thence, by Bruges and Antwerp,
+to Holland, where nobody could have imagined there were
+as many pictures as Thorpe saw with his own weary eyes. 
+There were wonderful old buildings at Lubeck for Julia's
+eyes to glisten over, and pictures at Berlin, Dresden,
+and Dusseldorf for Alfred. 
+
+The assumption existed that the excursion into the
+Thuringenwald to see the memorials of Luther was especially
+for the uncle's benefit, and he tried solicitously
+to say or look nothing which might invalidate it. 
+There were other places in Germany, from Mainz to Munich,
+which he remembered best by their different beers. 
+They spent Christmas at Vienna, where Julia had heard
+that its observance was peculiarly insisted upon, and then
+they saw the Tyrol in its heaviest vesture of winter snows,
+and beautiful old Basle, where Alfred was crazier
+about Holbein than he had been at Munich over Brouwer. 
+Thorpe looked very carefully at the paintings of both men,
+and felt strengthened in his hopes that when Alfred got
+a little older he would see that this picture business
+was not the thing for a young gentleman with prospects
+to go into. 
+
+It was at Basle that Thorpe received a letter from London
+which directly altered the plans of the party.  He had
+had several other letters from London which had produced
+no such effect.  Through Semple, he had followed in outline
+the unobtrusive campaign to secure a Special Settlement,
+and had learned that the Stock Exchange Committee,
+apparently without opposition, had granted one for the
+first week in February. 
+
+Even this news, tremendously important as it was, did not
+prompt Thorpe to interfere with the children's projects. 
+There was no longer any point in remaining away from London;
+there were, indeed, numerous reasons for a prompt return.
+But he was loth to deprive the youngsters of that descent
+into smiling, sunlit Italy upon which they had so fondly
+dwelt in fancy, and after all Semple could do all that was
+needful to be done for another month. 
+
+So they went to Basle, and here it was that another kind
+of letter came.  It was in a strange hand, at once cramped
+and fluttering, which puzzled the recipient a good deal;
+it was a long time before even the signature unravelled itself. 
+Then he forced himself to decipher it, sentence by sentence,
+with a fierce avidity.  It was from General Kervick. 
+
+The next morning Thorpe astonished his young companions
+by suggesting an alteration in their route.  In a roundabout
+and tentative fashion--in which more suspicious observers
+must have detected something shamefaced--he mentioned
+that he had always heard a great deal about Montreux as a
+winter-resort. The fact that he called it Montroox raised
+in Julia's mind a fleeting wonder from whom it could be that
+he had heard so much about it, but it occurred to neither
+her nor her brother to question his entire good faith.
+Their uncle had displayed, hitherto, a most comforting
+freedom from discrimination among European towns;
+he had, indeed, assured them many times that they were
+all one to him.  That he should suddenly turn up now with
+a favourite winter-resort of his own selection surprised
+them considerably, but, upon reflection, it also pleased them. 
+He had humoured all their wishes with such unfailing and
+bountiful kindness, that it was a delight to learn that
+there was something he wanted to do.  They could not finish
+their breakfast till the guide-book had been brought to the table. 
+
+"Oh! How splendid!" Julia had cried then.  "The Castle
+of Chillon is there!"
+
+"Why of course!" said Thorpe, complacently. 
+
+They laughed gayly at him for pretending that he had known this,
+and he as good-humouredly accepted their banter.  He drew
+a serious long breath of relief, however, when their backs
+were turned.  It had gone off much better than he had feared. 
+
+Now, on this Sunday afternoon, as the train made its sure-footed
+way across the mountains, the thought that he was actually
+to alight at Montreux at once fascinated and depressed him. 
+He was annoyed with himself for suffering it to get such
+a hold upon his mind.  What was there in it, anyway? There
+was a big hotel there, and he and his youngsters were to stop
+at it, and if he accidentally encountered a certain lady
+who was also stopping there--and of course the meeting
+would bear upon its face the stamp of pure chance--what of it?
+
+And if he did meet her, thus fortuitously--what would
+happen then? No doubt a lady of her social position met
+abroad great numbers of people that she had met at home. 
+It would not in any way surprise her--this chance encounter
+of which he thought so much.  Were there sufficient grounds
+for imagining that it would even interest her? He forced
+his mind up to this question, as it were, many times,
+and invariably it shied and evaded the leap. 
+
+There had been times, at Hadlow House, when Lady Cressage
+had seemed supremely indifferent to the fact of his existence,
+and there had been other times when it had appeared
+manifest that he pleased her--or better, perhaps, that she
+was willing to take note of how much she pleased him. 
+It must have been apparent to her--this fact that she
+produced such an impression upon him.  He reasoned this
+out satisfactorily to himself.  These beautiful women,
+trained from childhood for the conquest of a rich husband,
+must have cultivated an extraordinary delicacy of consciousness,
+in such matters.  They must have developed for themselves
+what might be called a sixth sense--a power of feeling
+in the air what the men about were thinking of them. 
+More than once he had caught a glimmer of what he felt to be
+the operation of this sense, in the company of Lady Cressage. 
+He could not say that it had been discernible in her glance,
+or her voice, or her manner, precisely, but he was sure
+that he had seen it, somehow. 
+
+But even assuming all this--admitting that in October,
+on a wet Sunday, in the tedium of a small country-house party,
+she had shown some momentary satisfaction in the idea that
+he was profoundly impressed by her--did it at all follow
+that in February, amid the distractions of a fashionable
+winter-resort, and probably surrounded by hosts of friends,
+she would pay any attention to him whatever? The abject
+fear that she might not even remember him--might not
+know him from Adam when he stood before her--skulked
+about in the labyrinths of his mind, but he drove it back
+whenever it showed itself.  That would be too ignominious. 
+
+The young people at the other side of the compartment,
+forever wiping the window with the napkin, and straining their
+eyes to see the invisible, diverted his unsettled attention. 
+A new perception of how much he liked them and enjoyed
+having them with him, took hold of his thoughts. 
+It had not occurred to him before, with any definiteness,
+that he would be insupportably lonely when the time came
+to part with them. 
+
+Now, when he dwelt upon it, it made him feel sad and old. 
+
+He said to himself at once, with decision, that there
+need be no parting at all.  He would take a house
+without delay, and they should live with him. 
+He could not doubt that this would be agreeable to them;
+it would solve every problem for him. 
+
+His fancy sketched out the natural and legitimate
+extensions of this project.  There would be, first of all,
+a house in town--a furnished house of a modest sort,
+having no pretension save to provide a cheerful temporary
+shelter for three people who liked one another. 
+Here the new household would take shape, and get its
+right note of character.  Apparently Louisa would not be
+urged to form part of this household.  He said to himself
+with frankness that he didn't want her, and there had been
+nothing to indicate that her children would pine for her. 
+She showed good sense when she said that her place was
+in the shop, and in her ancestral home over the shop. 
+No doubt there would be a certain awkwardness,
+visible to others if not to themselves, about her living
+in one part of London and her children in another. 
+But here also her good sense would come on;--and, besides,
+this furnished house in town would be a mere brief
+overture to the real thing--the noble country mansion
+he was going to have, with gardens and horses and hounds
+and artificial lakes and deer parks and everything. 
+Quite within the year he would be able to realize this
+consummation of his dreams. 
+
+How these nice young people would revel in such a place--and
+how they would worship him for having given it to them for
+a home! His heart warmed within him as he thought of this. 
+He smiled affectionately at the picture Julia made,
+polishing the glass with vehement circular movements
+of her slight arm, and then grimacing in comic vexation
+at the deadly absence of landscape outside.  Was there
+ever a sweeter or more lovable girl in this world? Would
+there have to be some older woman to manage the house,
+at the beginning? he wondered.  He should like it immensely
+if that could be avoided.  Julia looked fragile and
+inexperienced--but she would be twenty-one next month. 
+Surely that was a mature enough age for the slight
+responsibility of presiding over servants who should be
+the best that money could buy.  Many girls were married,
+and given households of their own to manage, when they
+were even younger. 
+
+This reflection raised an obstacle against the smooth-
+flowing current of his thoughts.  Supposing that Julia
+got the notion of marrying--how miserable that would
+make everything.  Very likely she would never do any
+such thing; he had observed in her no shadow of a sign
+that a thought of matrimony had ever crossed her brain. 
+Yet that was a subject upon which, of course, she could
+not be asked to give pledges, even to herself. 
+
+Thorpe tried to take a liberal view of this matter. 
+He argued to himself that there would be no objection at
+all to incorporating Julia's husband into the household,
+assuming that she went to the length of taking one,
+and that he was a good fellow.  On this latter point,
+it was only the barest justice to Julia's tastes and judgment
+to take it for granted that he would be a good fellow. 
+Yet the uncle felt uneasily that this would alter things
+for the worse.  The family party, with that hypothetical
+young man in it, could never be quite so innocently
+and completely happy as--for instance--the family party
+in this compartment had been during these wonderful
+three months. 
+
+Mechanically he rubbed the window beside him, and turned
+to look out with a certain fixedness--as if he might
+chance to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom with whom
+Julia would have it in her power to disturb the serenity
+of their prospective home.  A steep white cliff,
+receding sullenly against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse
+grotesquely low for its size, crouching under big
+shelving galleries heaped with snow; an opening in front,
+to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a valley
+into which they would descend--he saw these things. 
+They remained in his mind afterward as a part of something
+else that he saw, with his mental vision, at the same
+moment--a strikingly real and vivid presentment of
+Lady Cressage, attired as he had seen her in the saddle,
+her light hair blown about a little under her hat,
+a spot of colour in the exquisite cheek, the cold,
+impersonal dignity of a queen in the beautiful profile. 
+
+The picture was so actual for the instant that he uttered
+an involuntary exclamation--and then looked hastily round
+to see whether his companions had heard it.  Seemingly they
+had not; he lolled again upon the comfortless cushion,
+and strove to conjure up once more the apparition. 
+Nothing satisfactory came of the effort.  Upon consideration,
+he grew uncertain as to whether he had seen anything at all. 
+At the most it was a kind of half-dream which had visited him. 
+He yawned at the thought, and lighted a fresh cigar. 
+All at once, his mind had become too indolent to do any
+more thinking.  A shapeless impression that there would be
+a good many things to think over later on flitted into his
+brain and out again. 
+
+"Well, how are the mountains using you, now?" he called
+out to his niece. 
+
+"Oh, I could shake them!" she declared.  "Listen to this:
+'A view of singular beauty, embracing the greater part
+of the Lake of Geneva, and the surrounding mountains,
+is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are now--or
+were a minute ago.  You can see that there is some sort
+of valley in front of us--but that is all.  If I could
+only see one mountain with snow on it----"
+
+"Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come
+to that," Thorpe insisted, with jocose perversity. 
+"You're on mountains yourself, all the time."
+
+"You know what I mean," she retorted.  "I want to see
+something like the coloured pictures in the hotels."
+
+"Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow,"
+he said, for perhaps the twentieth time that day. 
+
+"There--that looks like water!" said Alfred. 
+"See? just beyond the village.  Yes, it is water. 
+There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events."
+
+"But it isn't the right colour," protested Julia,
+peering through the glass.  "It's precisely like everything
+else: it's of no colour at all.  And they always paint it
+such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss Government
+ought to return you your money."
+
+"You wait till you see it tomorrow--or next day,"
+said the uncle, vaguely.  He closed his eyes, and welcomed
+a drowsy mood.  As he went off to sleep, the jolting racket
+of the train mellowed itself into a murmur of "tomorrow
+or next day, tomorrow or next day," in his ears. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the
+big hotel, Julia looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. 
+She was in such haste to behold it that she had not so
+much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her muff still
+in her hand.  After one brief glance, she groaned aloud
+with vexation. 
+
+Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet,
+both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow,
+there lay a patch of water--motionless, inconspicuous,
+of a faded drab colour--which at some small distance
+out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little
+further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. 
+Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats,
+beached under the shelter of the pier, there was no proof
+in sight that this was a lake at all.  It was as uninspiring
+to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a porch. 
+
+While her uncle and brother occupied themselves with
+the luggage being brought up by the porters, she opened
+a window and stepped out upon the tiny balcony. 
+A flaring sign on the inner framework of this balcony
+besought her in Swiss-French, in the interests of order,
+not to feed the birds.  The injunction seemed meaningless
+to her until she perceived, over by the water, several gulls
+lazily wheeling about.  They were almost as grey as the
+fog they circled in.  Suddenly they seemed to perceive
+her in turn, and, swerving sharply, came floating
+toward the hotel, with harsh, almost menacing cries. 
+She hurried in, and shut the window with decision. 
+It seemed to her that the smile with which, as she turned,
+she was able to meet her uncle's look, was a product
+of true heroism. 
+
+Apparently this smile did not altogether delude him. 
+"Oh, now, you mustn't get down on your luck,"
+he adjured her.  "We're going to be awfully cozy here. 
+Have you seen your room? It's just there, in a little alley
+to the right of the door.  They say it has an even finer
+view than these windows.  Oh, you needn't laugh--this is
+the best view in the world, I'm told by those who know. 
+And as a winter-resort, why----"
+
+"I say, look here!" The interruption came from Alfred,
+who, having gone out on one of the balconies, put in
+his head now to summon them.  "Come here! Here's some fun."
+
+He pointed out to Thorpe the meaning of the inscription
+on the sign, and then pulled him forward to observe its
+practical defiance.  A score of big gulls were flapping
+and dodging in excited confusion close before them,
+filling their ears with a painful clamour.  Every now
+and again, one of the birds, recovering its senses
+in the hurly-burly, would make a curving swoop downward
+past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly catch
+in its beak something that had been thrown into the air. 
+
+Thorpe, leaning over his railing, saw that a lady on
+a balcony one floor below, and some yards to the left,
+was feeding the birds.  She laughed aloud as she did so,
+and said something over her shoulder to a companion who was
+not visible. 
+
+"Well, that's pretty cool," he remarked to his niece,
+who had come to stand beside him.  "She's got the same
+sign down there that we've got.  I can see it from here. 
+Or perhaps she can't read French."
+
+"Or perhaps she isn't frightened of the hotel people,"
+suggested the girl.  She added, after a little, "I think
+I'll feed them myself in the morning.  I certainly shall
+if the sun comes out--as a sort of Thanksgiving festival,
+you know."
+
+Her uncle seemed not to hear her.  He had been struck by
+the exceptional grace of the gestures with which the pieces
+of bread were flung forth.  The hands and wrists of this
+lady were very white and shapely.  The movements which she
+made with them, all unaware of observation as she was,
+and viewed as he viewed them from above, were singularly
+beautiful in their unconstraint.  It was in its way
+like watching some remarkable fine dancing, he thought. 
+He could not see much of her face, from his perch,
+but she was tall and fashionably clad.  There was a loose
+covering of black lace thrown over her head, but once,
+as she turned, he could see that her hair was red. 
+Even in this fleeting glimpse, the unusual tint attracted
+his attention: there was a brilliancy as of fire in it. 
+Somehow it seemed to make a claim upon his memory.
+He continued to stare down at the stranger with an indefinable
+sense that he knew something about her. 
+
+Suddenly another figure appeared upon the balcony--and
+in a flash he comprehended everything.  These idiotic,
+fighting gluttons of gulls had actually pointed out to him
+the object of his search.  It was Lady Cressage who stood
+in the doorway, there just below him--and her companion,
+the red-haired lady who laughed hotel-rules to scorn,
+was the American heiress who had crossed the ocean
+in his ship, and whom he had met later on at Hadlow. 
+What was her name--Martin? No--Madden. He confronted the swift
+impression that there was something odd about these two
+women being together.  At Hadlow he had imagined that they
+did not like each other.  Then he reflected as swiftly
+that women probably had their own rules about such matters. 
+He seemed to have heard, or read, perhaps, that females
+liked and disliked each other with the most capricious
+alternations and on the least tangible of grounds. 
+At all events, here they were together now.  That was
+quite enough.
+
+The two ladies had gone in, and closed their window. 
+The sophisticated birds, with a few ungrateful croaks
+of remonstrance, had drifted away again to the water. 
+His niece had disappeared from his elbow.  Still Thorpe
+remained with his arms folded on the railing, his eyes fixed
+on the vacant balcony, below to the left. 
+
+When at last he went inside, the young people were waiting
+for him with the project of a stroll before dinner. 
+The light was failing, but there was plenty of time. 
+They had ascertained the direction in which Chillon lay;
+a servant had assured them that it was only a few minutes'
+walk, and Alfred was almost certain that he had seen it from
+the window. 
+
+Thorpe assented with a certain listlessness, which they
+had never noted in his manner before, but when Julia begged
+him not to stir if he were in the slightest degree tired,
+he replied honestly enough that he would do anything
+rather than be left alone.  Then, of course, they said,
+there should be no walk, but to this he would not listen. 
+The party trooped downstairs, accordingly, and out into
+the street.  The walking was vile, but, as Julia had long
+ago said, if they were to be deterred by slush they would
+never get anywhere or see anything. 
+
+It proved to be too late and too dark to either enter
+the castle or get much of an idea of its exterior. 
+Returning, they paused again to look into the lighted window
+of the nice little book-shop. The numerous photographs
+of what they were entitled to behold from the windows
+of their hotel seemed more convincing than photographs
+usually were.  As the young people inspected them,
+they became reassured.  It was not credible that such a noble
+vista would forever deny itself to such earnest pilgrims. 
+When their uncle introduced this time his ancient formula
+about the certainty of brilliant sunshine in the morning,
+they somehow felt like believing him. 
+
+"Yes--I really think it must change," Julia declared,
+with her fascinated glance upon the photographs.
+
+Alfred looked at his watch.  "We'd better get along
+to the hotel, hadn't we?" he suggested. 
+
+"By the way"--Thorpe began, with a certain uneasiness
+of manner--"speaking of dinner, wouldn't you like to dine
+at the big table d'hote, instead of up in our sitting-room?"
+
+"If you're tired of our dining alone--by all means,"
+answered Julia, readily.  There was obvious surprise,
+however, in both her look and tone. 
+
+"Tired nothing!" he assured her.  "I like it better
+than anything else in the world.  But what I mean is--I
+was thinking, seeing that this is such a great winter-
+resort, and all the swagger people of Europe come here--
+that probably you youngsters would enjoy seeing the crowd."
+
+Julia's glance, full of affectionate appreciation,
+showed how wholly she divined his spirit of self-sacrifice. 
+"We wouldn't care in the least for it," she declared.
+"We enjoy being a little party by ourselves every whit
+as much as you do--and we both hate the people you get
+at table d'hotes--and besides, for that matter, if there
+are any real swells here, you may be sure they dine in their
+own rooms."
+
+"Why, of course!" Thorpe exclaimed swiftly, in palpable
+self-rebuke. "I don't know what I could have been thinking of. 
+Of course they would dine in their rooms."
+
+Next morning, Thorpe rose earlier than ever--with the
+impression of a peculiarly restless and uncomfortable night
+behind him.  It was not until he had shaved and dressed
+that he noted the altered character of the air outside. 
+Although it was not fully daylight yet, he could see
+the outlines of the trees and vinerows on the big,
+snow-clad hill, which monopolized the prospect from his window,
+all sharp and clear cut, as if he were looking at them
+through an opera-glass. He went at once to the sitting-room,
+and thrust the curtains aside from one of the windows. 
+
+A miracle had been wrought in the night.  The sky
+overhead was serenely cloudless; the lake beneath,
+stirring softly under some faint passing breeze,
+revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. 
+Between sky and water there stretched across the picture
+a broad, looming, dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here
+and there at the top by little slanting patches of an
+intensely glowing white.  He looked at this darkling middle
+distance for a moment or two without comprehension. 
+Then he turned and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's
+room and beat upon it. 
+
+"Get up!" he called through the panels.  "Here's your
+sunrise--here's your Alpine view.  Go to your window
+and see it!"
+
+A clear voice, not unmirthful, replied: "I've been watching
+it for half an hour, thanks.  Isn't it glorious?"
+
+He was more fortunate at the opposite door, for Alfred
+was still asleep.  The young man, upon hearing the news,
+however, made a toilet of unexampled brevity, and came
+breathlessly forth.  Thorpe followed him to the balcony,
+where he stood collarless and uncombed, with the fresh
+morning breeze blowing his hair awry, his lips parted,
+his eyes staring with what the uncle felt to be a painful
+fixedness before him. 
+
+Thorpe had seen many mountains in many lands.  They did
+not interest him very much.  He thought, however, that he
+could see now why people who had no mountains of their
+own should get excited about Switzerland.  He understood
+a number of these sentimental things now, for that matter,
+which had been Greek to him three months before. 
+Unreceptive as his philistinism may have seemed to these
+delightful youngsters, it was apparent enough to him that
+they had taught him a great deal.  If he could not hope
+to share their ever-bubbling raptures and enthusiasms,
+at least he had come to comprehend them after a fashion,
+and even to discern sometimes what it was that stirred them. 
+
+He watched his nephew now--having first assured himself
+by a comprehensive downward glance that no other
+windows of the hotel-front were open.  The young man
+seemed tremendously moved, far too much so to talk. 
+Thorpe ventured once some remarks about the Mexican mountains,
+which were ever so much bigger, as he remembered them,
+but Alfred paid no heed.  He continued to gaze across
+the lake, watching in rapt silence one facet after another
+catch the light, and stand out from the murky gloom,
+radiantly white, till at last the whole horizon was a mass
+of shining minarets and domes, and the sun fell full
+on his face.  Then, with a long-drawn sigh, he turned,
+re-entered the room, and threw himself into a chair. 
+
+"It's too good!" he declared, with a half-groan. "I
+didn't know it would be like that."
+
+"Why nothing's too good for us, man," his uncle told him. 
+
+"THAT is," said the boy, simply, and Thorpe, after staring
+for a moment, smiled and rang the bell for breakfast. 
+
+When Julia made her appearance, a few minutes later,
+the table was already laid, and the waiter was coming
+in with the coffee. 
+
+"I thought we'd hurry up breakfast," her uncle explained,
+after she had kissed him and thanked him for the sunrise
+he had so successfully predicted--"because I knew you'd
+both be crazy to get out."
+
+He had not over-estimated their eagerness, which was so great,
+indeed, that they failed to note the excessive tranquility
+of his own demeanour.  He ate with such unusual deliberation,
+on this exciting morning, that they found themselves at
+the end of their repast when, apparently, he had but made a beginning. 
+
+"Now you mustn't wait for me at all," he announced
+to them then.  "I'm a little tired this morning--and I
+think I'd just like to lie around and smoke, and perhaps
+read one of your novels.  But you two must get your
+things on and lose no time in getting out.  This is the
+very best time of day, you know--for Alpine scenery.
+I'd hate to have you miss any of it."
+
+Under his kindly if somewhat strenuous insistence, they went
+to their rooms to prepare for an immediate excursion. 
+He was so anxious to have them see all there was to be
+seen that, when Julia returned, properly cloaked and befurred,
+and stood waiting at the window, he scolded a little. 
+
+"What on earth is that boy doing?" he exclaimed, with a
+latent snarl in his tone which was novel to her ear. 
+"He'll keep you here till noon!"
+
+"He's shaving, I think.  He won't be long," she replied,
+with great gentleness.  After a moment's pause, she turned
+from the window and came gayly forward. 
+
+"Oh, I forgot: I was going to feed the birds. 
+There are several of them out there now." As she spoke,
+she busily broke up some of the rolls on the table. 
+Her face was bright with the pleasure of the thought. 
+
+"If you don't much mind, Julia," her uncle began,
+with almost pleading intonations, "I rather think I wouldn't
+feed those birds.  The rule is there before our eyes,
+you know--and it's always been my idea that if you're
+at a hotel it's the correct thing to abide by its rules. 
+It's just an idea of mine--and I daresay, if you think
+about it, you'll feel the same way."
+
+The girl freed the last remaining bread-crumb from her gloves. 
+"Why, of course, uncle," she said, with promptitude. 
+
+Although there was no hint of protest in her tone
+or manner, he felt impelled to soften still further
+this solitary demonstration of his authority. 
+"You see I've been all round the world, my little girl,"
+he explained, haltingly, "and when a man's done that,
+and knocked about everywhere, he's apt to get finicking
+and notional about trifles every once in a while."
+
+"You're less so than anybody I ever knew," she generously interposed. 
+
+"Oh, no I'm not.  You don't know me well enough yet;
+that's what's the matter.  And you see, Julia--another thing
+just because you saw that lady throwing out bread,
+that aint a very good reason why you should do it. 
+You don't know what kind of a person she may be. 
+Girls have got to be so frightfully careful about all that
+sort of thing."
+
+Julia offered a constrained little laugh in comment. 
+"Oh, you don't know how careful I can be," she said. 
+
+"But you're not annoyed?" he entreated her--and for answer
+she came behind him, and rested an arm on his shoulder,
+and patted it.  He stroked her hand with his own. 
+"That's something like the nicest niece in the world!"
+he exclaimed, with fervour. 
+
+When at last she and her brother had gone, he made short
+work of his breakfast, and drank his coffee at a gulp. 
+A restless activity suddenly informed his movements. 
+He lit a cigar, and began pacing up and down the room,
+biting his lips in preoccupation as he went.  After a little,
+he opened a window, and ventured cautiously as far
+out on the balcony as was necessary to obtain a view
+of the street below.  Eventually, he identified his nephew
+and niece among the pedestrians beneath him, and he kept
+them in sight till, after more than one tiresome halt at
+a shop window, they disappeared round a bend in the road. 
+Then he turned and came back into the room with the buoyant
+air of a man whose affairs are prospering. 
+
+He smiled genially to himself as he gathered from the table
+in one capacious hand all the pieces of bread his beloved
+niece had broken up, and advanced again to the open window. 
+Waiting here till one of the dingy gulls moving aimlessly
+about was headed toward him, he tossed out a fragment. 
+The bird dashed at it with a scream, and on the instant
+the whole squawking flock were on wing.  He suffered
+the hubbub to proceed unappeased for a little while he
+kept a watchful though furtive eye on that balcony
+to the left, below.  Unhappily he could not get out far
+enough to see whether the inner curtains of its window
+were drawn.  He threw another bit of bread, and then
+looked at his watch.  It was a few minutes past nine. 
+Surely people travelling to see scenery would be up by
+this hour. 
+
+The strategy of issuing just enough bread to keep the
+feathered concourse in motion commended itself to his mind. 
+As a precautionary measure, he took all the rolls remaining on
+the table, and put them in the drawer of a desk by the window. 
+It even occurred to him to ring for more bread, but upon
+consideration that seemed too daring.  The waiter would
+be sufficiently surprised at the party's appetites as it was. 
+
+Half an hour later, his plan of campaign suddenly yielded
+a victory.  Lady Cressage appeared on her balcony,
+clad in some charming sort of morning gown, and bareheaded. 
+She had nothing in her hands, and seemed indifferent
+to the birds, but when Thorpe flung forth a handful
+of fragments into the centre of their whirling flock,
+she looked up at him.  It was the anxious instant, and he
+ventured upon what he hoped was a decorous compromise
+between a bow and a look of recognition. 
+
+She was in no haste to answer either.  He could see
+rather than hear that she said something to her invisible
+companion within, the while she glanced serenely
+in the general direction of his balcony.  It seemed
+to him that the answer to her remark, whatever it was,
+must have exerted a direct influence upon his destiny,
+for Lady Cressage all at once focussed her vague regard
+upon him, and nodded with a reasonably gracious smile. 
+
+"It's wonderful luck to find you here," he called
+down to her.  Having played their part, he wished now
+that the birds were at Jericho.  Their obstreperous
+racket made conversation very difficult.  Apparently she
+made him an answer, but he could catch nothing of it. 
+
+"I'm here with my niece and nephew," he shouted down. 
+"I don't hear what you say.  May I come down and pay
+my respects--later on? What is your number, and when may
+I come?"
+
+These questions, as he flashed them in review through his mind,
+seemed to be all right from the most exacting social
+point of view.  Doubtless it was equally all right that,
+before replying, she should consult her companion,
+as she did at some length.  Then she replied--and he had
+no difficulty now in hearing her above the birds--that it
+would be very nice of him to come, say, in an hour's time. 
+She told him the number--and then almost abruptly went in. 
+
+Thorpe, during this hour that ensued, smoked with
+volcanic energy.  He tried to interest himself in one
+after another of half a dozen Tauchnitz novels his niece
+carried about, with a preposterous absence of success. 
+He strove to arrange in some kind of sequence the things
+that he should say, when this momentous interview
+should begin, but he could think of nothing which did
+not sound silly.  It would be all right, he argued to
+himself in the face of this present mental barrenness;
+he always talked well enough on the spur of the moment,
+when the time came--and still was not reassured.
+
+He wondered if both ladies would be there to receive him,
+and decided that they would probably regard that as indispensable
+to the proprieties.  In that case, their conversation would
+necessarily be of the most casual and general character. 
+He would tell them a good deal about his niece, he foresaw. 
+A man travelling about with a niece--and such a delightfully
+lady-like and engaging little niece--would take on some
+added interest and dignity, he perceived, in the eyes
+of ladies travelling alone.  He essayed to estimate just
+how much they would probably like Julia.  Of course he would
+say nothing about her mother and the book-shop; a vague
+allusion to a widowed sister would be ample on that head. 
+But there could be confident references to Cheltenham;
+he knew from what Julia had said that it suggested the
+most satisfactory social guarantees, if taken strictly
+by itself.  And then so much would depend upon Julia
+herself! If she succeeded in striking up a friendship
+with them--ah, then everything would be all right. 
+Perhaps they would take a fancy to Alfred too! He was
+a boy, of course, but conceivably the fact that he wanted
+to paint, and knew about pictures, would appeal to them. 
+He seemed to have heard somewhere that artists were
+the very devil among women. 
+
+At last the weary time of waiting had worn itself out,
+somehow, and, after a final polishing before his glass,
+he went down, and found his right corridor, and knocked
+at the door.  A pleasant voice bade him enter, and,
+hat and gloves in hand, he went in. 
+
+As he had imagined, both ladies were present. 
+He had not been prepared, however, for the fact that it
+was the American who played the part of hostess. 
+It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down,
+and generally made him free of the apartment.  When he
+shook hands with Lady Cressage, there was somehow an effect
+of the incidental in the ceremony, as if she were also a guest. 
+
+Nothing could have been simpler or more pleasing
+than the little visit turned out to be.  Miss Madden
+had suddenly grown tired of the snowless and dripping
+English winter, and had as promptly decided to come
+to Switzerland, where the drifts ought to be high enough,
+and the frosts searching enough, in all conscience. 
+They had selected Territet, because it was familiar to her,
+and because it was on the way to Martigny and Brieg,
+and she had had a notion of crossing either the Simplon
+or the St. Bernard in winter.  As she found now,
+the St. Bernard was quite impracticable, but admittedly
+a post road was kept open over the Simplon.  It was said
+now that she would not be allowed to proceed by this,
+but it often happened that she did the things that she
+was not allowed to do.  The hotel-people at both Brieg
+and Berisal had written refusing to let their horses attempt
+the Simplon journey, and they were of course quite within
+their rights, but there were other horses in Switzerland. 
+One surely could buy horses--and so on. 
+
+Thorpe also had his turn at autobiography.  He told
+rather whimsically of his three months' experiences at
+the tail of the juvenile whirligigs, and his auditors
+listened to them with mild smiles.  He ventured upon
+numerous glowing parentheses about Julia, and they at
+least did not say that they did not want to know her. 
+They heard with politeness, too, what he could contrive
+to drag in about his artist-nephew, and said it must be
+very pleasant for him to have such nice company.  At least
+Miss Madden said this: her companion, as he thought it
+over afterward, seemed hardly to have said anything at all. 
+She answered the few remarks which he found it possible
+to direct to her, but the responses took no hold upon
+his memory.  He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy,
+or both. 
+
+Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension,
+were verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed
+itself--as splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing
+its glaciers above the mounting sunrise--in his brain. 
+
+"We should all be charmed if you would come up and dine
+with us tonight," he said, under the abrupt impulsion
+of this idea.  "It's been such an age since we wanderers
+have had the privilege of company at our table!"
+
+The felicity of these phrases from his lips attracted
+his admiring attention, even while he waited in suspense
+for an answer to them. 
+
+The ladies exchanged a look.  "Yes," said Miss Madden,
+after the slightest of pauses, "we shall be very happy."
+
+Shortly thereafter Thorpe took his leave, and went
+downstairs and out.  He wandered about till luncheon
+time, observing the mountains across the lake from
+various standpoints, and, as it were, with new eyes. 
+He was interested in them in a curious new fashion;
+they seemed to say things to him.  His lip curled
+once at the conceit that he was one of the Alps himself. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+IT did not happen until three days later that Thorpe's
+opportunity to speak alone with Lady Cressage came. 
+
+In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have
+become fused in a remarkable intimacy.  This was
+clearly due to the presence of the young people,
+and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day
+upon the striking prescience he had shown in bringing them. 
+
+Both the ladies unaffectedly liked Julia; so much so
+that they seemed unwilling to make any plans which did
+not include her.  Then it was only a matter of course
+that where she went her brother should go--and a further
+logical step quite naturally brought in their willing uncle. 
+If he had planned everything, and now was ordering everything,
+it could not have gone more to his liking. 
+
+Certain side speculations lent a savour to the satisfaction
+with which he viewed this state of affairs.  He found many
+little signs to confirm the suspicion that the two ladies
+had been the readier to make much of Julia because they
+were not overkeen about each other's society.  The bright,
+sweet-natured girl had come as a welcome diversion
+to a couple who in seclusion did battle with tendencies
+to yawn.  He was not quite convinced, for that matter,
+that the American lady always went to that trouble. 
+She seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person,
+who would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations
+from doing the things she wanted to do.  Her relations
+with her companion afforded him food for much thought. 
+Without any overt demonstrations, she produced the
+effect of ordering Lady Cressage about.  This, so far
+as it went, tended to prejudice him against her. 
+On the other hand, however, she was so good to Julia,
+in a peculiarly frank and buoyant way which fascinated
+the girl, that he could not but like her.  And she was
+very good to Alfred too. 
+
+There was, indeed, he perceived, a great deal of
+individuality about the friendship which had sprung up
+between Miss Madden and his nephew.  She was years his
+senior--he settled it with himself that the American
+could not be less than seven-and-twenty,--yet Alfred
+stole covert glances of admiration at her, and seemed
+to think of nothing but opportunities for being in her
+company as if--as if--Thorpe hardly liked to complete
+the comparison in his own thoughts.  Alfred, of course,
+said it was all on account of her wonderful hair; he rather
+went out of his way to dilate upon the enthusiasm her
+"colour scheme"--whatever that might mean--excited in him
+as an artist.  The uncle had moments of profound skepticism
+about this--moments when he uneasily wondered whether it
+was not going to be his duty to speak to the young man. 
+For the most part, however, he extracted reassurance
+from Miss Madden's demeanour toward the lad.  She knew,
+it seemed, a vast deal about pictures; at least she was able
+to talk a vast deal about them, and she did it in such
+a calmly dogmatic fashion, laying down the law always,
+that she put Alfred in the position of listening as a pupil
+might listen to a master.  The humility with which his
+nephew accepted this position annoyed Thorpe upon occasion,
+but he reasoned that it was a fault on the right side. 
+Very likely it would help to keep the fact of the lady's
+seniority more clearly before the youngster's mind,
+and that would be so much gained. 
+
+And these apprehensions, after all, were scarcely to be
+counted in the balance against the sense of achieved
+happiness with which these halcyon days kept Thorpe filled. 
+The initiatory dinner had gone off perfectly.  He could
+have wished, indeed, that Julia had a smarter frock,
+and more rings, when he saw the imposing costumes and jewelled
+throats and hands of his guests--but she was a young girl,
+by comparison, he reflected, and there could be no doubt
+that they found her charming.  As for Alfred, he was notably
+fine-looking in his evening-clothes--infinitely more like
+the son of a nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying
+to himself, than that big dullard, the Honourable Balder. 
+It filled him with a new pleasure to remember that Alfred
+had visiting cards presenting his name as D'Aubigny,
+which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate
+Dabney really stood for.  The lad and his sister had
+united upon this excellent change long ago at Cheltenham,
+and oddly enough they had confessed it to their uncle,
+at the beginning of the trip, with a show of trepidation,
+as if they feared his anger.  With radiant gayety he had
+relieved their minds by showing them his card, with "Mr.
+Stormont Thorpe" alone upon it.  At the dinner table,
+in the proudest moment of his life, he had made himself
+prouder still by thinking how distinguished an appearance
+his and Alfred's cards would make together in the apartment
+below next day. 
+
+But next day, the relations between the two parties had
+already become too informal for cards.  Julia went down
+to see them; they came up to see Julia.  Then they all went
+for a long walk, with luncheon at Vevey, and before evening
+Alfred was talking confidently of painting Miss Madden. 
+Next day they went by train to St. Maurice, and,
+returning after dark, dined without ceremony together. 
+This third day--the weather still remaining bright--they had
+ascended by the funicular road to Glion, and walked on among
+the swarming luegers, up to Caux.  Here, after luncheon,
+they had wandered about for a time, regarding the panorama
+of lake and mountains.  Now, as the homeward descent began,
+chance led the two young people and Miss Madden on ahead. 
+
+Thorpe found himself walking beside Lady Cressage. 
+He had upon his arm her outer wrap, which she said she
+would put on presently.  To look at the view he must glance
+past her face: the profile, under the graceful fur cap,
+was so enriched by glowing colour that it was, to his thought,
+as if she were blushing. 
+
+"How little I thought, a few months ago," he said,
+"that we should be mountaineering together!"
+
+"Oh, no one knows a day ahead," she responded, vaguely. 
+"I had probably less notion of coming to Switzerland
+then than you had."
+
+"Then you don't come regularly?"
+
+"I have never seen either Germany or Switzerland before. 
+I have scarcely been out of England before."
+
+"Why now"--he paused, to think briefly upon his words--"I
+took it for granted you were showing Miss Madden around."
+
+"It 's quite the other way about," she answered, with a
+cold little laugh.  "It is she who is showing me around. 
+It is her tour.  I am the chaperone." Thorpe dwelt upon
+the word in his mind.  He understood what it meant only
+in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness
+of the tone in which it had been uttered. 
+
+"No--it didn't seem as if it were altogether--what I
+might call--YOUR tour," he ventured.  They had seen much
+of each other these past few days, but it was still hard
+for him to make sure whether their freedom of intercourse
+had been enlarged. 
+
+The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence,
+she commented upon his remark, embarrassed him.  For a
+moment he said nothing.  He went on then with a renewed
+consciousness of risk. 
+
+"You mustn't be annoyed with me," he urged.  "I've been
+travelling with that dear little niece of mine and her brother,
+so long, that I've got into a habit of watching to notice
+if the faces I see round me are happy.  And when they're not,
+then I have a kind of fatherly notion of interfering,
+and seeing what's wrong."
+
+She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon
+doubtful inspiration--"By the way, speaking of fathers,
+I didn't know at Hadlow that you were the daughter
+of one of my Directors"--this smile froze upon the instant. 
+
+"The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel,
+don't you think?" she remarked, "than it is from here."
+
+Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. 
+"I have taken a great interest in General Kervick,"
+he said, almost defiantly.  "I am seeing to it that he has
+a comfortable income--an income suitable to a gentleman
+of his position--for the rest of his life."
+
+"He will be very glad of it," she remarked. 
+
+"But I hoped that you would be glad of it too,"
+he told her, bluntly.  A curious sense of reliance upon
+his superiority in years had come to him.  If he could
+make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed
+likely that she would defer to it.  "I'm talking to you
+as I would to my niece, you know," he added, plausibly. 
+
+She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face,
+as if the point of view took her by surprise. 
+"I don't understand," she said.  "You are providing
+an income for my father, because you wish to speak
+to me like an uncle.  Is that it?"
+
+He laughed, somewhat disconsolately.  "No--that isn't it,"
+he said, and laughed again.  "I couldn't tell, you know,
+that you wouldn't want to talk about your father."
+"Why, there's no reason in the world for not talking of him,"
+she made haste to declare.  "And if he's got something
+good in the City, I'm sure I'm as glad as anyone.  He is
+the sort that ought always to have a good deal of money. 
+I mean, it will bring out his more amiable qualities. 
+He does not shine much in adversity--any more than I do."
+
+Thorpe felt keenly that there were fine things to be said
+here--but he had confidence in nothing that came to
+his tongue.  "I've been a poor man all my life--till now,"
+was his eventual remark. 
+
+"Please don't tell me that you have been very happy
+in your poverty," she adjured him, with the dim flicker
+of a returning smile.  "Very likely there are people
+who are so constituted, but they are not my kind. 
+I don't want to hear them tell about it.  To me poverty
+is the horror--the unmentionable horror!"
+
+"There never was a day that I didn't feel THAT!"
+Thorpe put fervour into his voice.  "I was never
+reconciled to it for a minute.  I never ceased swearing
+to myself that I'd pull myself out of it.  And that's
+what makes me sort of soft-hearted now toward those--
+toward those who haven't pulled themselves out of it."
+
+"Your niece says you are soft-hearted beyond example,"
+remarked Lady Cressage. 
+
+"Who could help being, to such a sweet little girl as she is?"
+demanded the uncle, fondly. 
+
+"She is very nice," said the other.  "If one may say
+such a thing, I fancy these three months with her have
+had an appreciable effect upon you.  I'm sure I note
+a difference."
+
+"That's just what I've been saying to myself!" he told her. 
+He was visibly delighted with this corroboration. 
+"I've been alone practically all my life.  I had no
+friends to speak of--I had no fit company--I hadn't
+anything but the determination to climb out of the hole. 
+Well, I've done that--and I've got among the kind of people
+that I naturally like.  But then there came the question
+of whether they would like me.  I tell you frankly,
+that was what was worrying the heart out of me when I
+first met you.  I like to be confessing it to you now--but
+you frightened me within an inch of my life.  Well now,
+you see, I'm not scared of you at all.  And of course
+it's because Julia's been putting me through a course
+of sprouts."
+
+The figure was lost upon Lady Cressage, but the spirit
+of the remarks seemed not unpleasant to her.  "I'm sure
+you're full of kindness," she said.  "You must forget that I
+snapped at you--about papa." "All I remember about that is,"
+he began, his eye lighting up with the thought that this time
+the opportunity should not pass unimproved, "that you said
+he didn't shine much in adversity---any more than you did. 
+Now on that last point I disagree with you, straight. 
+There wouldn't be any place in which you wouldn't shine."
+
+"Is that the way one talks to one's niece?" she asked him,
+almost listlessly.  "Such flattery must surely be bad
+for the young." Her words were sprightly enough, but her
+face had clouded over.  She had no heart for the banter.
+
+"Ah"--he half-groaned. "I only wish I knew what was
+the right way to talk to you.  The real thing is that I
+see you're unhappy--and that gets on my nerve--and I
+should like to ask you if there wasn't something I could
+do--and ask it in such a way that you'd have to admit
+there was--and I don't know enough to do it."
+
+He had a wan smile for thanks.  "But of course there
+is nothing," she replied, gently. 
+
+"Oh, there must be!" he insisted.  He had no longer any
+clear notions as to where his tongue might not lead him. 
+"There must be! You said I might talk to you as I would
+to Julia
+
+"Did I?"
+
+"Well, I'm going to, anyway," he went on stoutly,
+ignoring the note of definite dissent in her interruption. 
+"You ARE unhappy! You spoke about being a chaperone.
+Well now, to speak plainly, if it isn't entirely pleasant
+for you with Miss Madden--why wouldn't you be a chaperone
+for Julia? I must be going to London very soon--but
+she can stay here, or go to Egypt, or wherever she
+likes--and of course you would do everything, and have
+everything--whatever you liked, too."
+
+"The conversation is getting upon rather impossible grounds,
+I'm afraid," she said, and then bit her lips together. 
+Halting, she frowned a little in the effort of considering
+her further words, but there was nothing severe in the
+glance which she lifted to him as she began to speak. 
+"Let us walk on.  I must tell you that you misconceive
+the situation entirely.  Nobody could possibly be kinder
+or more considerate than Miss Madden.  Of course she
+is American--or rather Irish-American, and I'm English,
+and our notions and ways are not always alike.  But that has
+nothing to do with it.  And it is not so much that she
+has many thousands a year, and I only a few hundreds. 
+That in itself would signify nothing--and if I must take
+help from somebody I would rather take it from Celia Madden
+than anybody else I know--but this is the point, Mr. Thorpe. 
+I do not eat the bread of dependence gracefully.  I pull wry
+faces over it, and I don't try very much to disguise them. 
+That is my fault.  Yes--oh yes, I know it is a fault--but
+I am as I am.  And if Miss Madden doesn't mind--why"--she
+concluded with a mirthless, uncertain laugh--"why on earth
+should you?"
+
+"Ah, why should I?" he echoed, reflectively.  "I should
+like desperately to tell you why.  Sometime I will tell you."
+
+They walked on in silence for a brief space.  Then she
+put out her hand for her wrap, and as she paused,
+he spread it over her shoulders. 
+
+"I am amazed to think what we have been saying to each other,"
+she said, buttoning the fur as they moved on again. 
+"I am vexed with myself."
+
+"And more still with me," he suggested. 
+
+"No-o--but I ought to be.  You've made me talk the most
+shocking rubbish."
+
+"There we disagree again, you know.  Everything you've
+said's been perfect.  What you're thinking of now is
+that I'm not an old enough friend to have been allowed
+to hear it.  But if I'm not as old a friend as some,
+I wish I could make you feel that I'm as solid a friend
+as any--as solid and as staunch and as true.  I wish I
+could hear you say you believed that."
+
+"But you talk of 'friends,'" she said, in a tone not at
+all responsive--"what is meant by 'friends'? We've chanced
+to meet twice--and once we barely exchanged civilities,
+and this time we've been hotel acquaintances--hardly more,
+is it?--and you and your young people have been very
+polite to me--and I in a silly moment have talked to you
+more about my affairs than I should--I suppose it was
+because you mentioned my father.  But 'friends' is rather
+a big word for that, isn't it?"
+
+Thorpe pouted for a dubious moment.  "I can think
+of a bigger word still," he said, daringly.  "It's been
+on the tip of my tongue more than once."
+
+She quickened her pace.  The air had grown perceptibly colder. 
+The distant mountains, visible ever and again through
+the bare branches, were of a dark and cheerless blue,
+and sharply defined against the sky.  It was not yet
+the sunset hour, and there were no mists, but the
+light of day seemed to be going out of the heavens. 
+He hurried on beside her in depressed silence. 
+
+Their companions were hidden from view in a convolution
+of the winding road, but they were so near that their
+voices could be heard as they talked.  Frequently the
+sound of laughter came backward from them. 
+
+"They're jolly enough down there," he commented at last, moodily. 
+
+"That's a good reason for our joining them, isn't it?"
+Her tone was at once casual and pointed.
+
+"But I don't want to join them!" he protested.  "Why don't
+you stay with me--and talk?" "But you bully me so,"
+she offered in explanation. 
+
+The phrase caught his attention.  Could it be that it
+expressed her real feeling? She had said, he recalled,
+that he had made her talk.  Her complaint was like
+an admission that he could overpower her will. 
+If that were true--then he had resources of masterfulness
+still in reserve sufficient to win any victory. 
+
+"No--not bully you," he said slowly, as if objecting to the word
+rather than the idea.  "That wouldn't be possible to me. 
+But you don't know me well enough to understand me. 
+I am the kind of man who gets the things he wants. 
+Let me tell you something: When I was at Hadlow, I had
+never shot a pheasant in my life.  I used to do tolerably
+well with a rifle, but I hardly knew anything about a
+shot-gun, and I don't suppose I'd ever killed more than
+two or three birds on the wing--and that was ages ago.
+But I took the notion that I would shoot better than anybody
+else there.  I made up my mind to it--and I simply did it,
+that's all.  I don't know if you remember--but I killed
+a good deal more than both the others put together. 
+I give you that as an example.  I wanted you to think
+that I was a crack shot--and so I made myself be a
+crack shot."
+
+"That is very interesting," she murmured.  They did
+not seem to be walking quite so fast. 
+
+"Don't think I want to brag about myself," he went on. 
+"I don't fancy myself--in that way.  I'm not specially
+proud of doing things--it's the things themselves
+that I care for.  If some men had made a great fortune,
+they would be conceited about it.  Well, I'm not. 
+What I'm keen about is the way to use that fortune so
+that I will get the most out of it--the most happiness,
+I mean.  The thing to do is to make up your mind carefully
+what it is that you want, and to put all your power and
+resolution into getting it--and the rest is easy enough.
+I don't think there's anything beyond a strong man's reach,
+if he only believes enough in himself."
+
+"But aren't you confusing two things?" she queried. 
+The subject apparently interested her.  "To win one's
+objects by sheer personal force is one thing.  To merely
+secure them because one's purse is longer than other
+people's--that's quite another matter."
+
+He smiled grimly at her.  "Well, I'll combine the two,"
+he said. 
+
+"Then I suppose you will be altogether irresistible,"
+she said, lightly.  "There will be no pheasants left for
+other people at all."
+
+"I don't mind being chaffed," he told her, with gravity. 
+"So long as you're good-natured, you can make game
+of me all you like.  But I'm in earnest, all the same. 
+I'm not going to play the fool with my money and my power. 
+I have great projects.  Sometime I'll tell you about them.
+They will all be put through--every one of them.  And you
+wouldn't object to talking them over with me--would you?"
+
+"My opinion on 'projects' is of no earthly value--to
+myself or anyone else."
+
+"But still you'd give me your advice if I asked it?"
+he persisted.  "Especially if it was a project in which you
+were concerned?"
+
+After a moment's constrained silence she said to him,
+"You must have no projects, Mr. Thorpe, in which I
+am concerned.  This talk is all very wide of the mark. 
+You are not entitled to speak as if I were mixed up with
+your affairs.  There is nothing whatever to warrant it."
+
+"But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there,
+and keep you there?" he asked her, with gleeful boldness. 
+"And just ask yourself whether you do really want
+to help it.  Why should you? You've seen enough of me
+to know that I can be a good friend.  And I'm the kind
+of friend who amounts to something--who can and will
+do things for those he likes.  What obligation are you
+under to turn away that kind of a friend, when he offers
+himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself."
+
+"But you are not in a position to nominate the questions
+that I am to put to myself," she said.  The effort to
+import decision into her tone and manner was apparent. 
+"That is what I desire you to understand.  We must not talk
+any more about me.  I am not the topic of conversation."
+
+"But first let me finish what I wanted to say," he insisted. 
+"My talk won't break any bones.  You'd be wrong not
+to listen to it--because it's meant to help you--to
+be of use to you.  This is the thing, Lady Cressage:
+You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position. 
+Like my friend Plowden"--he watched her face narrowly
+but in vain, in the dull light, for any change at mention
+of the name--"like my friend Plowden you have a position
+and title to keep up, and next to nothing to keep it
+up on.  But he can go down into the City and make
+money--or try to.  He can accept Directorships and tips
+about the market and so on, from men who are disposed
+to be good to him, and who see how he can be of use to
+them--and in that way he can do something for himself. 
+But there is the difference: you can't do these things,
+or you think you can't, which is the same thing. 
+You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by notice-boards,
+telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that way;
+that you mustn't say this thing or do the other. 
+Now your friend down ahead there--Miss Madden--she doesn't
+take much stock in notice-boards. In fact, she feeds
+the gulls, simply because she's forbidden to do it. 
+But you--you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're annoyed
+with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't
+I read you right?"
+
+She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic. 
+There was no touch of expostulation in the voice with
+which she answered him.  "I see what you think you mean,"
+she said. 
+
+"Think!" he responded, with self-confident emphasis. 
+"I'm not 'thinking.' I'm reading an open book.  As I say,
+you're not contented--you're not happy; you don't try
+to pretend that you are.  But all the same, though you
+hate it, you accept it.  You think that you really must
+obey your notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought
+to do is to take a different view.  Why should you put up
+all this barbed wire between yourself and your friends? It
+doesn't do anybody else any good--and it does you harm. 
+Why, for example, should Plowden be free to take things
+from me, and you not?"
+
+She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye. 
+"Unfortunately I was not asked to join your Board."
+
+He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her
+meditatively as he turned these words over in his mind. 
+"What I'm doing for Plowden," he said with slow vagueness
+meanwhile, "it isn't so much because he's on the Board. 
+He's of no special use to me there.  But he was nice to me
+at a time when that meant everything in the world to me--and
+I don't forget things of that sort.  Besides, I like
+him--and it pleases me to let him in for a share of my
+good fortune.  See? It's my way of enjoying myself. 
+Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed
+to let you in also for a share of that good fortune?
+You think there's a difference, but I tell you it's
+imaginary--pure moonshine.  Why, the very people whose
+opinion you're afraid of--what did they do themselves
+when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the
+scum of the earth had only to own some Chartered shares,
+and pretend to be 'in the know' about them--and they
+could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. 
+I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal--I
+wouldn't have them in my house--but it seems there
+wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in London."
+
+"Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed. 
+"It wasn't a nice exhibition that society made of itself--
+one admits that,--but it was only one set that quite lost
+their heads.  There are all kinds of sets, you know. 
+And--I don't think I see your application, in any event.
+The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. 
+People ran after those who could tell them which shares were
+going up, and they gambled in those shares.  That was all,
+wasn't it?"
+
+Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query
+with a little shake of the head.  "'On a business basis,'"
+he repeated, as if talking to himself.  "They like to have
+things 'on a business basis.'"
+
+He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she
+paused as well, in a reluctant, tentative way.  "I don't
+understand you," she remarked, blankly. 
+
+"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows,
+and marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which
+his mind had been busy.  "This is the question. 
+You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board. 
+You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden,
+and couldn't do them for you.  Oh, I know it was a joke--but
+it had its meaning--at least to me.  Now I want to ask
+you--if I decide to form another Company, a very small
+and particular Company--if I should decide to form it,
+I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
+Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess
+you know what I mean."
+
+The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and
+satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken
+down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could
+not account for.  All at once his sense of physical
+ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady
+Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something
+shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then shifted
+to the dim mountain chain beyond.  His heart fluttered
+surprisingly inside his breast, during the silence which ensued. 
+
+"Surely you must have said everything now that you
+wished to say," she observed at last.  She had been
+studying intently the trodden snow at her feet, and did
+not even now look up.  The constraint of her manner,
+and a certain pleading hesitation in her words,
+began at once to restore his self-command. "Do not
+talk of it any further, I beg of you," she went on. 
+"We--we have been lagging behind unconscionably. 
+If you wish to please me, let us hurry forward now. 
+And please!--no more talk at all!"
+
+"But just a word--you're not angry?"
+
+She shook her head very slightly. 
+
+"And you do know that I'm your friend--your solid,
+twenty-four-carat friend?"
+
+After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a
+whisper--"Yes--be my friend--if it amuses you,"--and
+led the way with precipitate steps down the winding road. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early
+morning train for Geneva--homeward bound. 
+
+It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration
+that urgent business summoned him to London, yet Julia
+and Alfred, when they chanced to exchange glances after
+the announcement, read in each other's eyes the formless
+impression that there were other things beside business. 
+Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large
+and probably venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit
+with their conception of his character that commercial
+anxieties should possess the power to upset him. 
+And upset he undeniably was. 
+
+They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the
+morning following the excursion up to Glion and Caux. 
+He told them then that he had slept very badly, and that
+they must "count him out" of their plans for the day. 
+He continued to be counted out of what remained of
+their stay at Territet.  He professed not to be ill,
+but he was restless and preoccupied.  He ate little,
+but smoked continuously, and drank spirits a good deal,
+which they had not seen him do before.  Nothing would induce
+him to go out either day. 
+
+Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's
+equanimity synchronized with an apparent change in the
+attitude of their new friends on the floor below. 
+This change was, indeed, more apparent than definable. 
+The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly
+and affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship
+had somehow vanished.  Insensibly, the two parties
+had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common. 
+There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous
+luncheons or formal dinners as a group. 
+
+The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel
+on this morning of departure, after they had clambered
+over the drifts into the snow-bedecked train, and opened
+the window of their compartment.  They made sure that
+they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite,
+and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no
+other token of occupancy discernible.  They had said good-bye
+to the two ladies the previous evening, of course--it
+lingered in their minds as a rather perfunctory ceremony--but
+this had not prevented their hoping for another farewell
+glimpse of their friends.  No one came to wave a hand
+from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked
+somewhat dubiously at each other as the train moved. 
+Then intuitively they glanced toward their uncle--and
+perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes,
+and was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite. 
+
+"Fortunately, it is a clear day," said Julia.  "We shall
+see Mont Blanc."
+
+Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound
+in her own ears.  Neither her uncle nor her brother
+answered her. 
+
+
+At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which
+the young people had turned their farewell gaze in vain,
+Miss Madden sipped her coffee thoughtfully while she read
+a letter spread upon the table beside her. 
+
+"It's as they said," she observed.  "You are not allowed
+to drive in the mountains with your own horses and carriage. 
+That seems rather quaint for a model Republic--doesn't it?"
+
+"I daresay they're quite right," Lady Cressage
+replied, listlessly.  "It's in the interest of safety. 
+People who do not know the mountains would simply go and
+get killed in avalanches and hurricanes--and all that. 
+I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent."
+
+"And you're on the side of the Government," said the other,
+with a twinkle in her brown eyes.  "Truly now--you hated
+the whole idea of driving over the Simplon."
+
+Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent
+as she nodded. 
+
+"But do you like this Russian plan any better?"
+demanded Celia.  "I wish for once you would be absolutely
+candid and open with me--and let me know to the uttermost
+just what you think." "'For once'?" queried the other. 
+Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance
+of the quotation to be marked. 
+
+"Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,"
+Miss Madden declared.  She put on a smile to alleviate the
+force of her remarks.  "It is not you alone--Edith. Don't
+think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women. 
+You can't help it.  It's in your blood to keep things back. 
+I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready
+to believe, would be incapable of telling an untruth. 
+But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she
+would tell me the whole truth.  Don't you see this case
+in point," she pursued, with a little laugh, "I could
+not drag it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea,
+so long as there was a chance of our going.  Immediately we
+find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it."
+
+"But you wanted to go," objected Lady Cressage, quietly. 
+"That was the important thing.  What I wanted or did
+not want had nothing to do with the matter."
+
+Celia's face clouded momentarily.  "Those are not the
+kind of things I like to hear you say," she exclaimed,
+with a certain vigour.  "They put everything in quite
+a false light.  I am every whit as anxious that you should
+be pleased as that I should.  You know that well enough. 
+I've said it a thousand times--and have I ever done
+anything to disprove it? But I never can find out what
+you do want--what really will please you! You never
+will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank
+about the things I propose.  It's only by watching
+you out of the corner of my eye that I can ever guess
+whether anything is altogether to your liking or not."
+
+The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar
+to them both.  "That is only another way of saying
+what you discovered long ago," said Lady Cressage,
+passively--"that I am deficient in the enthusiasms.
+But originally you were of the opinion that you had
+enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would
+redress the balance, so to speak.  I thought it was a very
+logical opinion then, and, from my own point of view,
+I think so now.  But if it does not work in practice,
+at least the responsibility of defending it is not mine."
+
+"Delightful!" cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put
+down her cup again.  "You are the only woman I've ever
+known who was worth arguing with.  The mere operation
+makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford--or
+passing the final Jesuit examinations.  Heaven knows,
+I would get up arguments with you every day, for the pure
+enjoyment of the thing--if I weren't eternally afraid
+of saying something that would hurt your feelings,
+and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound
+in silence in the dark, and I should know that something
+was wrong, and have to watch you for weeks to make
+out what it was--and it would all be too unhappy. 
+But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. 
+You don't tell me things!"
+
+Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a
+wistful reserve.  "It is a constitutional defect--even national,
+according to you.  How shall I hope to change, at this
+late day? But what is it you want me to tell you?--I forget."
+
+"The Russian thing.  To go to Vienna, where we get
+our passports, and then to Cracow, and through to Kief,
+which they say is awfully well worth while--and next
+Moscow--and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see
+the ice break up.  It is only in winter that you see
+the characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. 
+With the furs and the sledges, and the three horses
+galloping over the snow--it seems to me it must be the
+best thing in Europe--if you can call Russia Europe. 
+That's the way it presents itself to me--but then I was
+brought up in a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort
+of thing--in its proper season.  It is different with you. 
+In England you don't know what a real winter is. 
+And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would
+like the Russian experiment."
+
+The other laughed gently.  "But if I don't know what a
+real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it
+or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go
+and find out.  Oh yes--truly--I should like very much to go."
+
+Miss Madden sighed briefly.  "All right," she said,
+but with a notable absence of conviction in her tone. 
+
+A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through
+another note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. 
+She pouted her lips over the contents of this missive,
+and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise, but as she
+laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion. 
+
+"It's from our young friend," she explained, genially--
+"the painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me
+of a promise he says I made--that when I came to London
+he should paint my portrait.  I don't think I promised
+anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail. 
+It's all my unfortunate hair.  They must have gone
+by this time--they were to go very early, weren't they?"
+
+Lady Cressage glanced at the clock.  "It was 8:40,
+I think--fully half an hour ago," she answered,
+with a painstaking effect of indifference. 
+
+"Curious conglomeration"--mused the other.  "The boy and
+girl are so civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. 
+I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries
+spoil the noble savage.  They ought to go away and leave
+him alone.  As a barbarian he was rather effective--but
+they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame
+monstrosity of him.  But I suppose it's inevitable. 
+Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set
+up as a gentleman.  We do it more simply in America. 
+One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to
+the next generation to put on the frills.  My father,
+for example, never altered in the slightest degree the
+habits he formed when he was a poor workman.  To the day
+of his death, blessed old man, he remained what he had
+always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly,
+and thrifty--a model peasant.  Nothing ever tempted him a
+hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred to walk in. 
+But such nobility of mind and temper with it all! He never
+dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path. 
+From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever
+putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible
+and generous.  I must have been an extremely trying daughter,
+but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he
+thought so.--But I never stop when I begin talking of
+my father."
+
+"It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him,"
+Lady Cressage put in.  "One knows so few people who feel
+that way about their fathers!"
+
+Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon
+something that had been left unsaid.  The sight of the
+young artist's note recalled her earlier subject. 
+"Of course there is a certain difference," she went on,
+carelessly,--"this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant,
+as the phrase goes.  He strikes one, sometimes, as having
+been educated."
+
+"Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me,"
+said the other, with interest.  "And his people were
+booksellers--somewhere in London--so that he got a good
+smattering of literature and all that.  He certainly has
+more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten
+of the nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. 
+And he can talk very well indeed--in a direct, practical sort
+of way.  I don't quite follow you about his niece and
+nephew spoiling him.  Of course one can see that they
+have had a great effect upon him.  He sees it himself--and
+he's very proud of it.  He told me so, quite frankly. 
+But why shouldn't it be a nice effect?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Celia replied, idly.  "It seemed to me
+that he was the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't
+to be shaved and polished and taught drawing-room tricks--I
+feel that merely in the interest of the fitness of things. 
+Have you looked into his eyes--I mean when they've got
+that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred
+thousand dead men in them."
+
+"I know the look you mean," said Lady Cressage,
+in a low voice. 
+
+"Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody,"
+pursued Miss Madden, with ostensible indifference, but fixing
+a glance of aroused attention upon her companion's face,
+"or that he has any criminal intentions whatever.  He behaves
+very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and nephew
+idolize him.  He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. 
+It may be that I'm altogether wrong about him--only I
+know I had the instinct of alarm when I caught that sort
+of dull glaze in his eye.  I met an African explorer
+a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories
+were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. 
+Perhaps it was this that put it into my head--but I have
+a feeling that this Thorpe is an exceptional sort of man,
+who would have the capacity in him for terrible things,
+if the necessity arose for them."
+
+"I see what you mean," the other repeated.  She toyed
+with the bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively
+watched their manipulation into squares and triangles
+as she went on.  "But may that not be merely the visible
+sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful character?
+And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances
+whether such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred
+thousand dead men, or enriches a hundred thousand lives
+instead? We agree, let us say, that this Mr. Thorpe
+impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality. 
+The question arises, How will he use his power? On that point,
+we look for evidence.  You see a dull glaze in his eye,
+and you draw hostile conclusions from it.  I reply that it
+may mean no more than that he is sleepy.  But, on the
+other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in his favour. 
+He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his
+family that we have seen--persons, moreover, who have been
+brought up in ways different to his own, and who would
+not start, therefore, with prejudices in his favour. 
+Beyond that, I know of two cases in which he has behaved,
+or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish
+generosity--and in neither case was there any claim upon
+him of a substantial nature.  He seems to me, in fact,
+quite too much disposed to share his fortune with Tom,
+Dick, and Harry--anybody who excites his sympathy or gets
+into his affections." Having said this much, Lady Cressage
+swept the crumbs aside and looked up.  "So now," she added,
+with a flushed smile, "since you love arguments so much,
+how do you answer that?"
+
+Celia smiled back.  "Oh, I don't answer it at all," she said,
+and her voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. 
+"Your proofs overwhelm me.  I know nothing of him--and you
+know so much!"
+
+Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel
+earnestness and directness of gaze.  "I had a long,
+long talk with him--the afternoon we came down from Glion."
+
+Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. 
+She did not return to the table, but after a brief pause
+came and took an easy-chair beside her friend, who turned
+to face her.  "My dear Edith," she said, with gravity,
+"I think you want to tell me about that talk--and so I
+beg you to do so.  But if I'm mistaken--why then I beg
+you to do nothing of the kind."
+
+The other threw out her hands with a gesture of
+wearied impatience, and then clasped them upon her knee. 
+"I seem not to know what I want! What is the good
+of talking about it? What is the good of anything?"
+
+"Now--now!" Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone
+had reference, apparently, to something understood
+between the two, for Lady Cressage deferred to it,
+and even summoned the ghost of a smile. 
+
+"There is really nothing to tell, "she faltered, hesitatingly--"
+that is, nothing happened.  I don't know how to say it--the
+talk left my mind in a whirl.  I couldn't tell you why. 
+It was no particular thing that was said--it seemed to be
+more the things that I thought of while something else was
+being talked about--but the whole experience made a most
+tremendous impression upon me.  I've tried to straighten
+it out in my own mind, but I can make nothing of it. 
+That is what disturbs me, Celia.  No man has ever confused me
+in this silly fashion before.  Nothing could be more idiotic. 
+I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people
+of--well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,--but
+this man, who is of hardly any intellectual rank at all,
+and who rambled on without any special aim that one
+could see--he reduced my brain to a sort of porridge. 
+I said the most extraordinary things to him--babbling
+rubbish which a school-girl would be ashamed of. 
+How is that to be accounted for? I try to reason it out,
+but I can't. Can you?"
+
+"Nerves," said Miss Madden, judicially. 
+
+"Oh, that is meaningless," the other declared. 
+"Anybody can say 'nerves.' Of course, all human thought
+and action is 'nerves.'"
+
+"But yours is a special case of nerves," Celia pursued,
+with gentle imperturbability.  "I think I can make my meaning
+clear to you--though the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. 
+The finest thoroughbred dog in the world, if it is beaten
+viciously and cowed in its youth, will always have a latent
+taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity--call it
+what you like.  Well, it seems to me there's something
+like that in your case, Edith.  They hurt you too cruelly,
+poor girl.  I won't say it broke your nerve--but it made
+a flaw in it.  Just as a soldier's old wound aches when
+there's a storm in the air--so your old hurt distracts
+and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. 
+It's a rather clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain."
+
+"Perhaps--I don't know," Edith replied, in a tone
+of melancholy reverie.  "It makes a very poor creature
+out of me, whatever it is."
+
+"I rather lose patience, Edith," her companion
+admonished her, gravely.  "Nobody has a right
+to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself to be."
+
+"But I'm not a coward," the other protested. 
+"I could be as brave as anybody--as brave as you are--if
+a chance were given me.  But of what use is bravery
+against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it. 
+I only wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down,
+or break through it.--Oh yes, I know what you say! You say
+there is no wall--that it is all an illusion of mine. 
+But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view. 
+I've battered myself against it too long--too sorely, Celia!"
+
+Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment.  "Oh, we women
+all have our walls--our limitations--if it comes to that,"
+she said, with a kind of compassionate impatience in her tone. 
+"We are all ridiculous together--from the point of view
+of human liberty.  The free woman is a fraud--a myth. 
+She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. 
+I used to have the most wonderful visions of what independence
+would mean.  I thought that when I was absolutely my
+own master, with my money and my courage and my free mind,
+I would do things to astonish all mankind.  But really
+the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a
+German waiter.  Even that palls on one after a time. 
+And if you were independent, Edith--if you had any amount
+of money--what difference do you think it would make to you?
+What could you do that you don't do, or couldn't do, now?"
+
+"Ah, now"--said the other, looking up with a thin
+smile--"now is an interval--an oasis."
+
+Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face,
+habitually serene in its expression, lost something in
+composure as she regarded her companion.  "I don't know
+why you should say that," she observed, gently enough,
+but with an effect of reproof in her tone.  "I have
+never put limits to the connection, in my own mind--and
+it hadn't occurred to me that you were doing so in yours."
+
+"But I'm not," interposed Lady Cressage. 
+
+"Then I understand you less than ever.  Why do you
+talk about an 'interval'? What was the other word?--
+'oasis'--as if this were a brief halt for refreshments and
+a breathing-spell, and that presently you must wander forth
+into the desert again.  That suggestion is none of mine. 
+We agreed that we would live together--'pool our issues,'
+as they say in America.  I wanted a companion; so did you. 
+I have never for an instant regretted the arrangement. 
+Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I have regretted. 
+You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen,
+and you were talented, and you seemed to like me--and I
+promised myself that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit
+to your other gifts--and in that I have failed wofully. 
+You're not happy.  I see that only too clearly."
+
+"I know--I'm a weariness and a bore to you," broke in
+the other, despondingly. 
+
+"That is precisely what you're not," Celia went on. 
+"We mustn't use words of that sort.  They don't describe
+anything in our life at all.  But I should be better
+pleased with myself if I could really put my finger
+on what it is that is worrying you.  Even if we decided
+to break up our establishment, I have told you that you
+should not go back to what you regard as poverty. 
+Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy. 
+As I say, I think you attach more importance to money
+than those who have tested its powers would agree to--but
+that's neither here nor there.  You did not get on well on
+600 pounds a year--and that is enough.  You shall never
+have less than twice that amount, whether we keep together
+or not--and if it ought to be three times the amount,
+that doesn't matter. 
+
+"You don't seem to realize, Edith"--she spoke with
+increased animation--"that you are my caprice.  You are
+the possession that I am proudest of and fondest of. 
+There is nothing else that appeals to me a hundredth
+part as much as you do.  Since I became independent,
+the one real satisfaction I have had is in being able
+to do things for you--to have you with me, and make
+you share in the best that the world can offer. 
+And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see
+I don't know what to do."
+
+"Oh, I know--I behave very badly!" Lady Cressage had risen,
+and with visible agitation began now to pace the room. 
+"I deserve to be thrown into the lake--I know it
+well enough! But Celia--truly--I'm as incapable
+of understanding it as you are.  It must be that I am
+possessed by devils--like the people in the New Testament. 
+Perhaps someone will come along who can cast them out. 
+I don't seem able to do it myself.  I can't rule myself
+at all.  It needs a strength I haven't got!"
+
+"Ah!" said Celia, thoughtfully.  The excited sentences
+which Edith threw over her shoulder as she walked appeared,
+upon examination, to contain a suggestion. 
+
+"My dear child, "she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence,
+"do you want to marry?"
+
+Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged
+a long steadfast glance with her friend.  Then she
+came slowly forward.  "Ah, that is what I don't know,"
+she answered.  Apparently the reply was candid. 
+
+Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little
+in thought.  Then, at some passing reflection,
+she smiled in a puzzled fashion.  At last she also rose,
+and went to the mantel for another cigarette.  "Now I
+am going to talk plainly," she said, with decision. 
+"Since the subject is mentioned, less harm will be done
+by speaking out than by keeping still.  There is a debate
+in your mind on the matter, isn't there?"
+
+The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more,
+stood at the window and with bowed head looked down at
+the lake.  "Yes--I suppose it might be called that,"
+she replied, in a low voice. 
+
+"And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would
+rather not?" Celia, after an instant's pause, went on
+without waiting for an answer.  "I beg that you won't
+assume my hostility to the idea, Edith.  In fact,
+I'm not sure I don't think it would be the best thing
+for you to do.  Marriage, a home, children--these are great
+things to a woman.  We can say that she pays the price
+of bondage for them--but to know what that signifies,
+we must ask what her freedom has been worth to her."
+
+"Yes," interposed the other, from the window.  "What have
+I done with my freedom that has been worth while?"
+
+"Not much," murmured Celia, under her breath. 
+She moved forward, and stood beside Edith, with an arm
+round her waist.  They looked together at the lake. 
+
+"It is Lord Plowden, is it not?" asked the American,
+as the silence grew constrained. 
+
+Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over
+her reply.  "No," she said at last.  Upon reflection,
+and with a dim smile flickering in her side-long glance
+at Celia, she added, "He wants to marry you, you know."
+
+"Leave that out of consideration," said Celia, composedly.
+"He has never said so.  I think it was more his mother's
+idea than his, if it existed at all.  Of course I am
+not marrying him, or anybody else.  But I saw at Hadlow
+that you and he were--what shall I say?--old friends."
+
+"He must marry money," the other replied.  In an unexpected
+burst of candour she went on: "He would have asked me to
+marry him if I had had money.  There is no harm in telling
+you that.  It was quite understood--oh, two years ago. 
+And I think I wished I had the money--then."
+
+"And you don't wish it now?"
+
+A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served
+for answer.  After a little, she spoke in a musing tone:
+"He is going to have money of his own, very soon, but I
+don't think it would attract me now.  I like him personally,
+of course, but--there is no career, no ambition, no future."
+
+"A Viscount has future enough behind him," observed Celia. 
+
+"It doesn't attract me," the other repeated, vaguely. 
+"He is handsome, and clever, and kind and all that--but he
+would never appeal to any of the great emotions--nor be
+capable of them himself He is too smooth, too well-balanced,
+too much the gentleman.  That expresses it badly--but
+do you see what I mean?"
+
+Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her,
+in a steady, comprehending look. 
+
+"Yes, I think I see what you mean," she said,
+with significance in her tone. 
+
+Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her
+companion's arm.  "But I don't know myself what I mean!"
+she exclaimed, despairingly, as she moved away.  "I don't
+know!--I don't know!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised
+if not exhilarated by a visit from her two children
+in the little book-shop.
+
+"It's the last day in the world that I should have
+thought you'd 'a' come out on," she told them,
+in salutation--and for comment they all glanced along
+the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. 
+A gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain
+slanting through the discredited remnants of a fog,
+which the east wind had broken up, but could not drive away,
+and with only now and again a passer-by moving across
+the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward
+with chin buried in turned-up collar.  In the doorway
+outside the sulky boy stamped his feet and slapped his
+sides with his arms in pantomimic mutiny against the task
+of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers, which nobody
+would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift. 
+
+"I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books
+and go home," she said, as their vague gaze was attracted
+by his gestures.  "But it isn't three yet--it seems ridiculous
+to close up.  Still, if you'd be more comfortable upstairs"
+
+"Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us,
+"protested Julia.  She strove to make her tone cheerful,
+but its effect of rebuke was unmistakable. 
+
+The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly
+at her daughter.  The pallid flicker of the gas-jet
+overhead made her long, listless face seem more devoid
+of colour than ever. 
+
+"But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?"
+she observed, coldly.  "You've been back in town ten days
+and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes upon either of you. 
+But don't you want to sit down? You can put those parcels
+on the floor anywhere.  Or shall I do it for you?"
+
+Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against
+a heap of old magazines tied in bundles.  He sprang
+up now and cleared the chair, but his sister declined
+it with a gesture.  Her small figure had straightened
+itself into a kind of haughty rigidity. 
+
+"There has been so much to do, mamma," she explained,
+in a clear, cool voice.  "We have had hundreds of things
+to buy and to arrange about.  All the responsibility for the
+housekeeping rests upon me--and Alfred has his studio to do. 
+But of course we should have looked in upon you sooner--and
+much oftener--if we had thought you wanted us.  But really,
+when we came to you, the very day after our return,
+it was impossible for us to pretend that you were glad
+to see us."
+
+"Oh, I was glad enough," Mrs. Dabney made answer,
+mechanically.  "Why shouldn't I be glad? And why should
+you think I wasn't glad? Did you expect me to shout and dance?"
+
+"But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square,"
+Alfred reminded her.
+
+"That's different," she declared.  "What would I be doing
+in Ovington Square? It's all right for you to be there. 
+I hope you'll be happy there.  But it wouldn't add anything
+to your happiness to have me there; it would be quite
+the other way about.  I know that, if you DON'T. This is
+my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!"
+
+Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn
+maternal countenance, hardened beyond their wont. 
+"You talk as if there had been some class war declared,
+"she said, with obvious annoyance.  "You know that Uncle
+Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice
+to you as he is to us."
+
+"Uncle Stormont!" Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words
+was surcharged with hostile sarcasm.  "But his name
+was Stormont as much as it was Joel, "broke in Alfred,
+from his dark corner.  "He has a perfect right to use
+the one he likes best."
+
+"Oh, I don't dispute his right," she replied,
+once more in her passionless monotone.  "Everybody can
+call themselves whatever they please.  It's no affair
+of mine.  You and your sister spell your father's
+name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered,
+did I? You have your own ideas and your own tastes. 
+They are quite beyond me--but they're all right for you. 
+I don't criticize them at all.  What I say is that it
+is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets
+full of money to enable you to make the most of them. 
+If I were religious I should call that providential."
+
+"And that's what we DO call it," put in Julia, with vivacity. 
+"And why should you shut your doors against this Providence,
+mamma? Just think of it! We don't insist upon your coming
+to live at Ovington Square at all.  Probably, as you say,
+you would be happier by yourself--at least for the present. 
+But when Uncle St--when uncle says there's more than
+enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you
+to let him do things for you--why, he's your own brother!
+It's as if I should refuse to allow Alfred to do things
+for me."
+
+"That you never did," interposed the young man, gayly. 
+"I'll say that for you, Jule."
+
+"And never will," she assured him, with cheerful decision. 
+"But no--mamma--can't you see what we mean? We have done
+what you wanted us to do.  You sent us both to much
+better schools than you could afford, from the time
+we were of no age at all--and when uncle's money came
+you sent us to Cheltenham.  We did you no discredit. 
+We worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. 
+We came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose
+that you would be--I won't say proud, but at least well
+satisfied with us--and then it turned out that you didn't
+like us at all."
+
+"I never said anything of the sort," the mother declared,
+with a touch of animation. 
+
+"Oh no--you never said it," Julia admitted, "but what else
+can we think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go
+abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready,
+and having new frocks made and all that--and I never hear
+a suggestion that you don't want me to go----"
+
+"But I did want you to go," Mrs. Dabney affirmed. 
+
+"Well, then, when I come back--when we come back,
+and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has
+made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished
+house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you won't
+even come and look at the house!"
+
+"But I don't want to see it," the mother retorted; obstinately. 
+
+"Well, then, you needn't!" said Alfred, rising. 
+"Nobody will ask you again." "Oh yes they will,"
+urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. 
+All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate
+between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. 
+From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow,
+that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by
+comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic:
+and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full
+of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. 
+In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered
+with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind
+of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and
+justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper. 
+That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody,
+suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody,
+vehemently demanded his own will of everybody--and it was
+all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe. 
+
+After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best
+of Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively
+peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead,
+yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation
+running through the household.  Julia and her father--a small,
+hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale,
+anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered
+the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law,
+and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories--Julia
+and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable
+line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons,
+who would not expect to have their own way. 
+
+Alfred and his mother were Thorpes--that is to say,
+people who necessarily had their own way.  Their domination
+was stained by none of the excesses which had rendered the
+grandfather intolerable.  Their surface temper was in truth
+almost sluggishly pacific.  Underneath, however, ugly currents
+and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential
+existence--and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see
+that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. 
+Worse even than these possibilities of violence, however,
+so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain
+of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. 
+A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument,
+immovable under the most sympathetic pressure,
+which particularly tried the Dabney patience. 
+It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing
+influence between these jarring forces, that she
+had spent whole years of her life in personal
+interventions of this sort.
+
+"Oh yes they will," she repeated, and warned her brother
+into the background with a gesture half-pleading
+half-peremptory. "We are your children, and we're
+not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure
+that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see
+that it would be absurd to let anything come between you and us."
+
+"How could I help letting it come?" demanded the mother,
+listlessly argumentative.  "You had outgrown me and my
+ways altogether.  It was nonsense to suppose that you would
+have been satisfied to come back and live here again,
+over the shop.  I couldn't think for the life of me what I
+was going to do with you.  But now your uncle has taken
+all that into his own hands.  He can give you the kind
+of home that goes with your education and your ideas--and
+what more do you want? Why should you come bothering me?"
+
+"How unjust you are, mamma!" cried Julia, with a glaze
+of tears upon her bright glance.
+
+The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly
+straightening herself, looked down upon her daughter. 
+Her long plain face, habitually grave in expression,
+conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the fingers
+of the large, capable hands she clasped before her
+writhed restlessly against one another, and there
+was a husky-threat of collapse in her voice as she spoke:
+
+"If you ever have children of your own," she said,
+"and you slave your life out to bring them up so that
+they'll think themselves your betters, and they act
+accordingly--then you'll understand.  But you don't understand
+now--and there's no good our talking any more about it. 
+Come in whenever it's convenient--and you feel like it. 
+I must go back to my books now."
+
+She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book
+upon the blotter.  Her children, surveying her blankly,
+found speech difficult.  With some murmured words,
+after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss
+upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
+
+Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off
+Strandward beneath it.  She continued to look for a long time,
+in an aimless, ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed
+by the window and the glass of the door.  The premature
+night was closing in miserably, with increasing rain,
+and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner. 
+At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted
+another gas-jet, and striding to the door, rapped sharply
+on the glass. 
+
+"Bring everything in!" she called to the boy, and helped
+out his apprehension by a comprehensive gesture. 
+
+Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two
+narrow outlets from the shop in front was satisfactorily
+blocked with the wares from without, and all the floor
+about reeked with the grimy drippings of the oilskins,
+Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear. 
+
+"I think you may go home now," she said to him, with the
+laconic abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. 
+"You have a home, haven't you?"
+
+Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people
+had made about him and his belongings, as a preliminary
+to his getting this job, he could not but be surprised at
+the mistress's question.  In confusion he nodded assent,
+and jerked his finger toward his cap. 
+
+"Got a mother?" she pursued.  Again he nodded,
+with augmented confidence. 
+
+"And do you think yourself better than she is?"
+
+The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up
+in anxious perplexity over this strange query.  Then it
+cleared as he thought he grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he
+lifted to her gleamed with the fell acuteness of the Dials. 
+"I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't," he answered, in swift,
+rasping accents.  "She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's
+a fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave--" "Go home!"
+she bade him, peremptorily--and frowned after him as he
+ducked and scuttled from the shop. 
+
+Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-
+book--the wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank
+in its history--but loitered about in the waning light among
+the shelves near the desk, altering the position of books
+here and there, and glancing cursorily through others. 
+Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon
+the rain-soaked street.  A tradesman's assistant, opposite,
+was rolling the iron shutters down for the night. 
+If business in hats was over for the day, how much
+more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted
+with shutters--for what reason she could not guess. 
+The opened pages of numerous volumes were displayed close
+against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane
+to get at them.  Apparently literature raised no desires
+in the criminal breast.  To close the shop there was nothing
+to do but lock and bolt the door and turn out the lights. 
+At last, as the conviction of nightfall forced itself
+upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent
+to put her hand to the key.  Then, with a little start
+of surprise, she stood erect.  Someone was shutting
+an umbrella in the doorway, preparatory to entering the shop. 
+
+It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with
+a glowing face, who pushed his way in, and confronted
+her with a broad grin.  There was such a masterful air
+about him, that when he jovially threw an arm round her
+gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder,
+she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission. 
+
+Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind
+of emergency.  "Do mind what you're about!" she told him,
+flushing not unpleasurably. 
+
+"Shut up the place!" he answered, with lordly geniality. 
+"I've walked all the way from the City in the rain. 
+I wanted the exertion--I couldn't have sat in a cab. 
+Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk. 
+God! What things I've got to tell you!"
+
+"There isn't any fire down here," she said, apologetically,
+as they edged their way through the restricted alley
+to the rear.  "The old fireplace took up too much room.
+Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I have an oil-stove in.
+Usually the gas warms it enough.  You don't find it too
+cold--do you?--with your coat on? Or would you rather
+come upstairs?"
+
+"Never mind the cold," he replied, throwing a leg
+over the stool before the desk.  "I can't stay more
+'n a minute or two.  What do you think we've done today?"
+
+Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look
+so well as he did now, sprawling triumphantly upon
+the stool under the yellow gas-light. His strong,
+heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace. 
+It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. 
+He looked up at her with a clear, bold eye, in which,
+despite its gloss of good-humour, she discerned a new authority. 
+
+The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from
+the countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic,
+heavy expression which had been their complement. 
+He was all vigour, readiness, confidence, now.  She deemed
+him almost handsome, this curious, changeable brother
+of hers, as he beat with his fist in a measured way
+upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened
+his commanding gaze upon her.
+
+"We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day,"
+he went on.  "This is the twenty-eighth of February. 
+A fortnight ago today was the first settlement. 
+I wasn't here, but Semple was--and the working of it
+is all in his hands.  He kept as still as a mouse that
+first day.  They had to deliver to us 26,000 shares,
+and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make any fuss. 
+The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they
+were caught in a trap.  We didn't even put the price up
+to par.  They had to come to Semple, and say there didn't
+seem to be any shares obtainable just at the moment,
+and what would he carry them over at? That means,
+to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. 
+He was as smooth as sweet-oil with them, and agreed
+to carry them over till today without any charge at all. 
+But today it was a little different.  The price was up
+ten shillings above par.  That is to say, Semple arranged
+with a jobber, on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty
+shillings for our one-pound shares.  That offer fixed
+the making-up price.  So then, when they were still
+without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again,
+they had to pay ten shillings' difference on each of
+twenty-six thousand shares, plus the difference between par
+and the prices they'd sold at.  That makes within a few
+hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's haul. 
+D'ye see?"
+
+She nodded at him, expressively.  Through previous talks
+she had really obtained an insight into the operation,
+and it interested her more than she would have cared
+to confess. 
+
+"Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets,"
+he proceeded with a steady glow in his eyes.  "A fortnight hence,
+that is March 14th, we ring the bell on them again, and they
+march up to the captain's office and settle a second time. 
+Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber makes the price for
+Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have to pay
+us in differences.  It is for us to say what that price
+shall be.  We'll decide on that when the time comes. 
+We most probably will just put it up another ten shillings,
+and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds.  It's best
+in the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small
+rises like that, in order not to frighten anybody. 
+So Semple says, at any rate."
+
+"But why not frighten them?" Louisa asked.  "I thought
+you wanted to frighten them.  You were full of that idea
+a while ago."
+
+He smiled genially.  "I've learned some new wrinkles
+since then.  We'll frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're
+through with them.  But at the start we just go easy. 
+If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there would be
+a dead scare among the jobbers.  They'd be afraid to sell
+or name a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares
+in hand.  And there are other ways in which that would
+be a nuisance.  Presently, of course, we shall liberate
+some few shares, so that there may be some actual dealings. 
+Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went
+to the general public will come into the market too. 
+But of course you see that all such shares will simply
+go through one operation before they come back to us. 
+Some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will snap
+them up and bring them straight to Semple, to get free from
+the fortnightly tax we are levying on them.  In that way
+we shall eventually let out say half of these fourteen
+'shorts,' or perhaps more than half."
+
+"What do you want to do that for?" The sister's grey eyes
+had caught a metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. 
+"Why let anybody out? Why can't you go on taking their
+money for ever?"
+
+Thorpe nodded complacently.  "Yes--that's what I asked too. 
+It seemed to me the most natural thing, when you'd got
+'em in the vise, to keep them there.  But when you come
+to reflect--you can't get more out of a man than there
+is in him.  If you press him too hard, he can always go
+bankrupt--and then he's out of your reach altogether,
+and you lose everything that you counted on making
+out of him.  So, after a certain point, each one of the
+fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt with on
+a different footing.  We shall have to watch them all,
+and study their resources, as tipsters watch horses
+in the paddock. 
+
+"You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred
+thousand pounds better than others could lose ten thousand. 
+All that we have to know.  We can take it as a principle
+that none of them will go bankrupt and lose his place
+on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. 
+Well, our business is to learn how far each fellow is
+from the wall to start with.  Then we keep track of him,
+one turn of the screw after another, till we see he's
+got just enough left to buy himself out.  Then we'll let
+him out.  See?"
+
+"It's cruel, isn't it?" she commented, calmly meditative,
+after a little pause. 
+
+"Everything in the City is cruel," he assured her with
+a light tone.  "All speculative business is cruel. 
+Take our case, for example.  I estimate in a rough way
+that these fourteen men will have to pay over to us,
+in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand
+pounds--maybe eight hundred.  Well, now, not one of those
+fellows ever earned a single sovereign of that money. 
+They've taken the whole of it from others, and these others
+took it from others still, and so on almost indefinitely. 
+There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been through
+twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man
+who had done some honest work for it parted company with it. 
+Well--money like that belongs to those who are in possession
+of it, only so long as they are strong enough to hold on
+to it.  When someone stronger still comes along, he takes
+it away from them.  They don't complain: they don't cry
+and say it's cruel.  They know it's the rule of the game. 
+They accept it--and begin at once looking out for a new
+set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on. 
+That's the way the City goes."
+
+Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with
+ruminative slowness.  As he lapsed into silence now, he fell
+to studying his own hands on the desk-top before him.
+He stretched out the fingers, curved them in different degrees,
+then closed them tight and turned the bulky hard-looking
+fists round for inspection in varying aspects. 
+
+"That's the kind of hand," he began again, thoughtfully,
+"that breaks the Jew in the long run, if there's only
+grit enough behind it.  I used to watch those Jews'
+hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining them. 
+They're all thin and wiry and full of veins.  Their fingers
+are never still; they twist round and keep stirring
+like a lobster's feelers.  But there aint any real
+strength in 'em. They get hold of most of the things
+that are going, because they're eternally on the move. 
+It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them
+such a pull, and makes most people afraid of them. 
+But when a hand like that takes them by the throat"--he
+held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick uncouth
+fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful
+muscular tension--"when THAT tightens round their neck,
+and they feel that the grip means business--my God!
+what good are they?"
+
+He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm
+on the desk with a noise which made his sister start. 
+Apparently the diversion recalled something to her mind. 
+
+"There was a man in here asking about you today,"
+she remarked, in a casual fashion.  "Said he was an old
+friend of yours."
+
+"Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now," he observed
+with beaming indifference.  "I'm already getting heaps
+of invitations to dinners and dances and all that. 
+One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some
+salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. 
+I told him I couldn't come, but he put my name down
+all the same.  Says his wife will write to remind me. 
+Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze
+really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap
+they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort
+on me.  He says the social pressure they can command,
+for a game of this kind, is something tremendous.
+But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth,
+d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go
+yachting with nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home
+in Ovington Square--that'll be good enough for me. 
+By the way--you haven't been out to see us yet. 
+We're all settled now.  You must come at once--why not
+with me, now?"
+
+Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion.  She had been
+rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk,
+and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search
+about for something inside. 
+
+"He left a card for you," she said, as she groped among
+the desk's contents.  "I don't know what I did with it. 
+He wrote something on it."
+
+"Oh, damn him, and his card too," Thorpe protested easily. 
+"I don't want to see either of them."
+
+"He said he knew you in Mexico.  He said you'd had
+dealings together.  He seemed to act as if you'd want
+to see him--but I didn't know.  I didn't tell him your address."
+
+Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without
+much interest, but the sum of their message appeared
+suddenly to catch his attention.  He sat upright,
+and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply
+up at his sister. 
+
+"What was his name?" he asked with abruptness. 
+
+"I don't in the least remember," she made answer, holding the
+desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search. 
+"He was a little man, five-and-fifty, I should think. 
+He had long grey hair--a kind of Quaker-looking man. 
+He said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered
+your telling him your people were booksellers.  He only
+got back here in England yesterday or the day before. 
+He said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you
+left Mexico.  He didn't even know whether you were in England
+or not!"
+
+Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at
+a set of green-bound cheap British poets just at one
+side of his sister's head.  "You must find that card!"
+he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice. 
+"I know the name well enough, but I want to see what
+he's written.  Was it his address, do you remember? The
+name itself was Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it
+a woman never knows where she's put anything? Even Julia
+spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or
+something of that sort, every day of her life! They've got
+nothing in the world to do except know where things are,
+right under their nose, and yet that's just what they
+don't know at all!"
+
+"Oh, I have a good few other things to do," she reminded him,
+as she fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. 
+"I can put my hand on any one of four thousand books
+in stock," she mildly boasted over her shoulder,
+"and that's something you never learned to do.  And I can
+tell if a single book is missing--and I wouldn't trust
+any shopman I ever knew to do that."
+
+"Oh of course, you're an exception," he admitted,
+under a sense of justice.  "But I wish you'd find the card."
+
+"I know where it is," she suddenly announced,
+and forthwith closed the desk.  Moving off into the
+remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she returned
+to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. 
+"I'd stuck it in the little mirror over the washstand,"
+she explained. 
+
+He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to
+examine it under the gas-light. "Where is Montague Street?"
+he asked, with rough directness. 
+
+"In Bloomsbury--alongside the Museum.  That's one Montague
+Street--I don't know how many others there may be."
+
+Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning
+his coat.  "Yes--Bloomsbury," he said hurriedly.
+"That would be his form.  And you say he knew nothing
+about my movements or whereabouts--nothing about
+the Company, eh?" He looked at his watch as he spoke. 
+Evidently the presence of this stranger had excited him
+a good deal. 
+
+"No," she assured him, reflectively; "no, I'm sure he
+didn't. From what he said, he doesn't know his way about
+London very well, or anywhere else, for that matter,
+I should say."
+
+Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a
+meaning look.  "No--he's a shade off in the upper story,"
+he told her in a confidential tone.  "Still, it's important
+that I should see him,"--and with only a hasty hand-shake
+he bustled out of the shop. 
+
+By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him
+on the pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling
+with his umbrella for a cab. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+We've got a spare room here, haven't we?" Thorpe asked his niece,
+when she came out to greet him in the hall of their new
+home in Ovington Square.  He spoke with palpable eagerness
+before even unbuttoning his damp great-coat, or putting
+off his hat.  "I mean it's all in working order ready for use?"
+
+"Why yes, uncle," Julia answered, after a moment's thought. 
+"Is someone coming?"
+
+"I think so," he replied, with a grunt of relief. 
+He seemed increasingly pleased with the project he
+had in mind, as she helped him off with his things. 
+The smile he gave her, when she playfully took his arm
+to lead him into the adjoining library, was clearly but a
+part of the satisfied grin with which he was considering
+some development in his own affairs.
+
+He got into his slippers and into the easy-chair before
+the bright fire and lit a cigar with a contented air. 
+
+"Well, my little girl?" he said, with genial inconsequence,
+and smiled again at her, where she stood beside the mantel. 
+
+"It will be such a lark to play the hostess to a stranger!"
+she exclaimed.  "When is he coming?--I suppose it is a
+'he,'" she added, less buoyantly. 
+
+"Oh--that fellow," Thorpe said, as if he had been thinking
+of something else.  "Well--I can't tell just when he will
+turn up.  I only learned he was in town--or in England--a
+couple of hours ago.  I haven't seen him yet at all. 
+I drove round to his lodgings, near the British Museum,
+but he wasn't there.  He only comes there to sleep,
+but they told me he turned in early--by nine o'clock or so. 
+Then I went round to a hotel and wrote a note for him,
+and took it back to his lodgings, and left it for him. 
+I told him to pack up his things as soon as he got it,
+and drive here, and make this his home--for the time being
+at least."
+
+"Then it's some old friend of yours?" said the girl. 
+"I know I shall like him."
+
+Thorpe laughed somewhat uneasily.  "Well--yes--he's a kind
+of a friend of mine," he said, with a note of hesitation
+in his voice.  "I don't know, though, that you'll think
+much of him.  He aint what you'd call a ladies' man."
+
+He laughed again at some thought the words conjured up. 
+"He's a curious, simple old party, who'd just like a
+comfortable corner somewhere by himself, and wouldn't expect
+to be talked to or entertained at all.  If he does come,
+he'll keep to himself pretty well.  He wouldn't be any
+company for you.  I mean,--for you or Alfred either. 
+I think he's a Canadian or West Indian,--British subject,
+at all events,--but he's lived all his life in the West,
+and he wouldn't know what to do in a drawing-room,
+or that sort of thing.  You'd better just not pay any
+attention to him.  Pass the time of day, of course,
+but that's all."
+
+Julia's alert, small-featured face expressed some vague
+disappointment at what she heard, but her words were
+cheerful enough.  "Oh of course--whatever he likes best,"
+she said.  "I will tell Potter to make everything ready. 
+I suppose there's no chance of his being here in time
+for dinner?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head, and then lifted his brows
+over some new perplexity.  "I guess he'd want to eat
+his meals out, anyway," he said, after some thought. 
+"I don't seem to remember much about him in that respect--
+of course, everything was so different in camp out in
+Mexico--but I daresay he wouldn't be much of an ornament
+at the table.  However, that'll be all right.  He's as easy
+to manage as a rabbit.  If I told him to eat on the roof,
+he'd do it without a murmur.  You see it's this way,
+Julia: he's a scientific man--a kind of geologist,
+and mining expert and rubber expert--and chemical expert
+and all sort of things.  I suppose he must have gone
+through college--very likely he'll turn out to have
+better manners than I was giving him credit for. 
+I've only seen him in the rough, so to speak.  We weren't
+at all intimate then,--but we had dealings together,
+and there are certain important reasons why I should keep
+close in touch with him while he's here in London. 
+But I'll try and do that without letting you be bothered."
+"What an idea!" cried Julia.  "As if that wasn't what we
+had the house for--to see the people you want to see."
+
+Her uncle smiled rather ruefully, and looked in a rather
+dubious way at his cigar.  "Between you and me and the
+lamp-post, Jule," he said, with a slow, whimsical drawl,
+"there isn't a fellow in the world that I wanted to see
+less than I did him.  But since he's here--why, we've got
+to make the best of it."
+
+After dinner, Thorpe suffered the youngsters to go
+up to the drawing-room in the tacit understanding
+that he should probably not see them again that night.
+He betook himself then once more to the library, as it was
+called--the little, cozy, dark-panelled room off the hall,
+where the owner of the house had left two locked bookcases,
+and where Thorpe himself had installed a writing-desk
+and a diminutive safe for his papers.  The chief purpose
+of the small apartment, however, was indicated by the
+two big, round, low-seated easy-chairs before the hearth,
+and by the cigar boxes and spirit-stand and tumblers
+visible behind the glass of the cabinet against the wall. 
+Thorpe himself called the room his "snuggery," and spent
+many hours there in slippered comfort, smoking and gazing
+contentedly into the fire.  Sometimes Julia read to him,
+as he sat thus at his ease, but then he almost invariably
+went to sleep. 
+
+Now, when he had poured out some whiskey and water and lit
+a cigar, the lounging chairs somehow did not attract him. 
+He moved about aimlessly in the circumscribed space,
+his hands in his pockets, his burly shoulders rounded,
+his face dulled and heavy as with a depression of doubt. 
+The sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to
+his ears.  Often he ascended to the drawing-room to hear
+Julia play--and more often still, with all the doors open,
+he enjoyed the mellowed murmur of her music here at his ease
+in the big chair.  But tonight he had no joy in the noise. 
+more than once, as he slouched restlessly round the room,
+the notion of asking her to stop suggested itself,
+but he forbore to put it into action.  Once he busied
+himself for a time in kneeling before his safe,
+and scrutinizing in detail the papers in one of the bundles
+it contained. 
+
+At last--it was after ten o'clock, and the music above had
+ceased--the welcome sounds of cab-wheels without, and then
+of the door-bell, came to dispel his fidgeting suspense. 
+On the instant he straightened himself, and his face
+rearranged its expression.  He fastened upon the door
+of the room the controlled, calm glance of one who is
+easily confident about what is to happen. 
+
+"Quaker-looking" was not an inapt phrase for the person
+whom the maid ushered into the room through this door.
+He was a small, thin, elderly man, bowed of figure and
+shuffling in gait.  His coat and large, low-crowned hat,
+though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an indefinable sense
+of some theological standard, or pretence to such a standard. 
+His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet
+meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly
+overtaxed by the effort to discern anything clearly,
+might have belonged to any old village priest grown
+childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books. 
+Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose
+were not altogether unclerical in their suggestion. 
+A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the
+electric light of the strange, warm apartment--a helpless,
+worn old creature, inured through long years to bleak
+adverse winds, hoping now for nothing better in this world
+than present shelter. 
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Thorpe," he said, after a moment,
+with nervous formality.  "This is unexpectedly kind
+of you, sir."
+
+"Why--not at all!" said Thorpe, shaking him cordially
+by the hand.  "What have we got houses for, but to put up
+our old friends? And how are you, anyway? You've brought
+your belongings, have you? That's right!" He glanced into
+the hall, to make sure that they were being taken upstairs,
+and then closed the door.  "I suppose you've dined. 
+Take off your hat and coat! Make yourself at home. 
+That's it--take the big chair, there--so! And now let's
+have a look at you.  Well, Tavender, my man, you haven't
+grown any younger.  But I suppose none of us do. 
+And what'll you have to drink? I take plain water in mine,
+but there's soda if you prefer it.  And which shall it
+be--Irish or Scotch?"
+
+Mr. Tavender's countenance revealed the extremity of his
+surprise and confusion at the warmth of this welcome. 
+It apparently awed him as well, for though he shrank into
+a corner of the huge chair, he painstakingly abstained from
+resting his head against its back.  Uncovered, this head
+gained a certain dignity of effect from the fashion
+in which the thin, iron-grey hair, parted in the middle,
+fell away from the full, intellectual temples, and curled
+in meek locks upon his collar.  A vague resemblance
+to the type of Wesley--or was it Froebel?--might have
+hinted itself to the observer's mind. 
+
+Thorpe's thoughts, however, were not upon types. 
+"Well"--he said, from the opposite chair, in his roundest,
+heartiest voice, when the other had with diffidence suffered
+himself to be served, and had deferentially lighted
+on one side the big cigar pressed upon him--"Well--and
+how's the world been using you?"
+
+"Not very handsomely, Mr. Thorpe," the other responded,
+in a hushed, constrained tone. 
+
+"Oh, chuck the Misters!" Thorpe bade him.  "Aren't we
+old pals, man? You're plain Tavender, and I'm plain Thorpe."
+
+"You're very kind," murmured Tavender, still abashed. 
+For some minutes he continued to reply dolefully,
+and with a kind of shamefaced reluctance, to the questions
+piled upon him.  He was in evil luck: nothing had gone
+well with him; it had been with the greatest difficulty
+that he had scraped together enough to get back to London
+on the chance of obtaining some expert commission;
+practically he possessed nothing in the world beyond
+the clothes on his back, and the contents of two old
+carpet-bags--these admissions, by degrees, were wormed
+from him. 
+
+"But have you parted with the concession, then, that you
+bought from me?" Thorpe suddenly asked him.  "Help yourself
+to some more whiskey!"
+
+Tavender sighed as he tipped the decanter.  "It isn't
+any good," he answered, sadly.  "The Government repudiates
+it--that is, the Central Government at Mexico.  Of course,
+I never blamed you.  I bought it with my eyes open,
+and you sold it in perfect good faith.  I never doubted
+that at all.  But it's not worth the paper it's written
+on--that's certain.  It's that that busted me--that,
+and some other things."
+
+"Well--well!" said Thorpe, blankly.  His astonishment was
+obviously genuine, and for a little it kept him silent,
+while he pondered the novel aspects of the situation
+thus disclosed.  Then his eyes brightened, as a new path
+outlined itself. 
+
+"I suppose you've got the papers?--the concession and my
+transfer to you and all that?" he asked, casually. 
+
+"Oh, yes," replied Tavender.  He added, with a gleam
+of returning self-command--"That's all I have got."
+
+"Let's see--what was it you paid me?--Three thousand
+eight hundred pounds, wasn't it?"
+
+Tavender made a calculation in mental arithmetic. 
+"Yes, something like that.  Just under nineteen
+thousand dollars, "he said. 
+
+"Well," remarked Thorpe, with slow emphasis, "I won't
+allow you to suffer that way by me.  I'll buy it back
+from you at the same price you paid for it."
+
+Tavender, beginning to tremble, jerked himself upright
+in his chair, and stared through his spectacles at his
+astounding host.  "You say"--he gasped--"you say you'll
+buy it back!"
+
+"Certainly," said Thorpe.  "That's what I said."
+
+"I--I never heard of such a thing!" the other faltered
+with increasing agitation.  "No--you can't mean it. 
+It isn't common sense!"
+
+"It's common decency," replied the big man, in his most
+commanding manner.  "It's life and death to you--and it
+doesn't matter a flea-bite to me.  So, since you came
+to grief through me, why shouldn't I do the fair thing,
+and put you back on your legs again?"
+
+Tavender, staring now at those shrunken legs of his,
+breathed heavily.  The thing overwhelmed him. 
+Once or twice he lifted his head and essayed to speak,
+but no speech came to his thin lips.  He moistened them
+eventually with a long deliberate pull at his glass. 
+
+"This much ought to be understood, however," Thorpe resumed,
+reflecting upon his words as he went along.  "If I'm
+to buy back a dead horse, like that, it's only reasonable
+that there should be conditions.  I suppose you've seen
+by this time that even if this concession of ours was
+recognized by the Government there wouldn't be any money
+in it to speak of.  I didn't realize that two years ago,
+any more than you did, but it's plain enough now. 
+The trade has proved it.  A property of rubber trees
+has no real value--so long as there's a wilderness
+of rubber trees all round that's everybody's property. 
+How can a man pay even the interest on his purchase money,
+supposing he's bought a rubber plantation, when he has
+to compete with people who've paid no purchase money at all,
+but just get out as much as they like from the free forest?
+You must know that that is so."
+
+Tavender nodded eloquently.  "Oh yes, I know that is so. 
+You can prove it by me."
+
+Thorpe grinned a little.  "As it happens, that aint what I
+need to have you prove," he said, dryly.  "Now WE know that
+a rubber property is no good--but London doesn't know it. 
+Everybody here thinks that it's a great business to own
+rubber trees.  Why, man alive, do you know"--the audacity
+of the example it had occurred to him to cite brought
+a gratified twinkle to his eyes as he went on--"do you know
+that a man here last year actually sold a rubber plantation
+for four hundred thousand pounds--two millions of dollars!
+Not in cash, of course, but in shares that he could do
+something with--and before he's done with it, I'm told,
+he's going to make twice that amount of money out of it. 
+That'll show you what London is like."
+
+"Yes--I suppose they do those things," remarked Tavender, vaguely. 
+
+"Well--my point is that perhaps I can do something
+or other with this concession of yours here.  I may even
+be able to get my money back on it.  At any rate I'll
+take my chances on it--so that at least you shan't lose
+anything by it.  Of course, if you'd rather try and put
+it on the market yourself, why go ahead!" There was
+a wistful pathos in the way Tavender shook his head. 
+"Big money doesn't mean anything to me any more,"
+he said, wearily.  "I'm too old and I'm too tired. 
+Why--four--five--yes, half a dozen times I've had enough money
+to last me comfortably all my life--and every time I've used
+it as bait to catch bigger money with, and lost it all. 
+I don't do that any more! I've got something the matter
+with me internally that takes the nerve all out of me. 
+The doctors don't agree about it, but whatever its name
+is I've got it for keeps.  Probably I shan't live very
+long"--Thorpe recalled that the old man had always taken
+a gloomy view of his health after the third glass--"and
+if you want to pay me the nineteen thousand dollars,
+or whatever it is, why I shall say 'God bless you,'
+and be more than contented."
+
+"Oh, there's something more to it than that," observed Thorpe,
+with an added element of business-like briskness in his tone. 
+"If I let you out in this way--something, of course,
+you could never have dreamed would happen--you must
+do some things for me.  I should want you, for example,
+to go back to Mexico at once.  Of course, I'd pay
+your expenses out.  Or say, I'd give you a round four
+thousand pounds to cover that and some other things too. 
+You wouldn't object to that, would you?"
+
+The man who, two hours before, had confronted existence
+with the change of his last five-pound note in his pocket,
+did not hesitate now.  "Oh no, that would be all right,"
+with reviving animation, he declared.  He helped himself
+again from the cut-glass decanter.  "What would you want me
+to do there?"
+
+"Oh, a report on the concession for a starter," Thorpe answered,
+with careful indifference.  "I suppose they still know your
+name as an authority.  I could make that all right anyway. 
+But one thing I ought to speak of--it might be rather
+important--I wouldn't like to have you mention to anybody
+that the concession has at any time been yours. 
+That might tend to weaken the value of your report,
+don't you see? Let it be supposed that the concession has
+been my property from the start.  You catch my point,
+don't you? There never was any such thing as a transfer
+of it to you.  It's always been mine!"
+
+Tavender gave his benefactor a purblind sort of wink. 
+"Always belonged to you? Why of course it did,"
+he said cheerfully. 
+
+The other breathed a cautious prolonged sigh of relief
+"You'd better light a fresh one, hadn't you?" he asked,
+observing with a kind of contemptuous tolerance the old man's
+efforts to ignite a cigar which had more than once unrolled
+like a carpenter's shaving in his unaccustomed fingers,
+and was now shapelessly defiant of both draught and suction. 
+Tavender laughed to himself silently as he took a new cigar,
+and puffed at the match held by his companion.  The air
+of innocence and long-suffering meekness was falling rapidly
+away from him.  He put his shabby boots out confidently
+to the fender and made gestures with his glass as he talked. 
+
+"My mistake," he declared, in insistent tones, "was in not
+turning down science thirty years ago and going in bodily
+for business.  Then I should have made my pile as you
+seem to have done.  But I tried to do something of both. 
+Half the year I was assaying crushings, or running a level,
+or analyzing sugars, for a salary, and the other half I
+was trying to do a gamble with that salary on the strength
+of what I'd learned.  You can't ring the bell that way. 
+You've got to be either a pig or a pup.  You can't do both. 
+Now, for instance, if I'd come to London when you did,
+and brought my money with me instead of buying your
+concession with it----"
+
+"Why, what good do you suppose you would have done?"
+Thorpe interrupted him with good-natured brusqueness. 
+"You'd have had it taken from you in a fortnight! Why, man,
+do you know what London is? You'd have had no more chance
+here than a naked nigger in a swamp-full of alligators."
+
+"You seem to have hit it off," the other objected. 
+"This is as fine a house as I was ever in."
+
+"With me it's different," Thorpe replied, carelessly. 
+"I have the talent for money-making. I'm a man in armour. 
+The 'gators can't bite me, nor yet the rattle-snakes."
+
+"Yes--men are made up differently," Tavender assented,
+with philosophical gravity.  Then he lurched gently in the
+over-large chair, and fixed an intent gaze upon his host. 
+"What did you make your money in?" he demanded, not with
+entire distinctness of enunciation.  "It wasn't rubber,
+was it?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head.  "There's no money in rubber. 
+I'm entirely in finance--on the Stock Exchange--dealing
+in differences," he replied, with a serious face. 
+
+The explanation seemed wholly acceptable to Tavender. 
+He mused upon it placidly for a time, with his reverend
+head pillowed askew against the corner of the chair. 
+Then he let his cigar drop, and closed his eyes. 
+
+The master of the house bent forward, and noiselessly
+helped himself to another glass of whiskey and water. 
+Then, sinking back again, he eyed his odd guest meditatively
+as he sipped the drink.  He said to himself that in all
+the miraculous run of luck which the year had brought him,
+this was the most extraordinary manifestation of the lot. 
+It had been so easy to ignore the existence of this tiresome
+and fatuous old man, so long as he was in remote Mexico,
+that he had practically forgotten him.  But he should
+not soon forget the frightened shock with which he
+had learned of his presence in London, that afternoon. 
+For a minute or two, there in his sister's book-shop,
+it had seemed as if he were falling through the air--as
+if the substantial earth had crumbled away from under him. 
+But then his nerve had returned to him, his resourceful
+brain had reasserted itself.  With ready shrewdness he had
+gone out, and met the emergency, and made it the servant
+of his own purposes.
+
+He could be glad now, unreservedly glad, that Tavender had
+come to London, that things had turned out as they had. 
+In truth, he stood now for the first time on solid ground. 
+When he thought of it, now, the risk he had been running
+all these months gave him a little sinking of the heart. 
+Upon reflection, the performance of having sold the same
+property first to Tavender in Mexico and then to the
+Rubber Consols Company in London might be subject to
+injurious comment, or worse.  The fact that it was not a
+real property to begin with had no place in his thoughts. 
+It was a concession--and concessions were immemorially
+worth what they would fetch.  But the other thing might
+have been so awkward--and now it was all right!
+
+For an hour and more, till the fire burnt itself out
+and the guest's snoring became too active a nuisance,
+Thorpe sat lost in this congratulatory reverie. 
+Then he rose, and sharply shaking Tavender into a semblance
+of consciousness, led him upstairs and put him to bed. 
+
+Three days later he personally saw Tavender off at Waterloo
+station by the steamer-train, en route for Southampton
+and New York.  The old man was in childlike good spirits,
+looking more ecclesiastical than ever in the new clothes he
+had been enabled to buy.  He visibly purred with content
+whenever his dim eyes caught sight of the new valise and
+steamer trunk, which belonged to him, on the busy platform. 
+
+"You've been very kind to me, Thorpe," he said more
+than once, as they stood together beside the open door
+of the compartment.  "I was never so hospitably treated
+before in my life.  Your attention to me has been wonderful. 
+I call you a true friend."
+
+"Oh, that's all right! Glad to do it," replied the
+other, lightly.  In truth he had not let Tavender
+stray once out of his sight during those three days.
+He had dragged him tirelessly about London, showing him
+the sights from South Kensington Museum to the Tower,
+shopping with him, resting in old taverns with him,
+breakfasting, lunching, aud dining with him--in the
+indefatigable resolution that he should strike up no
+dangerous gossiping acquaintance with strangers.
+The task had been tiresome in the extreme--
+but it had been very well worth while.
+
+"One thing I'm rather sorry about," Tavender remarked,
+in apologetic parenthesis--"I ought to have gone down
+and seen that brother-in-law of mine in Kent.  He's been
+very good to me, and I'm not treating him very well.
+I wrote to tell him I was coming--but since then I haven't
+had a minute to myself.  However, I can write to him
+and explain how it happened.  And probably I'll be over
+again sometime."
+
+"Why, of course," said Thorpe, absently.  The allusion
+to the brother-in-law in Kent had escaped his notice,
+so intent was he upon a new congeries of projects taking
+vague shape in his mind.
+
+"Think of yourself as my man out there," he said now,
+slowly, following the clue of his thoughts.  "There may
+be big things to do.  Write to me as often as you can.
+Tell me everything that's going on.  Money will be no object
+to me--you can have as much as you like--if things turn
+up out there that are worth taking up.  But mind you say
+nothing about me--or any connection you've ever had with me. 
+You'll get a letter from the Secretary of a Company and
+the Chairman asking for a report on a certain property,
+and naming a fee.  You simply make a good report--on
+its merits.  You say nothing about anything else--about me,
+or the history of the concession, or its validity,
+or anything.  I mustn't be alluded to in any way. 
+You quite understand that?"
+
+"Trust me!" said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand. 
+
+It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched
+the train draw out of the station. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely
+indeed a busy or anxious time in the City.  In the
+ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going
+prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits eastward,
+and with only the most careless glances through the financial
+papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. 
+Men come to the City during this week, it is true,
+but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the moors, on the
+blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant
+German pine forests. 
+
+To the great mass of City people; this August in question
+began in a normal enough fashion.  To one little group
+of operators, however, and to the widening circle
+of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose
+interests were more or less involved with those of
+this group, it was a season of keen perturbation. 
+A combat of an extraordinary character was going on--a
+combat which threatened to develop into a massacre. 
+Even to the operators who, unhappily for themselves,
+were principals in this fight, it was a struggle in the dark. 
+They knew little about it, beyond the grimly-patent fact
+that they were battling for their very lives.  The outer
+ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew
+still less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. 
+The "press" seemed to know nothing at all.  This unnatural
+silence of the City's mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly
+clamorous upon the one side and the other when a duel
+is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing. 
+The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. 
+This in itself was of baleful significance.  It was
+not a duel which they had been bribed to ignore. 
+It was an assassination. 
+
+Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial,
+bald statement that on August 1st, the latest of twelve
+fortnightly settlements in this stock, Rubber Consols had been
+bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds for one-pound shares. 
+The information concerned the public at large not at all. 
+Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough
+to possess some of these shares.  Readers here and there,
+noting the figures, must have said to themselves that
+certain lucky people were coining money, but very little
+happened to be printed as to the identity of these people.
+Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal
+columns of the afternoon papers about a "Rubber King"
+of the name of Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the
+world's four corners makes so many "kings" that the name
+had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the popular eye. 
+
+City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general
+way about this "Rubber King." He was an outsider who had
+come in, and was obviously filling his pockets; but it
+was a comforting rule that outsiders who did this always
+got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run. 
+There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he
+would prove an exception to the rule.  He was investing
+his winnings with great freedom, so the City understood,
+and his office was besieged daily by promoters and touts. 
+They could clean out his strong-box faster than
+the profits of his Rubber corner could fill it. 
+To know such a man, however, could not but be useful,
+and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin Friars
+on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him
+to other topics.
+
+As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange
+as a whole was apathetic.  When some of the sufferers
+ventured cautious hints about the possibility of official
+intervention on their behalf, they were laughed
+at by those who did not turn away in cold silence. 
+Of the fourteen men who had originally been caught
+in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and Semple, all the
+conspicuous ones belonged to the class of "wreckers,"
+a class which does not endear itself to Capel Court. 
+
+Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit,
+were men of great wealth, but they had systematically
+amassed these fortunes by strangling in their cradles
+weak enterprises, and by undermining and toppling
+over other enterprises which would not have been weak
+if they had been given a legitimate chance to live. 
+Their system was legal enough, in the eyes alike of the law
+and of the Stock Exchange rules.  They had an undoubted
+right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and bring
+it down, and feed to the bone upon it.  But the exercise
+of this right did not make them beloved by the begetters
+and sponsors of their victims.  When word first went round,
+on the last day of February, that a lamb had unexpectedly
+turned upon these two practised and confident wolves,
+and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them
+pell-mell into a "corner," it was received on all sides
+with a gratified smile. 
+
+Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once
+more tragic and more satisfactory.  Not only Rostocker
+and Aronson, but a dozen others were in the cul de sac
+guarded by this surprising and bloody-minded lamb. 
+Most of the names were well-known as those of "wreckers."
+In this category belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere,
+Lewis, Ascher, and Mendel, and if Harding, Carpenter,
+and Vesey could not be so confidently classified,
+at least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy. 
+Two other names mentioned, those of Norfell and Pinney,
+were practically unknown. 
+
+There was some surprise, however, at the statement that
+the old and respected and extremely conservative firm of
+Fromentin Bros.  was entangled in the thing.  Egyptian bonds,
+minor Levantine loans, discounts in the Arabian and Persian
+trades--these had been specialties of the Fromentins for
+many years.  Who could have expected to find them caught among
+the "shorts" in Mexican rubber? It was Mexico, wasn't it,
+that these Rubber Consols purported to be connected with?
+
+Thorpe's Company, upon its commercial merits, had not been
+considered at all by the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange,
+at the time of its flotation.  Men vaguely and with
+difficulty recalled the fact of its prospectus,
+when the "corner" in its shares was first talked about. 
+They looked it up in their lists and files, later on,
+but its terms said nothing to them.  Nobody discussed
+the value of the assets owned by this Company, or the
+probability of its paying a dividend--even when the
+price bid for its shares was making the most sensational
+upward leaps.  How Thorpe stood with his shareholders,
+or whether he had any genuine shareholders behind him
+at all, was seen by the keen eyes of Capel Court to be
+beside the question.  Very likely it was a queer affair,
+if the truth were known--but at least it had substance
+enough in it to be giving the "wreckers" a lively time. 
+
+By the end of July it was understood that the fight
+was better worth watching than anything that had been
+seen in a long time.  The only trouble was that there
+was so little to see.  The papers said nothing. 
+The sufferers were the reverse of garrulous.  The little
+red Scotchman, Semple, who was the visible avenging sword
+of the "corner," was more imperturbably silent than
+anybody else.  His fellow-members in the "House" watched
+him now, however, with a new respect.  They discovered
+unsuspected elements of power in his thin, tight mouth,
+in the direct, cold glances of his brown-grey eyes,
+in the very way he carried his head and wore his hat. 
+He came to be pointed out, and nodded about behind his back,
+more than anyone else in the "House," and important men
+sought his acquaintance, with an awkward show of civility,
+who were notorious for their rude exclusiveness. 
+
+It might be, of course, that his "corner" would break
+under him at any fortnightly settlement, but already he
+had carried it much further than such things often went,
+and the planning of the coup had been beyond doubt Napoleonic. 
+
+Had this small sandy Scot planned it, or was he merely
+the weapon in Thorpe's hand? Both views had their supporters
+on the Exchange, but after the wrench of August 1st,
+when with an abrupt eighty-shilling rise the price of Rubber
+Consols stood at 15 pounds, and it was to be computed that
+Semple had received on that single day nearly 75,000 pounds
+in differences and "backwardation," a story was set afloat
+which gave Thorpe the undivided credit of the invention. 
+It was related as coming from his own lips that he
+had schemed it all out to be revenged upon a group
+of Jewish operators, against whom he had a grievance. 
+In confirmation of this tale, it was pointed out that,
+of the seven men still held pinned in the fatal "corner," six
+were Jews--and this did, upon first glance, look significant. 
+But then it was objected, upon reflection, that Blaustein
+and Ascher had both been permitted to make their escape,
+and this hardly justified the theory of an implacable
+anti-Semitic vendetta.  The objection seemed reasonable,
+but it was met in turn by the point that Blaustein and
+Ascher had been bled white, as Bismarck's phrase went,
+before they were released, whereas the five Christians
+had been liberated with relatively moderate fines. 
+Upon the whole, a certain odour of the Judenhetze clung
+thereafter about the "corner" in Rubber Consols. 
+
+On an afternoon of the following week, Mr. Stormont Thorpe
+was alone in the Board Room of the offices in Austin Friars. 
+He had risen from the great roller-topped desk over
+between the windows, and walked now with a lethargic,
+tired step to and fro before the empty fireplace,
+yawning more than once, and stretching out his arms in the
+supreme gesture of fatigue.  After a dozen listless rounds,
+something occurred to him.  He moved with a certain directness
+of purpose to the cabinet in the corner, unlocked it,
+and poured out for himself a tumbler of brandy and soda. 
+He drank it without a pause, then turned again, and began
+pacing up and down as before, his hands clasped behind him,
+his head bent in thought. 
+
+The intervening six months had effected visible changes
+in the outer man.  One noted most readily that the face
+had grown fuller in its lower parts, and was far less
+browned than formerly.  The large, heavy countenance,
+with its square jaws masked now under increased flesh,
+its beginnings of a double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect
+of pallor, was no longer lacking in individual distinction. 
+It was palpably the visage of a dictator.  The moustache
+had been cut down to military brevity, and the line of mouth
+below it was eloquent of rough power.  The steady grey eyes,
+seemingly smaller yet more conspicuous than before,
+revealed in their glance new elements of secretiveness,
+of strategy supported by abundant and confident personal force. 
+
+The man himself seemed scarcely to have grown stouter. 
+He held himself more compactly, as it were; seemed more
+the master of all his physical expressions.  He was
+dressed like a magnate who was also a person of taste. 
+There was a flower in the lapel of his well-shaped
+frock-coat, and the rustle of his starched and spotless
+white waistcoat murmured pleasantly of refined toilets. 
+
+"The Marquis of Chaldon--and a gentleman, with him."
+
+The announcement, from a clerk who had noiselessly opened
+the door, imposed itself with decorum upon Thorpe's reverie. 
+
+"Who is the gentleman with him?" Thorpe began austerely
+to ask, after an instant's hesitation.  But this briefest
+of delays had brought the callers into plain view behind
+the clerk, and with a slight gesture the master assented
+to their entrance. 
+
+This large apartment was no longer called the Board
+Room by anybody.  By tacit processes, it had become
+Mr. Thorpe's room.  Not even the titular Chairman
+of the Company, the renowned and eminent Lord Chaldon,
+ex-Ambassador and ex-Viceroy, entered this chamber
+now with any assumption of proprietorship in it. 
+No hint of a recollection that there were such things
+as the Company and the Board, or that he was nominally
+the head of both, expressed itself in his Lordship's
+demeanour as he advanced, his hand a little extended. 
+
+The noble Chairman was white of beard and hair, and extremely
+courteous of manner--a small, carefully-clad, gracious
+old gentleman, whose mild pink countenance had, with years
+of anxiety about ways and means, disposed itself in lines
+which produced a chronic expression of solicitude. 
+A nervous affection of the eyelids lent to this look,
+at intervals, a beseeching quality which embarrassed
+the beholder.  All men had liked him, and spoken well
+of him throughout his long and hard-worked career. 
+Thorpe was very fond of him indeed, and put a respectful
+cordiality into his grasp of the proffered hand. 
+Then he looked, with a certain thinly-veiled bluntness
+of enquiry, past the Marquis to his companion. 
+
+"You were very kind to give me the appointment,"
+said Lord Chaldon, with a little purring gloss of affability
+upon the earnestness of his tone.  "I wish very much
+to introduce to you my friend, my old friend I may say,
+Monsieur Alexandre Fromentin.  We slept together under
+the same tent, in the Persian country beyond Bagdad--oh,
+it must have been quite forty years ago.  We were youngsters
+looking to win our first spurs then--I in my line, he in his. 
+And often since we have renewed that old friendship--at many
+different places--India, and Constantinople, and Egypt. 
+I wish heartily to commend him to your--your kindness."
+
+Thorpe had perfunctorily shaken hands with the stranger--a tall,
+slender, sharp-faced, clean-shaven, narrow-shouldered man,
+who by these accounts of his years ought not to have such
+excessively black hair.  He bowed in a foreign fashion,
+and uttered some words which Thorpe, though he recognized
+them as English in intent, failed to follow.  The voice
+was that of an elderly man, and at a second glance there
+were plenty of proofs that he might have been older
+than the Marquis, out there in Persia, forty years ago. 
+But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their hair,
+and he offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the
+table toward his desk, with a certain reserve of manner.
+Seating himself in the revolving chair at the desk itself,
+he put the tips of his fingers together, and looked
+this gentleman with the Continental name and experience
+in the face. 
+
+"Is there something you wish me to do?" he asked,
+passively facilitating the opening of conversation. 
+
+"Ah, my God! 'Something'!"--repeated the other,
+with a fluttering gesture of his hands over his thin,
+pointed knees--"everything, Mr. Thorpe!"
+
+"That's a tolerably large order, isn't it?"
+Thorpe asked, calmly, moving a slow, inscrutable glance
+from one to the other of his callers. 
+
+"I could ask for nothing that would be a greater personal
+favour--and kindness"--Lord Chaldon interposed. 
+His tone bore the stress of sincerity. 
+
+"That means a great deal to me, as you know, my Lord,"
+replied Thorpe, "but I don't in the least understand--
+what is it that your friend wants?"
+
+"Only that I shall not be buried in a bankrupt's grave,"
+the suppliant answered, with a kind of embittered eagerness
+of utterance.  "That I shall not see disgraced the honoured
+name that my father and his father bequeathed to my care!"
+
+Thorpe's large, composed countenance betrayed
+a certain perplexity.  "There must be a mistake,"
+he observed.  "I don't even know this name of yours. 
+I never heard it before."
+
+The other's mobile face twisted itself in a grimace
+of incredulity.  He had a conspicuously wide mouth,
+and its trick of sidelong extension at this moment
+was very unpleasant.  "Ah, Herr Je! He never heard it,"
+he ejaculated, turning nervously to the Marquis. 
+"Would to the good God you never had!" he told Thorpe,
+with suppressed excitement. 
+
+Lord Chaldon, his own voice shaken a little, interposed
+with an explanation.  "My friend is the head--the
+respected head--of the firm of Fromentin Brothers. 
+I think you have--have dealings with them."
+
+Thorpe, after a furtive instant of bewilderment,
+opened his mouth.  "Oh! I see," he said.  "I know what you
+mean now.  With the French pronunciation, I didn't recognize
+the name.  I've always heard it called 'Fromen'-tin'
+here in London.  Oh, yes, of course--Fromen'tin Brothers."
+
+His lips shut tight again at this.  The listeners had
+caught no helpful clue from the tone of his words. 
+They exchanged a glance, and then M. Fromentin spoke. 
+
+"Mr. Thorpe," he began, slowly, with an obvious effort
+at self-repression. "It is a very simple story.  Our house
+is an old one.  My father's grandfather organized the
+finance of the commissariat of General Bonaparte in Egypt. 
+He created the small beginnings of the carpet and rug
+importation from Asia Minor.  His son, and in turn his son,
+followed him.  They became bankers as well as importers. 
+They helped very greatly to develop the trade of
+the Levant.  They were not avaricious men, or usurers. 
+It is not in our blood.  Your Chairman, Lord Chaldon,
+who honours me so highly by calling me his friend--he
+will assure you that we have a good name in the East. 
+Our banks have befriended the people, and never oppressed
+or injured them.  For that reason--I will say perhaps
+for that reason--we have never become a very rich house. 
+It is possible to name bankers who have made large fortunes
+out of Egypt.  It was different with us.  Lord Chaldon
+will tell you that of our own free will--my two brothers
+and I--of our own choice we consented to lose a fifth
+of all our possessions, rather than coin into gold by force
+the tears and blood of the wretched fellaheen."
+
+"Yes--I have never known a more honourable or humane action,"
+put in the Marquis, fervently. 
+
+"And then my brothers die--Polydor, who lived mostly
+at Smyrna, and whose estate was withdrawn from the
+business by his widow, and Augustin, who lived here in
+London after 1870, and died--it is now six years ago. 
+He left a son, Robert, who is my nephew, and my partner. 
+He is now of an age--perhaps thirty years.  He was a small
+child when he came to London--he has become more English
+than the English themselves.  His activity and industry
+are very great; he forms plans of such magnitude
+and numbers that they would compel his grandfather
+to turn in his coffin.  I am in indifferent health. 
+I live much at Homburg and Marienbad and at Cairo. 
+Practically speaking, I have retired from business. 
+There remain branches of our house--in several places--but
+the London house has become the centre of all things--and
+Robert has become the London house.  This I make plain
+to your mind, do I, Mr. Thorpe?"
+
+The other, with his chin sunk within the collar of his
+white waistcoat, and scrutinizing the narrator with a
+steadfast though impassive glance, made the faintest
+possible nod of assent. 
+
+"I had great confidence in Robert, "the old man went on. 
+His eyes were dimming with tears, and his voice
+quavered uncertainly.  "His plans seemed wise, even if they
+risked more than formerly.  The conditions of business are
+wholly altered since my youth--and it was best, I thought,
+to make Robert free to act under these conditions,
+which he understood much better than I could pretend
+to do.  Thus it was that when he said it was necessary
+for Fromentin Brothers to belong to the Stock Exchange,
+I did not object.  He was active and bold and clever,
+and he was in the thick of the fight.  Therefore he
+should be the judge in all things.  And that is our ruin. 
+In the time of the South African excitement, he won
+a great deal of money.  Then he lost it all and more. 
+Then gambling began, and his fortunes went now up, now down,
+but always, as his books show to me now--sinking a little
+on the average.  He grew more adventurous--more careless. 
+He put many small counters upon different numbers on
+the table.  You know what I mean? And in an accursed moment,
+because other gamblers were doing the same, he sold two
+thousand of your shares, without having them in his hands.
+Voila! He wishes now to put a bullet through his brain. 
+He proposes that as the fitting end of Fromentin Freres."
+
+Thorpe, his chin on his breast, continued to regard the
+melancholy figure opposite with a moody eye.  It seemed
+a long minute before he broke the tense silence by a sigh
+of discomfort.  "I do not discuss these things with anybody,"
+he said then, coldly.  "If I had known who you were,
+I don't think you'd have got in."
+
+The Marquis of Chaldon intuitively straightened himself
+in his chair, and turned toward the speaker a glance
+of distressed surprise. 
+
+"Or no--I beg your pardon," Thorpe hastened to add,
+upon the instant hint of this look--"that doesn't convey
+my meaning.  Of course, our Chairman brings whom he pleases. 
+His friends--as a matter of course--are our friends. 
+What I should have said was that if this had been mentioned
+beforehand to me, I should have explained that it wasn't
+possible to discuss that particular business."
+
+"But--pardon me"--said Lord Chaldon, in a quiet, very gentle,
+yet insistent voice, which seemed now to recall to its
+listeners the fact that sovereigns and chancellors had
+in their day had attentive ears for its tones--"pardon me,
+but why should it not be possible?"
+
+Thorpe frowned doubtfully, and shifted his position
+in his chair.  "What could I say, if it were discussed?"
+he made vague retort.  "I'm merely one of the Directors. 
+You are our Chairman, but you see he hasn't found it of
+any use to discuss it with you.  There are hard and fast
+rules about these things.  They run their natural course. 
+You are not a business man, my Lord----"
+
+"Oh, I think I may be called a 'business man,'"
+interposed the nobleman, suavely.  "They would tell
+you so in Calcutta, I think, and in Cairo too. 
+When one considers it, I have transacted a great
+deal of business--on the behalf of other people. 
+And if you will permit me--I do not impute indirection,
+of course--but your remark seems to require a footnote. 
+It is true that I am Chairman of the Board on which you
+are a Director--but it is not quite the whole truth. 
+I as Chairman know absolutely nothing about this matter. 
+As I understand the situation, it is not in your capacity
+as a Director that you know anything about it either. 
+Yet----"
+
+He paused, as if suddenly conscious of some impropriety
+in this domestic frankness before a third party,
+and Thorpe pounced through his well-mannered hesitation
+with the swiftness of a bird of prey. 
+
+"Let me suggest," he said roundly, lifting his head and
+poising a hand to hold attention, while he thought upon
+what it was he should suggest--"this is what I would say. 
+It seems rather irregular, doesn't it? to debate the matter
+in the presence of an outsider.  You see it yourself. 
+That is partly what I meant.  Now I have met Mr. Fromentin,"
+he gave the name its English vowels with an obstinate emphasis,
+"and I have heard his statement.  You have heard it too.
+If he wishes to lay more facts before us, why, well and good. 
+But then I would suggest that he leave the matter in
+our hands, to discuss and look into between ourselves. 
+That seems to you the proper course, doesn't it,
+Lord Chaldon?"
+
+The French banker had been studying with strained
+acuteness the big lymphatic mask of the Director,
+with sundry sharp glances aside at the Chairman. 
+The nervous changes on his alert, meagre old face showed
+how intently he followed every phase of their talk. 
+A certain sardonic perception of evil in the air curled
+on his lip when he saw the Marquis accede with a bow
+and wave of the hand to Thorpe's proposition.  Then he
+made his bow in turn, and put the best face possible upon
+the matter. 
+
+"Naturally I consult your convenience--and the proprieties,
+"he said, with an effect of proud humility.  "There are but
+a few other facts to submit.  My nephew has already paid,
+in differences upon those accursed two thousand shares,
+a sum of nearly 30,000 pounds.  I have the figures
+in my pocket--but they are fixed in my head as well. 
+Twenty-eight thousand five hundred, those differences
+already amount to, not to speak of interest. 
+At the last settlement, August 1st, the price per share
+was 15 pounds.  That would make 30,000 pounds more,
+if we bought now--or a total of practically 60,000 pounds. 
+Eh bien! I beg for the privilege of being allowed to buy
+these shares now.  It is an unpleasant confession to make,
+but the firm of Fromentin Freres will be made very poor
+by this loss of 60,000 pounds.  It was not always so,
+but it is so now.  My nephew Robert has brought it into
+that condition.  You see my shame at this admission. 
+With all my own means, and with his sister's marriage portion,
+we can make up this sum of 30,000 pounds, and still enable
+the firm to remain in existence.  I have gone over the
+books very painstakingly, since I arrived in London. 
+It can be kept afloat, and it can be brought back
+to safe and moderately profitable courses--if nothing
+worse happens.  With another six weeks like the last,
+this will not be at all possible.  We shall have the cup
+of dishonour thrust between our teeth.  That will be the end
+of everything."
+
+M. Fromentin finished in tremulous, grave tones. 
+After looking with blurred eyes for a moment into Thorpe's face,
+he bowed his head, and softly swayed the knees upon
+which his thin, dark hands maintained their clutch. 
+Not even the revelation of hair quite white at the roots,
+unduly widening the track of parting on the top of his
+dyed head, could rob this movement of its mournful dignity. 
+
+Thorpe, after a moment's pause, took a pencil and paper
+from the desk, and made a calculation.  He bit his lips
+and frowned at the sight of these figures, and set
+down some others, which seemed to please him no more. 
+Then, with a sudden gesture as of impatience, he rose to his feet. 
+
+"How much is that sister's marriage portion you spoke of?"
+he asked, rather brusquely. 
+
+The French gentleman had also risen.  He looked with an air
+of astonishment at his questioner, and then hardened his face. 
+"I apologize for mentioning it," he said, with brevity. 
+"One does not speak of family affairs."
+
+"I asked you how much it was," pursued Thorpe, in a masterful tone. 
+"A man doesn't want to rob a girl of her marriage portion."
+
+"I think I must not answer you," the other replied,
+hesitatingly.  "It was the fault of my emotion to introduce
+the subject.  Pray leave the young lady out of account."
+
+"Then I've nothing more to say," Thorpe declared,
+and seated himself again with superfluous energy. 
+He scowled for a little at the disorder of his desk,
+and then flung forth an angry explanation.  "If you evade
+fair questions like that, how can you expect that I will go
+out of my way to help you?"
+
+"Oh, permit me, Mr. Thorpe"--the Marquis intervened
+soothingly--"I think you misapprehend.  My friend,
+I am sure, wished to evade nothing.  He had the idea
+that he was at fault in--in alluding to a purely
+domestic matter as--as a--what shall I say?--as a plea
+for your consideration." He turned to the old banker. 
+"You will not refuse to mention the sum to me, will you,
+my friend?"
+
+M. Fromentin shrugged his shoulders.  "It is ten
+thousand pounds," he replied, almost curtly. 
+
+Thorpe was seemingly mollified.  "Very well, then," he said. 
+"I will sell you 2,000 shares at ten pounds."
+
+The others exchanged a wondering look. 
+
+"Monsieur," the banker stammered--"I see your meaning. 
+You will forgive me--it is very well meant indeed by
+you--but it was not my proposition.  The market-price
+is fifteen pounds--and we were prepared to pay it."
+Thorpe laughed in a peremptory, gusty way.  "But you can't
+pay more than I ask!" he told him, with rough geniality. 
+"Come, if I let you and your nephew in out of the cold,
+what kind of men-folk would you be to insist that your niece
+should be left outside? As I said, I don't want her money. 
+I don't want any woman's money.  If I'm going to be nice
+to the rest of the family, what's the objection to my being
+nice to her?"
+
+"Monsieur," said the Frenchman, after an instant's reflection,
+"I offer none.  I did not at the moment perceive the spirit
+of your words, but I recognize now that it was delicacy itself. 
+I tender you the most profound thanks--for ALL the family."
+
+After some further conversation the elder Fromentin
+took his departure.  Lord Chaldon apparently proposed
+to accompany him, but Thorpe begged him to remain,
+and he put aside his hat once more and resumed his seat. 
+
+Thorpe walked about a little, with his hands in his pockets,
+in a restless way.  "If it isn't unpleasant to you,
+I think I'll light a cigar," he said suddenly, and moved
+over to the cabinet.  He poured out a drink of neat brandy,
+as well, and furtively swallowed it.  Then he came back,
+preceded by a cloud of smoke. 
+
+"It went terribly against the grain," he said, with a
+rueful laugh.  "I'd sworn to let no Jew off with an inch
+of hide left on him--and here three of them have been
+wheedled out of my grip already."
+
+"Jews?" exclaimed the Marquis, much puzzled. 
+"Did you--did you think Fromentin was a Jew? God bless
+me! he's no more one than I am! Why, not even so much,
+for there IS a Herschell in my pedigree.  Why, dear man,
+they were Crusaders!"
+
+Thorpe smiled somewhat sheepishly.  "I never noticed much,"
+he said.  "It was a foreign-looking name.  I took it
+for granted."
+
+Lord Chaldon bent his brows a little.  "Yes-s"--he murmured,
+meditatively.  "I've heard it mentioned that your
+enterprise was suspected of an anti-Semitic twist. 
+Do you mind my talking a little with you about that?"
+
+"Oh, not at all," the other answered with languid acquiescence,
+as he seated himself. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+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. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+"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.'"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+AUGUST wore itself out in parched tedium, and a September
+began which seemed even more unbearable in town,--and
+still Thorpe did not get away from London. 
+
+So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance,
+and the receipt of innumerable letters from a restless and
+fussy steward whom he had not yet seen, went as evidence,
+he knew himself to be the tenant in possession of a great
+shooting in Morayshire.  He had several photographs of what was
+called the lodge, but looked like something between a mansion
+and a baronial castle, on the mantel of the Board Room. 
+The reflection that this sumptuous residence had been
+his for a month, and that it daily stood waiting for him,
+furnished and swept and provisioned for his coming,
+did nothing to help the passing of time in the hot,
+fagged City.  More than once he had said resolutely that,
+on the morrow, or at the worst the next day, he would
+go--but in the event he had not gone.  In the last week
+of August he had proceeded to the length of sending his
+niece and nephew Northward, and shutting up the house in
+Ovington Square, and betaking himself to the Savoy Hotel.
+This had appeared at the time to be almost equivalent
+to his getting away himself,--to be at least a first stage
+in the progress of his own journey.  But at the hotel
+he had stuck fast,--and now, on the tenth of September,
+was no nearer the moors and the deer-forest than he had
+been a month before. 
+
+A novel sense of loneliness,--of the fatuity of present
+existence,--weighed grievously upon him.  The ladies
+of Grafton Street had left town upon a comprehensive
+itinerary of visits which included the Malvern country,
+and a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in Westmoreland. 
+There was nothing very definite about the date of their
+coming to him in Scotland.  The lady who had consented
+to marry him had, somehow, omitted to promise that she
+would write to him.  An arrangement existed, instead,
+by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond,
+and to fix between themselves the details of the visit
+to Morayshire. 
+
+Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with
+this arrangement.  He was conscious of no deep impulse
+to write love-letters himself, and there was nothing
+in the situation which made his failure to receive love-
+letters seem unnatural.  The absence of moonshine,
+at least during this preliminary season, had been quite
+taken for granted between them, and he did not complain
+even to himself.  There was even a kind of proud
+satisfaction for him in the thought that, though he had
+all but completed the purchase of the noble Pellesley
+estate for Edith Cressage, he had never yet kissed her. 
+The reserve he imposed upon himself gave him a certain
+aristocratic fineness in his own eyes.  It was the means
+by which he could feel himself to be most nearly her equal. 
+But he remained very lonely in London, none the less. 
+
+It is true that a great deal of society was continually
+offered to him, and even thrust upon him.  In the
+popular phrase, London was empty, but there seemed to be
+more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont Thorpe'
+s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre
+or card or river parties.  He clung sullenly to his rule
+of going nowhere, but it was not so simple a matter to
+evade the civilities and importunities of those who were
+stopping at the hotel, or who came there to waylay him
+at the entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant. 
+He could not always refuse to sit down at tables when
+attractively-dressed and vivacious women made room for him,
+or to linger over cigars and wine with their husbands
+and escorts later on. 
+
+An incessant and spirited court was paid to him
+by many different groups of interested people who
+were rarely at the pains to dissemble their aims. 
+He formed a manner for the reception of these advances,
+compounded of joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality,
+which nobody, to his face at least, resented.  If women
+winced under his mocking rudenesses of speech and smile,
+if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of his
+refusal to let them inside his guard, they sedulously
+kept it from him.  The consciousness that everybody
+was afraid of him,--that everybody would kneel to him,
+and meekly take insult and ignominy from him, if only hope
+remained to them of getting something out of him,--hardened
+like a crust upon his mind. 
+
+It was impossible to get a sense of companionship from people
+who cringed to him, and swallowed his affronts and cackled
+at his jokes with equal docility.  Sometimes he had a
+passing amusement in the rough pleasantries and cruelties
+which they drew from him.  There were two or three bright
+Jewish women, more gayly clever and impudent, perhaps,
+than beautiful, with whom he found it genuine fun to talk,
+and concerning whom he was perpetually conceiving projects
+which could not have been discussed with their husbands,
+and as perpetually doing nothing to test their feasibility. 
+But these diversions were in their essence unsubstantial. 
+There was not even the semblance of a real friendship
+among them,--and loneliness became an increasing burden. 
+
+His sister at the old book-shop exasperated him nowadays
+to a degree which often provoked within him the resolution
+to have done with her.  He had a score of projects for
+her betterment, each capable of as many variations and eager
+adaptations to suit her fancy, but to them all and sundry she
+opposed a barrier of stupidly passive negation.  There was
+nothing she wanted done for her.  She would not exchange
+the work she had been brought up in for a life of idleness. 
+She did not want, and would not know what to do with,
+a bigger shop than she had.  An augmentation of her capital
+would be of no use, because there was no room in the
+crowded little shop for a larger stock than it contained. 
+She was entirely satisfied with the dingy home overhead,
+and declined to think even of moving elsewhere. 
+Over and over again she met his propositions with a saying
+which he could recall having particularly hated on their
+father's lips,--"It's ill teaching an old dog new tricks."
+
+"You ought to have them taught you with a stick,"
+he had told her roundly, on the last occasion. 
+
+She had merely shrugged her gaunt shoulders at him. 
+"You think you can bully everybody and make them crawl
+to you,--but there's no good your trying it on with me,"
+she had told him, and he had pushed his way out of the shop
+almost stamping his feet.  It was clear to him at that moment
+that he would never darken her door again. 
+
+Yet now, on this afternoon of the tenth, as he lounged
+with a cigar and a City paper in his apartment at the hotel
+after luncheon, wondering whether it were too hot to issue
+forth for a walk to the Park, the irrelevant idea of going
+round to see his sister kept coming into his mind. 
+He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the
+paper,--but off it slipped again to the old book-shop,
+and to that curious, cross-grained figure, its mistress. 
+He abandoned himself to thinking about her--and discovered
+that a certain unique quality in her challenged his admiration. 
+She was the only absolutely disinterested person he knew--the
+only creature in the world, apparently, who did not desire
+to make something out of him.  She was not at all well-
+off,--was indeed rather poor than otherwise,--and here was
+her only brother a millionaire, and in her dumb way she
+had a sisterly affection for him, and yet she could not
+be argued or cajoled into touching a penny of his money. 
+Surely there could be no other woman like her.
+
+Thorpe realized that it was a distinction to have such
+a sister,--and behind this thought rose obscurely the
+suggestion that there must be wonderful blood in a race
+which had produced such a daughter.  And for that matter,
+such a son too! He lifted his head, and looked abstractedly
+before him, as if he were gazing at some apotheosis
+of himself in a mirror. 
+
+He beheld all at once something concrete and personal,
+obtruded into the heart of his reverie, the sight of
+which dimly astounded him.  For the moment, with opened
+lips he stared at it,--then slowly brought himself
+to comprehend what had happened.  An old man had by some
+oversight of the hotel servants been allowed to enter
+the room unannounced.  He had wandered in noiselessly,
+and had moved in a purblind fashion to the centre of
+the apartment.  The vagueness of the expression on his face
+and of his movements hinted at a vacant mind or too much
+drink,--but Thorpe gave no thought to either hypothesis. 
+The face itself--no--yes--it was the face of old Tavender.
+
+"In the name of God! What are you doing here?" Thorpe gasped
+at this extraordinary apparition.  Still staring, he began
+to push back his chair and put his weight upon his feet. 
+
+"Well--Thorpe"--the other began, thrusting forward his head
+to look through his spectacles--"so it is you, after all. 
+I didn't know whether I was going to find you or not. 
+This place has got so many turns and twists to it----"
+
+"But good heavens!" interposed the bewildered Thorpe. 
+He had risen to his feet.  He mechanically took the hand
+which the other had extended to him.  "What in hell"--he began,
+and broke off again.  The aroma of alcohol on the air
+caught his sense, and his mind stopped at the perception
+that Tavender was more or less drunk.  He strove to spur
+it forward, to compel it to encompass the meanings of this
+new crisis, but almost in vain. 
+
+"Thought I'd look you up," said the old man, buoyantly. 
+"Nobody in London I'd rather see than you.  How are you, anyway?"
+
+"What did you come over for? When did you get here?"
+Thorpe put the questions automatically.  His self-control
+was returning to him; his capable brain pushed forward
+now under something like disciplined direction. 
+
+"Why I guess I owe it all to you," replied Tavender. 
+Traces of the old Quaker effect which had been so
+characteristic of him still hung about his garb and mien,
+but there shone a new assurance on his benignant,
+rubicund face.  Prosperity had visibly liberalized
+and enheartened him.  He shook Thorpe's hand again. 
+"Yes, sir--it must have been all through you!" he repeated. 
+"I got my cable three weeks ago--'Hasten to London,
+urgent business, expenses and liberal fee guaranteed,
+Rubber Consols'--that's what the cable said, that is,
+the first one and of course you're the man that introduced me
+to those rubber people.  And so don't you see I owe it all
+to you?"
+
+His insistence upon his obligation was suddenly almost tearful.
+Thorpe thought hard as he replied: "Oh--that's all right. 
+I'm very glad indeed to have helped you along. 
+And so you came over for the Rubber Consols people,
+eh? Well--that's good.  Seen 'em yet? You haven't told
+me when you landed."
+
+"Came up from Southampton this morning.  My brother-in-law
+was down there to meet me.  We came up to London together."
+"Your brother-in-law," observed Thorpe, meditatively. 
+Some shadowy, remote impression of having forgotten
+something troubled his mind for an instant.  "Is your
+brother-in-law in the rubber business?"
+
+"Extraor'nary thing," explained Tavender, beamingly, "he don't
+know no more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon. 
+I asked him today--but he couldn't tell me anything about
+the business--what it was I'd been sent for, or anything."
+
+"But he--he knew you'd been sent for," Thorpe commented
+upon brief reflection. 
+
+"Why, he sent the second cable himself----"
+
+"What second cable?"
+
+"Why it was the next day,--or maybe it was sent
+that same night, and not delivered till morning,--I
+got another cable, this time from my brother-in-law,
+telling me to cable him what ship I sailed on and when. 
+So of course he knew all about it--but now he says
+he don't. He's a curious sort of fellow, anyway."
+
+"But how is he mixed up in it?" demanded Thorpe, impatiently. 
+
+"Well, as nearly as I can figure it out, he works for one
+of the men that's at the head of this rubber company. 
+It appears that he happened to show this man--he's a man
+of title, by the way--a letter I wrote to him last spring,
+when I got back to Mexico--and so in that way this man,
+when he wanted me to come over, just told Gafferson to cable
+to me."
+
+"Gafferson," Thorpe repeated, very slowly, and with almost
+an effect of listlessness.  He was conscious of no surprise;
+it was as if he had divined all along the sinister
+shadows of Lord Plowden and Lord Plowden's gardener,
+lurking in the obscurity behind this egregious old ass
+of a Tavender. 
+
+"He's a tremendous horticultural sharp," said the other. 
+"Probably you've heard tell of him.  He's taken medals
+for new flowers and things till you can't rest. 
+He's over at--what do you call it?--the Royal Aquarium,
+now, to see the Dahlia Show.  I went over there with him,
+but it didn't seem to be my kind of a show, and so I left
+him there, and I'm to look in again for him at 5:30. I'm
+going down to his place in the country with him tonight,
+to meet his boss--the nobleman I spoke of."
+
+"That's nice," Thorpe commented, slowly.  "I envy anybody
+who can get into the country these days.  But how did
+you know I was here?" "The woman in the book-store told
+me--I went there the first thing.  You might be sure I'd
+look you up.  Nobody was ever a better friend than you've
+been to me, Thorpe.  And do you know what I want you
+to do? I want you to come right bang out, now, and have
+a drink with me."
+
+"I was thinking of something of the sort myself,"
+the big man replied.  "I'll get my hat, and be with you
+in a minute."
+
+In the next room he relinquished his countenance to a
+frown of fierce perplexity.  More than a minute passed
+in this scowling preoccupation.  Then his face lightened
+with the relief of an idea, and he stepped confidently
+back into the parlour. 
+
+"Come along," he said, jovially.  "We'll have a drink
+downstairs, and then we'll drive up to Hanover Square
+and see if we can't find a friend of mine at his club."
+
+In the office below he stopped long enough to secure a
+considerable roll of bank-notes in exchange for a cheque.
+A little later, a hansom deposited the couple at the door
+of the Asian Club, and Thorpe, in the outer hallway
+of this institution, clicked his teeth in satisfaction
+at the news that General Kervick was on the premises. 
+
+The General, having been found by a boy and brought down,
+extended to his guests a hospitality which was none the
+less urbane for the evidences of surprise with which it
+was seasoned.  He concealed so indifferently his inability
+to account for Tavender, that the anxious Thorpe grew
+annoyed with him, but happily Tavender's perceptions
+were less subtle.  He gazed about him in his dim-eyed
+way with childlike interest, and babbled cheerfully over
+his liquor.  He had not been inside a London club before,
+and his glimpse of the reading-room, where, isolated,
+purple-faced, retired old Empire-makers sat snorting
+in the silence, their gouty feet propped up on foot-rests,
+their white brows scowling over the pages of French novels,
+particularly impressed him.  It was a new and halcyon
+vision of the way to spend one's declining years. 
+And the big smoking-room--where the leather cushions were
+so low and so soft, and the connection between the bells
+and the waiters was so efficient--that was even better. 
+
+Thorpe presently made an excuse for taking Kervick apart. 
+"I brought this old jackass here for a purpose," he said
+in low, gravely mandatory tones.  "He thinks he's got
+an appointment at 5:30 this afternoon--but he's wrong. 
+He hasn't. He's not going to have any appointment at
+all--for a long time yet.  I want you to get him drunk,
+there where he sits, and then take him away with you,
+and get him drunker still, and then take a train with him
+somewhere--any station but Charing Cross or that line--and
+I don't care where you land with him--Scotland or Ireland
+or France--whatever you like.  Here's some money for
+you--and you can write to me for more.  I don't care
+what you say to him--make up any yarn you like--only keep
+him pacified, and keep him away from London, and don't
+let a living soul talk to him--till I give you the word. 
+You'll let me know where you are.  I'll get away
+now--and mind, General, a good deal depends on the way
+you please me in this thing."
+
+The soldier's richly-florid face and intent, bulging blue
+eyes expressed vivid comprehension.  He nodded with eloquence
+as he slipped the notes into his trousers pocket. 
+"Absolutely," he murmured with martial brevity,
+from under his white, tight moustache. 
+
+With only a vague word or two of meaningless explanation
+to Tavender, Thorpe took his departure, and walked back
+to the hotel.  From what he had learned and surmised, it was
+not difficult to put the pieces of the puzzle together. 
+This ridiculous old fool, he remembered now, had reproached
+himself, when he was in England before, for his uncivil
+neglect of his brother-in-law. By some absurd chance,
+this damned brother-in-law happened to be Gafferson. 
+It was clear enough that, when he returned to Mexico,
+Tavender had written to Gafferson, explaining the unexpected
+pressure of business which had taken up all his time
+in England.  Probably he had been idiot enough to relate
+what he of course regarded as the most wonderful piece
+of good news--how the worthless concession he had been
+deluded into buying had been bought back from him. 
+As likely as not he had even identified the concession,
+and given Thorpe's name as that of the man who had first
+impoverished and then mysteriously enriched him.  At all events,
+he had clearly mentioned that he had a commission to report
+upon the Rubber Consols property, and had said enough
+else to create the impression that there were criminal
+secrets connected with its sale to the London Company. 
+The rest was easy.  Gafferson, knowing Lord Plowden's
+relation to the Company, had shown him Tavender's letter. 
+Lord Plowden, meditating upon it, had seen a way to be
+nasty--and had vindictively plunged into it.  He had brought
+Tavender from Mexico to London, to use him as a weapon. 
+All this was as obvious as the nose on one's face. 
+
+But a weapon for what? Thorpe, as this question put
+itself in his mind, halted before a shop-window full
+of soft-hued silk fabrics, to muse upon an answer. 
+The delicate tints and surfaces of what was before his eyes
+seemed somehow to connect themselves with the subject. 
+Plowden himself was delicately-tinted and refined of texture.
+Vindictiveness was too plain and coarse an emotion
+to sway such a complicated and polished organism. 
+He reasoned it out, as he stood with lack-lustre gaze
+before the plate-glass front, aloof among a throng of
+eager and talkative women who pressed around him--that
+Plowden would not have spent his money on a mere impulse
+of mischief-making. He would be counting upon something
+more tangible than revenge--something that could be counted
+and weighed and converted into a bank-balance. He smiled
+when he reached this conclusion--greatly surprising
+and confusing a matronly lady into whose correct face he
+chanced to be looking at the instant--and turning slowly,
+continued his walk. 
+
+At the office of the hotel, he much regretted not having
+driven instead, for he learned that Semple had twice
+telephoned from the City for him.  It was late in the
+afternoon--he noted with satisfaction that the clock showed
+it to be already past the hour of the Tavender-Gafferson
+appointment,--but he had Semple's office called up,
+upon the chance that someone might be there.  The clerk
+had not consumed more than ten minutes in the preliminaries
+of finding out that no one was there--Thorpe meanwhile passing
+savage comments to the other clerks about the British official
+conception of the telephone as an instrument of discipline
+and humiliation--when Semple himself appeared in the doorway. 
+
+The Broker gave an exclamation of relief at seeing Thorpe,
+and then, apparently indifferent to the display
+of excitement he was exhibiting, drew him aside. 
+
+"Come somewhere where we can talk," he whispered nervously. 
+
+Thorpe had never seen the little Scotchman in such a flurry. 
+"We'll go up to my rooms," he said, and led the way
+to the lift. 
+
+Upstairs, Semple bolted the door of the sitting-room
+behind them, and satisfied himself that there was no one
+in the adjoining bedroom.  Then, unburdening himself
+with another sigh, he tossed aside his hat, and looked
+keenly up at the big man.  "There's the devil to pay,"
+he said briefly. 
+
+Thorpe had a fleeting pride in the lethargic,
+composed front he was able to present.  "All right,"
+he said with forced placidity.  "If he's got to be paid,
+we'll pay him." He continued to smile a little. 
+
+"It's nah joke," the other hastened to warn him. 
+"I have it from two different quarters.  An application has
+been made to the Stock Exchange Committee, this afternoon,
+to intervene and stop our business, on the ground of fraud. 
+It comes verra straight to me."
+
+Thorpe regarded his Broker contemplatively.  The news
+fitted with precision into what he had previously known;
+it was rendered altogether harmless by the precautions
+he had already taken.  "Well, keep your hair on,"
+he said, quietly.  "If there were fifty applications,
+they wouldn't matter the worth of that soda-water cork. 
+Won't you have a drink?"
+
+Semple, upon reflection, said he would.  The unmoved
+equipoise of the big man visibly reassured him.  He sipped
+at his bubbling tumbler and smacked his thin lips. 
+"Man, I've had an awful fright," he said at last,
+in the tone of one whose ease of mind is returning. 
+
+"I gave you credit for more nerve," observed the other,
+eyeing him in not unkindly fashion over his glass. 
+"You've been so plumb full of sand all the while--I didn't
+think you'd weaken now.  Why, we're within two days of home,
+now--and for you to get rattled at this late hour--you ought
+to be ashamed of yourself"
+
+The Scotchman looked into the bottom of his glass,
+as he turned it thoughtfully round.  "I'm relieved
+to see the way you take it," he said, after a pause. 
+With increased hesitation he went dryly on: "I've never
+enquired minutely into the circumstances of the flotation. 
+It has not seemed to be my business to do so, and upon
+advice I may say that the Committee would not hold
+that such was my business.  My position is quite clear,
+upon that point."
+
+"Oh, perfectly," Thorpe assented.  "It couldn't possibly
+be any of your business--either then, or now." He gave
+a significant touch of emphasis to these last two words. 
+
+"Precisely," said Semple, with a glance of swift comprehension. 
+"You must not think I am asking any intrusive questions. 
+If you tell me that--that there is no ground for uneasiness--I
+am verra pleased indeed to accept the assurance. 
+That is ample information for my purposes."
+
+"You can take it from me," Thorpe told him.  He picked up
+a red book from a side table, and turned over its pages
+with his thick thumb.  "This is what Rule 59 says,"
+he went on: "'NO APPLICATION WHICH HAS FOR ITS OBJECT TO
+ANNUL ANY BARGAIN IN THE STOCK EXCHANGE SHALL BE ENTERTAINED
+BY THE COMMITTEE, UNLESS UPON A SPECIFIC ALLEGATION OF
+FRAUD OR WILFUL MISREPRESENTATION.' Shall be entertained,
+d'ye see? They can't even consider anything of the sort,
+because it says 'specific,' and I tell you plainly that
+anything 'specific' is entirely out of the question."
+
+The Broker lifted his sandy brows in momentary apprehension. 
+"If it turns upon the precise definition of a word,"
+he remarked, doubtingly. 
+
+"Ah, yes,--but it doesn't," Thorpe reassured him. 
+"See here--I'll tell you something.  You're not asking
+any questions.  That's as it should be.  And I'm not forcing
+information upon you which you don't need in your business. 
+That's as it should be, too.  But in between these two,
+there's a certain margin of facts that there's no harm
+in your knowing.  A scheme to blackmail me is on foot. 
+It's rather a fool-scheme, if you ask me, but it might have
+been a nuisance if it had been sprung on us unawares. 
+It happened, however, that I twigged this scheme about
+two hours ago.  It was the damnedest bit of luck you ever
+heard of----"
+
+"You don't have luck," put in Semple, appreciatively. 
+"Other men have luck.  You have something else--I don't
+give it a name."
+
+Thorpe smiled upon him, and went on.  "I twigged it, anyway. 
+I went out, and I drove the biggest kind of spike
+through that fool-scheme--plumb through its heart. 
+Tomorrow a certain man will come to me--oh, I could
+almost tell you the kind of neck-tie he'll wear--and
+he'll put up his bluff to me, and I'll hear him out--and
+then--then I'll let the floor drop out from under him."
+
+"Aye!" said Semple, with relish. 
+
+"Stay and dine with me tonight," Thorpe impulsively suggested,
+"and we'll go to some Music Hall afterward.  There's a
+knock-about pantomime outfit at the Canterbury--Martinetti
+I think the name is--that's damned good.  You get plenty
+of laugh, and no tiresome blab to listen to.  The older
+I get, the more I think of people that keep their mouths shut."
+
+"Aye," observed Semple again. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+IN the Board Room, next day, Thorpe awaited the coming
+of Lord Plowden with the serene confidence of a prophet
+who not only knows that he is inspired, but has had an
+illicit glimpse into the workings of the machinery of events. 
+
+He sat motionless at his desk, like a big spider for who
+time has no meaning.  Before him lay two newspapers,
+folded so as to expose paragraphs heavily indicated
+by blue pencil-marks. They were not financial journals,
+and for that reason it was improbable that he would
+have seen these paragraphs, if the Secretary of the
+Company had not marked them, and brought them to him. 
+That official had been vastly more fluttered by them than
+he found it possible to be.  In slightly-varying language,
+these two items embedded in so-called money articles
+reported the rumour that a charge of fraud had arisen
+in connection with the Rubber Consols corner, and that
+sensational disclosures were believed to be impending. 
+
+Thorpe looked with a dulled, abstracted eye at these papers,
+lying on the desk, and especially at the blue pencil-lines
+upon them, as he pondered many things.  Their statement,
+thus scattered broadcast to the public, seemed at
+once to introduce a new element into the situation,
+and to leave it unchanged.  That influence of some sort
+had been exerted to get this story into these papers,
+it did not occur to him for an instant to doubt. 
+To his view, all things that were put into papers
+were put there for a purpose--it would express his
+notion more clearly, perhaps, to say for a price. 
+Of the methods of Fleet Street, he was profoundly ignorant,
+but his impressions of them were all cynical. 
+Upon reflection, however, it seemed unlikely to him that
+Lord Plowden had secured the insertion of these rumours. 
+So far as Thorpe could fathom that nobleman's game,
+its aims would not be served by premature publicity
+of this kind.
+
+Gradually, the outlines of a more probable combination took
+shape in his thoughts.  There were left in the grip of the
+"corner" now only two victims,--Rostocker and Aronson. 
+They owed this invidious differentiation to a number
+of causes: they had been the chief sellers of stock,
+being between them responsible for the delivery of
+8,500 Rubber Consols shares, which they could not get;
+they were men of larger fortune than the other "shorts,"
+and therefore could with safety be squeezed longest;
+what was fortunate for him under the circumstances,
+they were the two men against whom Thorpe's personal grudge
+seemed able to maintain itself most easily. 
+
+For these reasons, they had already been mulcted in differences
+to the extent of, in round numbers, 165,000 pounds. 
+On the morrow, the twelfth of September, it was Thorpe's
+plan to allow them to buy in the shares they needed,
+at 22 or 23 pounds per share--which would take from them
+nearly 200,000 pounds more.  He had satisfied himself
+that they could, and would if necessary, pay this enormous
+ransom for their final escape from the "corner." Partly
+because it was not so certain that they could pay more,
+partly because he was satiated with spoils and tired
+of the strain of the business, he had decided to permit
+this escape. 
+
+He realized now, however, that they on their side had
+planned to escape without paying any final ransom at all. 
+
+That was clearly the meaning of these paragraphs,
+and of the representations which had yesterday been made
+to the Stock Exchange Committee.  He had additional
+knowledge today of the character of these representations. 
+Nothing definite had been alleged, but some of the members
+of the Committee had been informally notified, so Semple
+had this morning learned, that a specific charge of fraud,
+supported by unanswerable proof, was to be brought
+against the Rubber Consols management on the morrow. 
+Thorpe reasoned out now, step by step, what that meant. 
+Lord Plowden had sought out Rostocker and Aronson, and had
+told them that he had it in his power ignominiously to break
+the "corner." He could hardly have told them the exact nature
+of his power, because until he should have seen Tavender
+he did not himself know what it was.  But he had given
+them to understand that he could prove fraud, and they,
+scenting in this the chance of saving 200,000 pounds,
+and seeing that time was so terribly short, had hastened
+to the Committeemen with this vague declaration that,
+on the morrow, they could prove--they did not precisely
+know what.  Yes--plainly enough--that was what had happened. 
+And it would be these two Jew "wreckers," eager to invest
+their speculative notification to the Committee with as much
+of an air of formality as possible, who had caused the
+allusions to it to be published in these papers. 
+
+Thorpe's lustreless eye suddenly twinkled with mirth as he
+reached this conclusion; his heavy face brightened into a grin
+of delight.  A vision of Lord Plowden's absurd predicament
+rose vividly before him, and he chuckled aloud at it. 
+
+It seemed only the most natural thing in the world that,
+at this instant, a clerk should open the door and nod
+with meaning to the master.  The visitor whom he had warned
+the people in the outer office he expected, had arrived. 
+Thorpe was still laughing to himself when Lord Plowden entered. 
+
+"Hallo! How d'ye do!" he called out to him from where he
+sat at his desk. 
+
+The hilarity of the manner into which he had been betrayed,
+upon the instant surprised and rather confused him. 
+He had not been altogether clear as to how he should
+receive Plowden, but certainly a warm joviality had not
+occurred to him as appropriate. 
+
+The nobleman was even more taken aback.  He stared
+momentarily at the big man's beaming mask, and then,
+with nervous awkwardness, executed a series of changes
+in his own facial expression and demeanour.  He flushed red,
+opened his lips to say "Ah!" and then twisted them into
+a doubting and seemingly painful smile.  He looked with
+very bright-eyed intentness at Thorpe, as he advanced,
+and somewhat spasmodically put out his hand.
+
+It occurred to Thorpe not to see this hand.  "How are you!"
+he repeated in a more mechanical voice, and withdrew
+his smile.  Lord Plowden fidgeted on his feet for a brief,
+embarrassed interval before the desk, and then dropped
+into a chair at its side.  With a deliberate effort
+at nonchalance, he crossed his legs, and caressed the
+ankle on his knee with a careless hand.  "Anything new?"
+he asked. 
+
+Thorpe lolled back in his arm-chair. "I'm going to be able
+to get away in a few days' time," he said, indifferently. 
+"I expect to finally wind up the business on the Stock
+Exchange tomorrow."
+
+"Ah--yes," commented Plowden, vacantly.  He seemed to be
+searching after thoughts which had wandered astray. 
+"Yes--of course."
+
+"Yes--of course," Thorpe said after him, with a latent
+touch of significance.
+
+The other looked up quickly, then glanced away again. 
+"It's all going as you expected, is it?" he asked. 
+
+"Better than I expected," Thorpe told him, energetically. 
+"Much better than anybody expected."
+
+"Hah!" said Plowden.  After a moment's reflection he went
+on hesitatingly: "I didn't know.  I saw something in one of
+the papers this morning,--one of the money articles,--which
+spoke as if there were some doubt about the result. 
+That's why I called."
+
+"Well--it's damned good of you to come round, and show such
+a friendly interest." Thorpe's voice seemed candid enough,
+but there was an enigmatic something in his glance
+which aroused the other's distrust. 
+
+"I'm afraid you don't take very much stock in the
+'friendly interest,'" he said, with a constrained little laugh. 
+
+"I'm not taking stock in anything new just now,"
+replied Thorpe, lending himself lazily to the other's metaphor. 
+"I'm loaded up to the gunnels already."
+
+A minute of rather oppressive silence ensued. 
+Then Plowden ventured upon an opening.  "All the same,
+it WAS with an idea of,--perhaps being of use to you,--
+that I came here," he affirmed.  "In what way?" Thorpe put
+the query almost listlessly. 
+
+Lord Plowden turned his hands and let his dark
+eyes sparkle in a gesture of amiable uncertainty. 
+"That depended upon what was needed.  I got the impression
+that you were in trouble--the paper spoke as if there
+were no doubt of it--and I imagined that quite probably
+you would be glad to talk with me about it."
+
+"Quite right," said Thorpe.  "So I should."
+
+This comprehensive assurance seemed not, however,
+to facilitate conversation.  The nobleman looked at
+the pattern of the sock on the ankle he was nursing,
+and knitted his brows in perplexity.  "What if the Committee
+of the Stock Exchange decide to interfere?" he asked at last. 
+
+"Oh, that would knock me sky-high," Thorpe admitted. 
+
+"Approximately, how much may one take 'sky-high' to mean?"
+
+Thorpe appeared to calculate.  "Almost anything up
+to a quarter of a million," he answered. 
+
+"Hah!" said Lord Plowden again.  "Well--I understand--
+I'm given to understand--that very likely that is what
+the Committee will decide."
+
+"Does it say that in the papers?" asked Thorpe. 
+He essayed an effect of concern.  "Where did you see that?"
+
+"I didn't see it," the other explained.  "It--it came
+to me."
+
+"God!" said Thorpe.  "That'll be awful! But are you
+really in earnest? Is that what you hear? And does it
+come at all straight?"
+
+Lord Plowden nodded portentously.  "Absolutely straight,"
+he said, with gravity. 
+
+Thorpe, after a momentary stare of what looked like
+bewilderment, was seen to clutch at a straw.  "But what
+was it you were saying?" he demanded, with eagerness. 
+"You talked about help--a minute ago.  Did you mean
+it? Have you got a plan? Is there something that you can do?"
+
+Plowden weighed his words.  "It would be necessary
+to have a very complete understanding," he remarked. 
+
+"Whatever you like," exclaimed the other. 
+
+"Pardon me--it would have to be a good deal more definite
+than that," Plowden declared.  "A 'burnt child'--you know."
+
+The big man tapped musingly with his finger-nails on
+the desk.  "We won't quarrel about that," he said. 
+"But what I'd like to know first,--you needn't give
+anything away that you don't want to,--but what's your
+plan? You say that they've got me in a hole, and that you
+can get me out." "In effect--yes."
+
+"But how do you know that I can't get myself out? What
+do you know about the whole thing anyway? Supposing I
+tell you that I laugh at it--that there's no more ground
+for raising the suspicion of fraud than there is for--for
+suspecting that you've got wings and can fly."
+
+"I--I don't think you'll tell me that," said Plowden, placidly. 
+
+"Well then, supposing I don't tell you that,"
+the other resumed, argumentatively.  "Supposing I say
+instead that it can't be proved.  If the Committee doesn't
+have proof NOW,--within twenty-one or twenty-two hours,--
+they can't do anything at ail.  Tomorrow is settling day. 
+All along, I've said I would wind up the thing tomorrow.
+The market-price has been made for me by the jobbers
+yesterday and today.  I'm all ready to end the whole
+business tomorrow--close it all out.  And after that's done,
+what do I care about the Stock Exchange Committee? They
+can investigate and be damned! What could they do to me?"
+
+"I think a man can always be arrested and indicted,
+and sent to penal servitude," said Lord Plowden, with a
+certain solemnity of tone.  "There are even well-known
+instances of extradition."
+
+Thorpe buried his chin deep in his collar, and regarded
+his companion with a fixed gaze, in which the latter
+detected signs of trepidation.  "But about the
+Committee--and tomorrow," he said slowly.  "What do you say
+about that? How can they act in that lightning fashion?
+And even if proofs could be got, how do you suppose
+they are to be got on the drop of the hat, at a minute's notice?"
+
+"The case is of sufficient importance to warrant a
+special meeting tomorrow morning," the other rejoined.
+"One hour's notice, posted in the House, is sufficient,
+I believe.  Any three members of the Committee can call
+such a meeting, and I understand that seven make a quorum. 
+You will see that a meeting could be held at noon tomorrow,
+and within half an hour could make you a ruined man."
+
+"I don't know--would you call it quite ruined?"
+commented Thorpe.  "I should still have a few sovereigns
+to go on with."
+
+"A criminal prosecution would be practically inevitable--after
+such a disclosure," Plowden reminded him, with augmented
+severity of tone. 
+
+"Don't mix the two things up," the other urged. 
+There seemed to the listener to be supplication in the voice. 
+"It's the action of the Committee that you said you
+could influence.  That's what we were talking about. 
+You say there will be a special meeting at noon tomorrow----
+
+"I said there could be one," Plowden corrected him.
+
+"All right.  There CAN be one.  And do you say that there
+can be proof,--proof against me of fraud,--produced
+at that meeting?"
+
+"Yes--I say that," the nobleman affirmed, quietly. 
+
+"And further still--do you say that it rests with you
+whether that proof shall be produced or not?"
+
+Lord Plowden looked into the impassive, deep-eyed gaze
+which covered him, and looked away from it again. 
+"I haven't put it in just that form," he said, hesitatingly. 
+"But in essentials--yes, that may be taken as true."
+
+"And what is your figure? How much do you want for holding
+this proof of yours back, and letting me finish scooping
+the money of your Hebrew friends Aronson and Rostocker?"
+
+The peer raised his head, and shot a keenly enquiring
+glance at the other.  "Are they my friends?" he asked,
+with challenging insolence. 
+
+"I'm bound to assume that you have been dealing with them,
+just as you are dealing with me." Thorpe explained
+his meaning dispassionately, as if the transaction were
+entirely commonplace.  "You tell them that you're in a position
+to produce proof against me, and ask them what they'll give
+for it.  Then naturally enough you come to me, and ask
+what I'll be willing to pay to have the proof suppressed. 
+I quite understand that I must bid against these men--and
+of course I take it for granted that, since you know
+their figure, you've arranged in your mind what mine is
+to be.  I quite understand, too, that I am to pay more
+than they have offered.  That is on account of 'friendly interest.'"
+
+"Since you allude to it," Lord Plowden observed,
+with a certain calm loftiness of tone, "there is no harm
+in saying that you WILL pay something on that old score. 
+Once you thrust the promise of something like a hundred
+thousand pounds positively upon me.  You insisted on my
+believing it, and I did so, like a fool.  I came to you
+to redeem the promise, and you laughed in my face. 
+Very well.  It is my turn now.  I hold the whip-hand, and I
+should be an ass not to remember things.  I shall want
+that entire one hundred thousand pounds from you, and fifty
+thousand added to it 'on account of the 'friendly interest,'
+as you so intelligently expressed it."
+
+Thorpe's chin burrowed still deeper upon his breast. 
+"It's an outrage," he said with feeling.  Then he added,
+in tones of dejected resignation: "When will you want it?"
+
+"At the moment when the payments of Rostocker and Aronson are made
+to you, or to your bankers or agents," Lord Plowden replied,
+with prepared facility.  He had evidently given much thought
+to this part of the proceedings.  "And of course I shall
+expect you to draw up now an agreement to that effect. 
+I happen to have a stamped paper with me this time. 
+And if you don't mind, we will have it properly witnessed--
+this time."
+
+Thorpe looked at him with a disconcertingly leaden stare,
+the while he thought over what had been proposed.
+"That's right enough," he announced at last, "but I shall
+expect you to do some writing too.  Since we're dealing
+on this basis, there must be no doubt about the guarantee
+that you will perform your part of the contract."
+
+"The performance itself, since payment is conditional
+upon it--" began Plowden, but the other interrupted him. 
+
+"No, I want something better than that.  Here--give me your
+stamped paper." He took the bluish sheet, and, without hesitation,
+wrote several lines rapidly.  "Here--this is my promise,"
+he said, "to pay you 150,000 pounds, upon your satisfactory
+performance of a certain undertaking to be separately
+nominated in a document called 'A,' which we will jointly
+draw up and agree to and sign, and deposit wherever
+you like--for safe keeping.  Now, if you'll sit here,
+and write out for me a similar thing--that in consideration
+of my promise of 150,000 pounds, you covenant to perform
+the undertaking to be nominated in the document 'A'--and so on."
+
+Lord Plowden treated as a matter of course the ready and
+business-like suggestion of the other.  Taking his place
+at the desk in turn, he wrote out what had been suggested. 
+Thorpe touched a bell, and the clerk who came in
+perfunctorily attested the signatures upon both papers. 
+Each principal folded and pocketed the pledge of the other. 
+
+"Now," said Thorpe, when he had seated himself again
+at the desk, "we are all right so far as protection
+against each other goes.  If you don't mind, I will draw
+up a suggestion of what the separate document 'A' should
+set forth.  If you don't like it, you can write one."
+
+He took more time to this task, frowning laboriously over
+the fresh sheet of foolscap, and screening from observation
+with his hand what he was writing.  Finally, the task
+seemed finished to his mind.  He took up the paper,
+glanced through it once more, and handed it in silence
+to the other.
+
+In silence also, and with an expression of arrested attention,
+Lord Plowden read these lines:
+
+"The undertaking referred to in the two documents of even date,
+signed respectively by Lord Plowden and Stormont Thorpe,
+is to the effect that at some hour between eleven A.M.
+and three P.M. of September 12th, instant, Lord Plowden
+shall produce before a special meeting of the Committee
+of the Stock Exchange, the person of one Jerome P. Tavender,
+to explain to said Committee his share in the blackmailing
+scheme of which Lord Plowden, over his own signature,
+has furnished documentary evidence."
+
+The nobleman continued to look down at the paper, after the
+power to hold it without shaking had left his hand. 
+There came into his face, mingling with and vitiating
+its rich natural hues of health, a kind of grey shadow. 
+It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint. 
+He did not lift his eyes. 
+
+Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation
+of his trick with boisterous and scornful mirth. 
+Even while the victim was deciphering the fatal paper,
+he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst
+out into bitter laughter.  But now there was something
+in the aspect of Plowden's collapse which seemed to forbid
+triumphant derision.  He was taking his blow so like a
+gentleman,--ashen-pale and quivering, but clinging to a
+high-bred dignity of silence,--that the impulse to exhibit
+equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant. 
+
+"Well--you see how little business you've got,
+setting yourself to buck against a grown-up man."
+
+He offered the observation in the tone of the school-
+teacher, affectedly philosophical but secretly jubilant,
+who harangues a defeated and humiliated urchin upon his folly. 
+
+"Oh, chuck it!" growled Lord Plowden, staring still
+at the calamitous paper. 
+
+Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence
+was after all most decorous.  He put his feet up on
+the corner of the desk, and tipping back his chair,
+surveyed the discomfited Viscount impassively. 
+He forbore even to smile. 
+
+"So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!"
+Lord Plowden had found words at last.  As he spoke,
+he lifted his face, and made a show of looking the other
+in the eye. 
+
+"Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even,
+that you haven't an inkling of," Thorpe told him,
+lightly.  "I've been watching every move you've made,
+seeing further ahead in your own game than you did. 
+Why, it was too easy! It was like playing draughts
+with a girl.  I knew you would come today, for example. 
+I told the people out there that I expected you."
+
+"Yes-s," said the other, with rueful bewilderment. 
+"You seem to have been rather on the spot--I confess."
+
+"On the spot? All over the place!" Thorpe lifted himself
+slightly in his chair, and put more animation into his voice. 
+
+"It's the mistake you people make!" he declared oracularly. 
+"You think that a man can come into the City without a penny,
+and form great combinations and carry through a great scheme,
+and wage a fight with the smartest set of scoundrels
+on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em, and make for
+himself a big fortune--and still be a fool! You imagine
+that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked
+by amateurs like yourself.  It's too ridiculous!"
+
+The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no
+malice had begun to spread through Plowden's consciousness. 
+It was almost more surprising to him than the revelation
+of his failure had been.  He accustomed himself to the
+thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept
+back into his glance.  He breathed more easily. 
+
+"You are right!" he admitted.  It cost him nothing to give
+a maximum of fervid conviction to the tone of his words. 
+The big brute's pride in his own brains and power was still
+his weakest point.  "You are right! I did play the fool. 
+And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first
+man in London to recognize the immense forces in you. 
+I said to you at the very outset, 'You are going to go far. 
+You are going to be a great man.' You remember that,
+don't you?"
+
+Thorpe nodded.  "Yes--I remember it."
+
+The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box
+from his pocket, and extracted a match.  "Do you mind?"
+he asked, and scarcely waiting for a token of reply,
+struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied
+it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. 
+The two men watched it curl and blacken after it had been
+tossed in the grate, without a word. 
+
+This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe
+the essentials of the situation.  He had allowed the talk
+to drift to a point where it became almost affable. 
+He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his feet
+firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity. 
+
+"It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me,
+"he said, in an altered, harsh tone, "but it was a
+fool-trick. That drunken old bum of a Tavender writes
+some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and he's
+a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength
+of what one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other
+clown means, you go and spend your money,--money I
+gave you, by the way,--in bringing Tavender over here. 
+You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using
+him against me for revenge and profit combined,
+or of peddling him to me for a still bigger profit. 
+You see it's all at my fingers' ends."
+
+Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent. 
+
+"Well then--Tavender arrives.  What do you do? Are you
+at the wharf to meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've
+set out to fight one of the smartest and strongest men
+in England, and I've got to keep every atom of wits about me,
+and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every point
+of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it!
+You snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson--Gafferson!--the
+mud-head of the earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf
+about with him in London, and bring him down by a slow
+train to your place in the evening.  My God! You've only
+got two clear days left to do the whole thing in--and you
+don't even come up to town to get ready for them! You
+send Gafferson--and he goes off to see a flower-show--
+Mother of Moses! think of it! a FLOWER-show!--and your
+Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll together,
+and talk over old times and arrange about new times,
+and so on, to our hearts' content.  Really, it's too
+easy! You make me tired!"
+
+The nobleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile. 
+"I confess to a certain degree of weariness myself,"
+he said, humbly. 
+
+Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion
+for a little.  "I may tell you that if you HAD got hold
+of Tavender," he decided to tell him, "he shouldn't
+have been of the faintest use to you.  I know what it
+was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn't understand
+it when he first told me, but afterwards I saw through
+it,--and it was merely a maudlin misapprehension of his. 
+He'd got three or four things all mixed up together. 
+You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd
+enjoy him at Hadlow House.  He smells of rum a hundred
+yards off.  What little brain he's got left is soaked in it. 
+The first time I was ever camping with him, I had to lick
+him for drinking the methylated spirits we were using with
+our tin stove.  Oh, you'd have liked him!"
+
+"Evidently," said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, "it was
+all a most unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake."
+With inspiration, he made bold to add: "The most amazing thing,
+though--to my mind--is that you don't seem--what shall
+I say?--particularly enraged with me about it."
+
+"Yes--that surprises me, too," Thorpe meditatively admitted. 
+"I was entitled to kill you--crush you to jelly. 
+Any other man I would.  But you,--I don't know,--I do funny
+things with you."
+
+"I wish you would give me a drink, now--as one of them,"
+Plowden ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry. 
+
+Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved
+across the room.  He set out upon the big official table
+in the middle, that mockingly pretentious reminder
+of a Board which never met, a decanter and two glasses
+and some recumbent, round-bottomed bottles.  He handed one
+of these last to Plowden, as the latter strolled toward the table. 
+
+"You know how to open these, don't you?" he said, languidly. 
+"Somehow I never could manage it."
+
+The nobleman submissively took the bottle, and picked
+with awkwardness at its wire and cork, and all at once
+achieved a premature and not over-successful explosion.
+He wiped his dripping cuff in silence, when the tumblers
+were supplied. 
+
+"Well--here's better luck to you next time," Thorpe said,
+lifting his glass.  The audacious irony of his words filled
+Plowden with an instant purpose. 
+
+"What on earth did you round on me in that way for,
+Thorpe--when I was here last?" He put the question with
+bravery enough, but at sight of the other's unresponsive
+face grew suddenly timorous aud explanatory.  "No man
+was ever more astounded in the world than I was.  To this
+day I'm as unable to account for it as a babe unborn. 
+What conceivable thing had I done to you?"
+
+Thorpe slowly thought of something that had not occurred
+to him before, and seized upon it with a certain satisfaction. 
+
+"That day that you took me shooting," he said, with the
+tone of one finally exposing a long-nursed grievance,
+"you stayed in bed for hours after you knew I was up and
+waiting for you--and when we went out, you had a servant
+to carry a chair for you, but I--by God!--I had to stand up."
+
+"Heavens above!" ejaculated Plowden, in unfeigned amazement. 
+
+"These are little things--mere trifles," continued Thorpe,
+dogmatically, "but with men of my temper and make-up those
+are just the things that aggravate and rankle and hurt. 
+Maybe it's foolish, but that's the kind of man I am. 
+You ought to have had the intelligence to see that--and
+not let these stupid little things happen to annoy me. 
+Why just think what you did.  I was going to do God
+knows what for you--make your fortune and everything
+else,--and you didn't show consideration enough for me
+to get out of bed at a decent hour--much less see to it
+that I had a chair if you were going to have one."
+
+"Upon my word, I can't tell how ashamed and sorry I am,"
+Lord Plowden assured him, with fervent contrition in
+his voice. 
+
+"Well, those are the things to guard against,"
+said Thorpe, approaching a dismissal of the subject. 
+"People who show consideration for me; people who take
+pains to do the little pleasant things for me, and see
+that I'm not annoyed and worried by trifles--they're
+the people that I, on my side, do the big things for. 
+I can be the best friend in the world, but only to those
+who show that they care for me, and do what they know
+I'll like.  I don't want toadies about me, but I do want
+people who feel bound to me, and are as keen about me
+and my feelings and interests as they are about their own."
+
+"It is delightfully feudal--all this," commented the nobleman,
+smilingly addressing the remark to nobody in particular. 
+Then he looked at Thorpe.  "Let me be one of them--one
+of the people you speak of," he said, with directness. 
+
+Thorpe returned his look with the good-natured
+beginnings of a grin.  "But what would you be good for?"
+he queried, in a bantering tone.  "People I have about
+me have to be of some use.  They require to have heads
+on their shoulders.  Why--just think what you've done. 
+I don't mean so much about your letting Tavender slip
+through your fingers--although that was about the worst I
+ever heard of.  But here in this room, at that desk there,
+you allowed me to bounce you into writing and signing
+a paper which you ought to have had your hand cut off
+rather than write, much less sign.  You come here trying
+to work the most difficult and dangerous kind of a
+bluff,--knowing all the while that the witness you depended
+entirely upon had disappeared, you hadn't the remotest
+idea where,--and you actually let me lead you into giving
+me your signature to your own declaration that you
+are blackmailing me! Thinking it all over--you know--I
+can't see that you would be of much help to me in the City."
+
+Lord Plowden joined perforce in the laughter with
+which the big man enjoyed his own pleasantry. 
+His mirth had some superficial signs of shamefacedness,
+but it was hopeful underneath.  "The City!" he echoed,
+with meaning.  "That's the curse of it.  What do I know
+about the City? What business have I in the City? As
+you said, I'm the amateur.  A strong man like you can
+make me seem any kind of a ridiculous fool he likes,
+with the turn of his hand.  I see that right enough. 
+But what am I to do? I have to make a shot at something. 
+I'm so rotten poor!"
+
+Thorpe had retired again behind the barrier of dull-
+eyed abstraction.  He seemed not to have heard this
+appealing explanation. 
+
+The other preserved silence in turn, and even made
+a pretence of looking at some pamphlets on the table,
+as a token of his boundless deference to the master's mood. 
+
+"I don't know.  I'll see," the big man muttered
+at last, doubtfully. 
+
+Lord Plowden felt warranted in taking an optimistic view
+of these vague words.  "It's awfully good of you"--
+he began, lamely, and then paused.  "I wonder,"--he took
+up a new thought with a more solicitous tone,--"I wonder
+if you would mind returning to me that idiotic paper I signed."
+
+Thorpe shook his head.  "Not just now, at any rate,"
+he said, still musingly.  With his head bowed, he took
+a few restless steps. 
+
+"But you are going to--to help me!" the other remarked,
+with an air of confidence.  He had taken up his hat,
+in response to the tacit warning of his companion's manner. 
+
+Thorpe looked at him curiously, and hesitated over
+his answer.  It was a surprising and almost unaccountable
+conclusion for the interview to have reached.  He was in
+some vague way ashamed of himself, but he was explicitly
+and contemptuously ashamed for Plowden, and the impulse
+to say so was strong within him.  This handsome young
+gentleman of title ought not to be escaping with this
+restored buoyancy of mien, and this complacency of spirit. 
+He had deserved to be punished with a heavy hand, and here
+he was blithely making certain of new benefits instead. 
+
+"I don't know--I'll see," Thorpe moodily repeated--and
+there was no more to be said. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+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. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+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. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people
+had made themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up. 
+
+It was a long time since he had liked himself and his
+surroundings so little.  The bed seemed all right to the eye,
+and even to the touch, but he had slept very badly in it,
+none the less.  The room was luxuriously furnished, as was
+the entire suite, but it was all strange and uncomfortable
+to his senses.  The operation of shaving and dressing
+in solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. 
+He regretted not having brought his man with him for
+this reason, and then, upon meditation, for other reasons. 
+A person of his position ought always to have a servant
+with him.  The hotel people must have been surprised at
+his travelling unattended--and the people at High Thorpe
+must also have thought it strange.  It flashed across
+his mind that no doubt his wife had most of all thought
+it strange.  How would she explain to herself his sudden,
+precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite
+naturally put an unpleasant construction upon it? It
+was bad enough to have to remember that they had parted
+in something like a tiff; he found it much worse to be
+fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning
+over his mysterious absence in her mind. 
+
+He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no
+overt signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant,
+passed out and made his way to the Embankment. 
+This had been a favourite walk of his in the old days--but
+he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye.
+It seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place
+by comparison with his former impressions of it. 
+The morning was grey-skied, but full of a hard quality
+of light, which brought out to the uncompromising
+uttermost the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. 
+The water was low, and from the mud and ooze of the
+ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the discoloured
+stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended
+his unaccustomed nostril.  A fitful, gusty wind was
+blowing from the east, and ever and again it gathered
+dust in eddying swoops from the roadway, and flung it in his face. 
+
+He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose,
+and with no very definite reflections.  It occurred to him
+that if his wife did impute to him some unworthy motive
+in stealing off to London, and made herself unhappy in doing
+so--that would at least provide the compensation of showing
+that she cared.  The thought, however, upon examination,
+contained very meagre elements of solace.  He could not in
+the least be sure about any of the workings of her mind. 
+There might be more or less annoyance mixed up this morning
+with the secret thoughts she had concerning him--or
+she might not be bothering her head about him at all. 
+This latter contingency had never presented itself
+so frankly to him before.  He looked hard at it, and saw
+more semblances of probability about it than he liked. 
+It might very well be that she was not thinking about him
+one way or the other. 
+
+A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need
+think about him pervaded his soul.  Who cared what he said
+or did or felt? The City had forgotten his very existence. 
+In the West End, only here and there some person might
+chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder
+who had married Lady Cressage.  Nowhere else in England,
+save one dull strip of agricultural blankness in a backward
+home county, was there a human being who knew anything
+whatever about him.  And this was his career! It was
+for this that he had planned that memorable campaign,
+and waged that amazing series of fortnightly battles,
+never missing victory, never failing at any point of the
+complicated strategy, and crowning it all with a culminating
+triumph which had been the wonder and admiration of the
+whole financial world! A few score of menials or interested
+inferiors bowed to him; he drove some good horses,
+and was attentively waited upon, and had a never-failing
+abundance of good things to eat and drink aud smoke. 
+Hardly anything more than that, when you came to think
+of it--and the passing usufruct of all these things could
+be enjoyed by any fool who had a ten-pound note in his
+pocket!
+
+What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had
+achieved power--and where was that power? What had he
+done with it? What COULD he do with it? He had an excess
+of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it command
+an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox,
+as he dimly perceived.  There existed only a narrow margin
+of advantage in favour of the rich man.  He could eat and
+drink a little more and a little better than the poor man;
+he could have better clothes, and lie abed later in the morning,
+and take life easier all round--but only within hard
+and fast bounds.  There was an ascertained limit beyond
+which the millionaire could no more stuff himself with food
+and wine than could the beggar.  It might be pleasant
+to take an added hour or two in bed in the morning,
+but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. 
+So it ran indefinitely--this thin selvedge of advantage
+which money could buy--with deprivation on the one side,
+and surfeit on the other.  Candidly, was it not true that
+more happiness lay in winning the way out of deprivation,
+than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The poor
+man succeeding in making himself rich--at numerous stages
+of the operation there might be made a moral snap-shot
+of the truly happy man.  But not after he had reached
+the top.  Then disintegration began at once.  The contrast
+between what he supposed he could do, and what he finds
+it possible to do, is too vast to be accepted with equanimity. 
+
+It must be said that after breakfast--a meal which he
+found in an Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness
+or opulence of pretension, and ate with an almost
+novel relish--Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy views
+of his position.  He still walked eastward, wandering into
+warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river,
+hitherto quite unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle,
+inconsequent fashion his meditations.  He established in
+his mind the proposition that since an excess of enjoyment
+was impossible--since one could not derive a great block
+of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites,
+but at the most could only gather a little from each--the
+desirable thing was to multiply as much as might be those
+tastes and whims and fancies which passed for appetites,
+and thus expand the area of possible gratification. 
+
+This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply
+itself to his individual needs with much facility. 
+What did he want to do that he had not done? It was
+difficult for him to say.  Perhaps it was chandlers'
+signs and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring
+preoccupation suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets,
+which raised the question of a yacht in his mind. 
+Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once dwelt
+with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it
+would still be full of attractions for him.  He liked
+the water, and the water liked him--and he was better able
+now than formerly to understand how luxurious existence
+can be made in modern private ships.  He decided that he
+would have a yacht--and then perceived that the decision
+brought no exhilaration.  He was no happier than before. 
+He could decide that he would have anything he chose
+to name--and it would in no whit lighten his mood. 
+The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively
+as spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired
+of the one as he had of the other?
+
+He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something
+he had never admitted to himself.  Was he indeed
+tired of High Thorpe? He had assured his wife to the
+contrary yesterday.  He reiterated the assurance to his own
+mind now.  It was instead that he was tired of himself. 
+He carried a weariness about with him, which looked at
+everything with apathetic eyes, and cared for nothing. 
+Some nameless paralysis had settled upon his capacity
+for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it. 
+He had had the power to expand his life to the farthest
+boundaries of rich experience and sensation, and he had
+deliberately shrunk into a sort of herbaceous nonentity,
+whom nobody knew or cared about.  He might have had London
+at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis
+might mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think
+of nothing better than that it should send old Kervick
+to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes
+and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself. 
+
+Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide,
+he presently came into a part of the City which had a certain
+familiarity for him.  He walked up St. Swithin's Lane,
+looking at the strange forms of foreign fruit exposed
+at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting
+recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. 
+Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open
+gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial,
+heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond. 
+Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of
+the porches.  The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of
+this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter
+in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it;
+they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied smugness--of
+orderly but altogether unillumined routine.  Nothing could
+be more commonplace to the eye. 
+
+Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before,
+what mysterious marvels of power had lurked hidden
+behind those conventional portals! Within those doors,
+in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to
+direct the movements of the greatest force the world had
+ever known.  They and their cousins in Paris and Frankfort,
+or wherever they lived, between them wielded a vaster
+authority than all the Parliaments of the earth. 
+They could change a government, or crush the aspirations
+of a whole people, or decide a question of peace or war,
+by the silent dictum of their little family council. 
+He remembered now how he had stood on this same spot,
+and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of
+dull houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to
+be a Rothschild--and that was only a little over a year ago!
+
+There was no sense of fascination whatever in his
+present gaze.  He found himself regarding instead,
+with a kind of detached curiosity, the little knot of men
+in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the doorway. 
+It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was
+proceeding within.  One of these persons whom he beheld
+might be a Rothschild, for aught he knew; at any rate,
+it was presumable that some of them were on the premises. 
+He had heard it said that the very head of the house listened
+to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon,
+and interrupted his conversations with the most important
+of non-commercial callers, to make or refuse bargains
+in shares offered by brokers who came in.  What impulse
+lay behind this extraordinary devotion to labour? Toward
+what conceivable goal could it be striving?
+
+To work hard and risk great things for the possession
+of a fortune, in order to enjoy it afterward--he could
+understand how that attracted men.  But to possess
+already the biggest of human fortunes, and still work--
+that baffled him.  He wished he knew some of those men
+in there, especially if they belonged to the place. 
+It would be wonderfully interesting to get at the inner
+point of view of New Court. 
+
+A little later, in Colin Semple's office, he sat down to
+await the coming of that gentleman.  "Then he doesn't get
+here so early nowadays?" he suggested to the head-clerk who,
+with instant recognition and exaggerated deference,
+had ushered him into this furthermost private room. 
+It pleased him to assume that prosperity had relaxed the
+Scotchman's vigilance. 
+
+"Oh yes, sir," the clerk replied.  "A bit earlier if anything,
+as a rule.  But I think he is stopping at his solicitors
+on his way to the City.  I hope you are very well, sir."
+
+"Yes--I'm very fit--thanks," Thorpe said, listlessly,
+and the other left him. 
+
+Mr. Semple, when at last he arrived, bustled into
+the room with unaffected gratification at the news
+he had heard without.  "Well, well, Thorpe man!"
+he cried, and shook hands cordially.  "This is fine!
+If I'd only known you were in town! Why wouldn't you
+have told me you were coming? I'd never have kept you waiting."
+
+Thorpe laughed wearily.  "I hardly knew I was in town myself. 
+I only ran up last night.  I thought it would amuse me
+to have a look round--but things seem as dull as ditchwater."
+
+"Oh no," said Semple, "the autumn is opening verra
+well indeed.  There are more new companies, and a better
+public subscription all round, than for any first
+week of October I remember.  Westralians appear bad
+on the face of things, it's true--but don't believe
+all you hear of them.  There's more than the suspicion
+of a 'rig' there.  Besides, you haven't a penny in them."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of that," Thorpe told him,
+with comprehensive vagueness.  "Well, I suppose
+you're still coining money," he observed, after a pause.
+
+"Keeping along--keeping along," the broker replied,
+cheerfully.  "I canna complain." Thorpe looked at him with a
+meditative frown.  "Well, what are you going to do with it,
+after you've got it?" he demanded, almost with sharpness. 
+
+The Scotchman, after a surprised instant, smiled.  "Oh, I'll
+just keep my hands on it," he assured him, lightly. 
+
+"That isn't what I mean," Thorpe said, groping after what
+he did mean, with sullen tenacity, among his thoughts. 
+His large, heavy face exhibited a depressed gravity
+which attracted the other's attention. 
+
+"What's the matter?" Semple asked quickly.  "Has anything
+gone wrong with you?"
+
+Thorpe slowly shook his head.  "What better off do you
+think you'll be with six figures than you are with five?"
+he pursued, with dogmatic insistence. 
+
+Semple shrugged his shoulders.  He seemed to have grown
+much brighter and gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. 
+Apparently he was somewhat stouter, and certainly there was
+a mellowed softening of his sharp glance and shrewd smile. 
+It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat nonplussed him,
+but his good-humour was unflagging. 
+
+"It's the way we're taught at school," he hazarded, genially. 
+"In all the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six."
+
+"They're wrong," Thorpe declared, and then consented
+to laugh in a grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial
+confession of puzzlement.  "What I mean is--what's the good
+of piling up money, while you can't pile up the enjoyments
+it will buy? What will a million give you, that the fifth
+of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?"
+
+"Aye," said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. 
+"So you've come to that frame of mind, have you?
+Why does a man go on and shoot five hundred pheasants,
+when he can eat only one?"
+
+"Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing
+more to say," Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. 
+"I've always thought of you as a man like myself,
+who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy himself."
+
+The Scotchman laughed joyously.  "Enjoy myself! Like you!"
+he cried.  "Man, you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's
+funeral! What's come over you? I know what it is. 
+You go and take a course of German waters----"
+
+"Oh, that be damned!" Thorpe objected, gloomily.  "I tell
+you I'm all right.  Only--only--God! I've a great notion
+to go and get drunk."
+
+Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic
+expression.  "I'm sorry you're so hipped," he said,
+in gentle tones.  "It can't be more than some passing whimsy. 
+You're in no real trouble, are you?--no family trouble?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head.  "The whole thing is rot!"
+he affirmed, enigmatically.
+
+"What whole thing?" The broker perched on the edge
+of his desk, and with patient philosophy took him up. 
+"Do you mean eighty thousand a year is rot? That depends
+upon the man who has it."
+
+"I know that well enough," broke in the other, heavily. 
+"That's what I'm kicking about.  I'm no good!"
+
+Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips
+in reflection.  "That's not the case," he observed with
+argumentative calmness.  "You're a great deal of good. 
+I'm not so sure that what you've been trying to do is
+any good, though.  Come!--I read you like large print. 
+You've set out to live the life of a rich country
+squire--and it hasn't come off.  It couldn't come off! I
+never believed it would.  You haven't the taste for it
+inbred in your bones.  You haven't the thousand little
+habits and interests that they take in with their
+mother's milk, and that make such a life possible.
+When you look at a hedge, you don't think of it as
+something to worry live animals out of.  When you see
+one of your labourers, you don't care who his father was,
+or which dairymaid his uncle ought to have married,
+if he had wanted to get a certain cottage.  You don't want
+to know the name of everybody whose roof you can see;
+much less could you remember them, and talk about them,
+and listen to gossip about them, year after year. 
+It isn't a passion in your blood to ride to hounds,
+and to shoot, and all that.  It doesn't come to you by
+tradition--and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might
+be a substitute for tradition.  What are you doing in
+the country, then? Just eating too much, and sitting about,
+and getting fat and stupid.  If you want the truth,
+there it is for you."
+
+Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon
+reflection to the view that this was the truth. 
+"That's all right, as far as it goes," he assented,
+with hesitation.  "But what the hell else is there?"
+
+The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis
+to drop it in an incomplete state.  "A year ago," he went on,
+"you had won your victories like a veritable Napoleon. 
+You had everything in your own hands; Napoleon himself was
+not more the master of what he saw about him than you were. 
+And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired
+yourself to your Elba.  It wasn't that you were beaten
+and driven there by others; you went of your own accord. 
+Have you ever thought, Thorpe, of this? Napoleon was
+the greatest man of his age--one of the greatest men
+of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred other ways. 
+He spent the last six years of his life at St. Helena--in
+excellent health and with companions that he talked
+freely to--and in all the extraordinarily copious reports
+of his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence
+worth repeating.  If you read it, you'll see he talked
+like a dull, ordinary body.  The greatness had entirely
+evaporated from him, the moment he was put on an island
+where he had nothing to do."
+
+"Yes-s," said Thorpe, thoughtfully.  He accepted the
+application without any qualms about the splendour of the
+comparison it rested upon.  He had done the great things,
+just as Semple said, and there was no room for false modesty
+about them in his mind.  "The trouble is," he began,
+"that I did what I had always thought I wanted to do most. 
+I was quite certain in my mind that that was what I wanted. 
+And if we say now that I was wrong--if we admit that that
+wasn't what I really wanted--why then, God knows what it
+is I DO want.  I'll be hanged if I do!"
+
+"Come back to the City," Semple told him.  "That's where
+you belong."
+
+"No--no!" Thorpe spoke with emphasis.  "That's where
+you're all off.  I don't belong in the City at all. 
+I hate the whole outfit.  What the devil amusement would
+it be to me to take other men's money away from them?
+I'd be wanting all the while to give it back to them. 
+And certainly I wouldn't get any fun out of their taking
+my money away from me.  Besides, it doesn't entertain me. 
+I've no taste at all for it.  I never look at a financial
+paper now.  I could no more interest myself in all that
+stuff again than I could fly.  That's the hell of it--to be
+interested in anything."
+
+"Go in for politics," the other suggested, with less warmth. 
+
+"Yes, I know," Thorpe commented, with a lingering tone. 
+"Perhaps I ought to think more about that.  By the way,
+what's Plowden doing? I've lost all track of him."
+
+"Abroad somewhere, I fancy," Semple replied.  His manner
+exhibited a profound indifference.  "When his mother
+died he came into something--I don't know how much. 
+I don't think I've seen him since--and that must have been
+six months and more ago."
+
+"Yes. I heard about it at the time," the other said. 
+"It must be about that.  His sister and brother--the
+young Plowdens--they're coming to us at the end of
+the week, I believe.  You didn't hit it off particularly
+with Plowden, eh?"
+
+Semple emitted a contemptuous little laugh.  "I did
+not quarrel with him--if you mean that," he said,
+"but even to please you, Thorpe, I couldn't bring myself
+to put my back into the job of making money for him. 
+He was treated fairly--even generously, d'ye mind. 
+I should think, all told, he had some thirty thousand
+pounds for his shares, and that's a hundred times as much
+as I had a pleasure in seeing him get.  Each man can
+wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand
+another man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the
+chance came."
+
+"THAT'S all right," Thorpe assured him, easily.  "I never
+told you that he was any good.  I merely felt like giving
+him a leg up--because really at the start he was of use
+to me.  I did owe him something....It was at his house
+that I met my wife."
+
+"Aye," said Semple, with dispassionate brevity. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where
+the busy broker, who had walked out with him,
+obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could think
+of no one else in the City whom he desired to see. 
+A call upon his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion
+of extremely pleasant courtesy by those affable people,
+but upon reflection it seemed scarcely worth the trouble. 
+
+He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long
+stretch of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion,
+turning off when the whim seized him into odd courts and
+alley-ways to see what they were like.  After luncheon,
+he continued his ramble, passing at last from St. Giles,
+through avenues which had not existed in the London
+of his boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials. 
+Here also the landmarks seemed all changed, but there
+was still enough ostentatious squalor and disorder
+to identify the district.  He observed it and its
+inhabitants with a certain new curiosity.  A notable
+alteration for the better had come over his spirits. 
+It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it might
+be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple,
+that had dissipated his gloom.  At all events it was
+gone--and he strolled along in quite placid contentment,
+taking in the panorama of London's more intimate life with
+the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh country eye. 
+
+He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much
+about the spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying
+observation as he had not supposed it possible to do. 
+He surrendered himself to the experience with a novel
+sense of having found something worth while--and
+found it, moreover, under his very nose.  In some dull,
+meaningless fashion he had always known this part
+of London, and been familiar with its external aspects. 
+Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him
+of seeing it all in a different way.  The objects he beheld,
+inanimate and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. 
+His mind was stirred pleasurably by the things they said
+to him. 
+
+He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed;
+at the barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up
+the side-streets; at the coarse-haired, bare-headed
+girls and women standing about in their shawls and big
+white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or
+about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts;
+at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against
+the accustomed background of the public-house corner,
+with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills
+in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts,
+sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the
+near view as some survival from the age of mammoths,
+which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over
+the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the
+blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse;
+at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human
+appeal to him--faces blurred with drink, faces pallid
+with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension
+of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow
+with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were,
+into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely
+seemed alive to him before. 
+
+Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his
+sister's book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock
+exposed on the shelf and stands outside, and he looked stonily
+at the great man; it was evident that he was as far from
+suspecting his greatness as his relationship.  It pleased
+Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another,
+and pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch
+him hard.  He had almost the temptation to covertly slip
+a volume into his pocket, and see what the lad would do. 
+It was remarkable, he reflected with satisfaction--this
+new capacity within him to find drama in trifles. 
+
+There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd
+squabble he had had with his sister about the sign overhead. 
+He stepped back a few paces and looked up at it.
+There were the old words--"Thorpe, Bookseller"--right enough,
+but they seemed to stand forth with a novel prominence. 
+Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been repainted. 
+At this he laughed aloud.  The details of the episode
+came back to him now.  For some reason, or no reason
+at all--he could not now imagine what on earth could
+have prompted him--he had last spring caused his sister
+to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney,
+should be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. 
+It was to Julia that he had confided this mission,
+and it was Julia who, in a round-about way, had disclosed
+to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do
+nothing of the sort.  He laughed again at the added
+defiance that this refurbishing of the old sign expressed,
+and still was grinning broadly as he entered the shop
+and pushed his way along to the rear. 
+
+She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever
+since he could remember her--tall, placid, dull-eyed,
+self-sufficient, exhaling as it were a kind of stubborn
+yet competent listlessness.  Her long, mannish countenance
+expressed an undoubted interest in his presence, when she
+recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it
+was pleased or otherwise.  In their infrequent latter-day
+encounters he had dropped the habit of kissing her,
+and there was certainly no hint in her manner of expecting,
+much less inviting, its renewal now--but upon a sudden
+impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her
+gaunt waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek. 
+
+Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully
+from his embrace, was plain enough.  "Well!" she exclaimed
+vaguely, and then looked at him.  "You're getting fatter."
+
+"No I'm not," he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging
+to an important topic.  "People think I am--but it's
+merely the looseness of these clothes.  There's really
+no difference since I was here last."
+
+The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment
+that this last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put
+it into words.  "Let's see--that was just before Christmas,
+wasn't it?" he said. 
+
+"Something like that," she responded.  "You were going
+to get married in a week or two, I remember, and THAT
+was in January, wasn't it? I was taking stock, I know."
+
+He nodded in turn.  The thought that his only sister recalled
+his marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary
+or a bank-holiday, and held herself implacably aloof from
+all contact with his domestic life, annoyed him afresh. 
+"You're an awful goat, not to come near us," he felt impelled,
+in brotherly frankness, to tell her. 
+
+She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little,
+in a gesture which it flashed across him his own mirror
+might often have recorded.  "I thought that was all settled
+and done with long ago," she said, moodily. 
+
+"Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou," he observed,
+with reassuring kindness of tone.  "I never felt so much
+like being nice to you in my life."
+
+She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him
+with a heavy new fixity of gaze.  No verbal comment,
+apparently, occurred to her. 
+
+"Julia and Alfred all right?" he queried, cheerfully. 
+
+"I daresay," she made brief answer. 
+
+"But they write to you, don't they?"
+
+"SHE does--sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves
+very well, from what she says."
+
+"She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,"
+he told her, in tones of confidential reproach. 
+
+"Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say,"
+she answered, as if the explanation were ample. 
+
+The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf,
+where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his
+Continental student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or
+less colourable pretext of learning the language, might enjoy
+the mingled freedom and occupation of a home of her own. 
+They had taken a house for the summer and autumn, and would
+do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for the winter. 
+
+"What I would really have liked," Thorpe confided to his
+sister now, "was to have had them both live with me. 
+They would have been as welcome as the day is long. 
+I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if he's
+set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad. 
+Even the best English artists, he says, do that at
+the beginning.  So it was all right for him to go. 
+But Julia--it was different with her--I was rather keen
+about her staying.  My wife was just as keen as I was. 
+She took the greatest fancy to Julia from the very start--and
+so far as I could see, Julia liked her all right. 
+In fact, I thought Julia would want to stay--but somehow
+she didn't."
+
+"She always spoke very highly of your wife," Mrs. Dabney
+affirmed with judicial fairness.  "I think she does
+like her very much."
+
+"Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among
+those Dutchmen for, when one of the best houses in England
+was open to her?" Thorpe demanded. 
+
+"You mustn't ask me," her mother responded.  Her tone
+seemed to carry the suggestion that by silence she could
+best protect her daughter's interests. 
+
+"I don't believe you know any more about it than I do,"
+was his impulsive comment. 
+
+"I daresay not," she replied, with indifference. 
+"Probably she didn't fancy living in so big a house--
+although heaven knows her ideas are big enough about
+most things."
+
+"Did she say so?" Thorpe asked abruptly.
+
+The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. 
+"She didn't say anything to me about it, one way or the other. 
+I formed my own impressions--that's all.  It's a free country. 
+Everybody can form their impressions."
+
+"I wish you'd tell me what you really think," Thorpe urged her,
+mildly persuasive.  "You know how fond I am of Julia,
+and how little I want to do her an injustice."
+
+"Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way," Louisa observed, vaguely. 
+"If you ask me plain, I think it was dull for her."
+
+"Well," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "I shouldn't
+be surprised if it was.  I hadn't thought of that. 
+But still--why she and my wife could be company for
+each other."
+
+"You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,"
+she told him, in an unexpected flight of metaphor. 
+"Two women cooped up in a lonesome country house may be
+a little less lonely than one of them by herself would
+be--but not much.  It's none of my business--but how your
+wife must hate it!"
+
+He laughed easily.  "Ah, that's where you're wrong,"
+he said.  "She doesn't care about anything but gardening. 
+That's her hobby.  She's crazy about it.  We've laid out
+more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants,
+than would rebuild this building.  I'm not sure the heating
+apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone.  And then the plants!
+What do you think of six and eight guineas for a single
+root? Those are the amaryllises--and if you come to orchids,
+you can pay hundreds if you like.  Well, that's her passion. 
+That's what she really loves."
+
+"That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying
+of loneliness," Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign
+of dissent from her brother she went on.  "Oh, I know what
+I'm talking about.  I have three or four customers--ladies
+in the country, and one of them is a lady of title,
+too--and they order gardening books and other books through me,
+and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come
+here and they talk to me about it.  And there isn't one
+of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it. 
+They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all
+day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they
+had their own way.  But they don't have their own way,
+and they must have something to occupy themselves with--and
+they take to gardening.  I daresay I'd even do it myself
+if I had to live in the country, which thank God I don't!"
+
+"That's because you don't know anything about the country,"
+he told her, but the retort, even while it justified itself,
+had a hollow sound in his own ears.  "All you know outside
+of London is Margate."
+
+"I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer,"
+she informed him, crushingly. 
+
+Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh.  "I know what you mean,
+Lou," he said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. 
+"I suppose there's a good deal in what you say.  It is dull,
+out there at my place, if you have too much of it. 
+Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife.  It never
+occurred to me, but it may be so.  But the deuce of it is,
+what else is there to do? We tried a house in London,
+during the Season----"
+
+"Yes, I saw in the papers you were here," she said impassively,
+in comment upon his embarrassed pause. 
+
+"I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much
+to see me"--he explained with a certain awkwardness--"but
+bye-gones are all bye-gones. We took a town house,
+but we didn't like it.  It was one endless procession
+of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties;
+we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try
+it again.  Well there you are, don't you see? It's stupid
+in Hertfordshire, and it's stupid here.  Of course one can
+travel abroad, but that's no good for more than a few months. 
+Of course it would be different if I had something to do. 
+I tell you God's truth, Lou--sometimes I feel as if I
+was really happier when I was a poor man.  I know it's all
+rot--I really wasn't--but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was."
+
+She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. 
+"Didn't it ever occur to you to do some good with your money?"
+she said, with slow bluntness.  Then, as if fearing a
+possible misconception, she added more rapidly: " I don't
+mean among your own family.  We're a clannish people,
+we Thorpes; we'd always help our own flesh and blood,
+even if we kicked them while we were doing it--but I
+mean outside, in the world at large."
+
+"What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't
+make it; I'm not responsible for it." He muttered the
+phrases lightly enough, but a certain fatuity in them
+seemed to attract his attention when he heard their sound. 
+"I've given between five and six thousand pounds to
+London hospitals within the present year," he added,
+straightening himself.  "I wonder you didn't see it. 
+It was in all the papers."
+
+"Hospitals!"
+
+It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her
+voice imported into the word.  He looked at her with
+unfeigned surprise, and then took in the impression that she
+was upon a subject which exceptionally interested her. 
+Certainly the display of something approaching animation
+in her glance and manner was abnormal. 
+
+"I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'" she reminded him,
+still with a vibration of feeling in her tone.  "You must
+live in the country, if you think London hospitals are
+deserving objects.  They couldn't fool Londoners on that point,
+not if they had got the Prince to go on his hands and knees. 
+And you give a few big cheques to them," she went on,
+meditatively, "and you never ask how they're managed,
+or what rings are running them for their own benefit,
+or how your money is spent--and you think you've done
+a noble, philanthropic thing! Oh no--I wasn't talking
+about humbug charity.  I was talking about doing some
+genuine good in the world."
+
+He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat
+back with a smile.  "All right," he said, genially. 
+"What do you propose?"
+
+"I don't propose anything," she told him, after a
+moment's hesitation.  "You must work that out for yourself. 
+What might seem important to me might not interest you
+at all--and if you weren't interested you wouldn't
+do anything.  But this I do say to you, Joel--and I've
+said it to myself every day for this last year or more,
+and had you in mind all the time, too--if I had made
+a great fortune, and I sat about in purple and fine linen
+doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and selfishness,
+letting my riches accumulate and multiply themselves without
+being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look
+my fellow-creatures in the face! You were born here. 
+You know what London slums are like.  You know what Clare
+Market was like--it's bad enough still--and what the Seven
+Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places round here
+are like to this day.  That's only within a stone's throw. 
+Have you seen Charles Booth's figures about the London
+poor? Of course you haven't--and it doesn't matter. 
+You KNOW what they are like.  But you don't care. 
+The misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two
+or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. 
+You sit upon your money-bags and smile.  If you want the truth,
+I'm ashamed to have you for a brother!"
+
+"Well, I'm damned!" was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled
+comment upon this outburst.  He looked long at his sister,
+in blank astonishment.  "Since when have you been taken
+this way?" he asked at last, mechanically jocular. 
+
+"That's all right," she declared with defensive inconsequence. 
+"It's the way I feel.  It's the way I've felt from
+the beginning."
+
+He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this
+unlooked-for demonstration on his sister's part. 
+He got off the stool and walked about in the little
+cleared space round the desk.  When he spoke, it was
+to utter something which he could trace to no mental
+process of which he had been conscious. 
+
+"How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too--from
+the beginning?" he demanded of her, almost with truculence. 
+"You say I sit on my money-bags and smile--you abuse
+me with doing no good with my money--how do you know
+I haven't been studying the subject all this while,
+and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never
+did believe in me!"
+
+She sniffed at him.  "I don't believe in you now,
+at all events," she said, bluntly. 
+
+He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. 
+"Why, this very day"--he began, and again was aware
+that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to his tongue,
+which were quite strangers to his brain--"this whole
+day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground
+you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all
+the corners and alleys of that whole district for myself,
+watching the people and the things they buy and the way
+they live--and thinking out my plans for doing something. 
+I don't claim any credit for it.  It seems to me no more
+than what a man in my position ought to do.  But I own
+that to come in, actually tired out from a tramp like that,
+and get blown-up by one's own sister for selfishness and
+heartlessness and miserliness and all the rest of it--I
+must say, that's a bit rum."
+
+Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been
+expected to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration
+in the heavy frown with which she continued to regard him. 
+But her words, uttered after some consideration, came in a
+tone of voice which revealed a desire to avoid offense. 
+"It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me,
+if you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. 
+You're too used to it for that."
+
+He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his
+assurances than this--but after all, one did not look to Louisa
+for enthusiasms.  The depth of feeling she had disclosed
+on this subject of London's poor still astonished him,
+but principally now because of its unlikely source. 
+If she had been notoriously of an altruistic and
+free-handed disposition, he could have understood it. 
+But she had been always the hard, dry, unemotional one;
+by comparison with her, he felt himself to be a volatile
+and even sentimental person.  If she had such views
+as these, it became clear to him that his own views
+were even much advanced. 
+
+"It's a tremendous subject," he said, with loose largeness
+of manner.  "Only a man who works hard at it can realize
+how complicated it is.  The only way is to start with
+the understanding that something is going to be done. 
+No matter how many difficulties there are in the way,
+SOMETHING'S GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out
+with that, why then he can fight his way through, and push
+the difficulties aside or bend them to suit his purpose,
+and accomplish something."
+
+Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it
+to quarrel with--yet somehow remained, if not skeptical,
+then passively unconvinced.  "What are your plans?"
+she asked him. 
+
+"Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything," he told her,
+with prepared readiness.  "It isn't a thing to rush into in
+a hurry, with half baked theories and limited information. 
+Great results, permanent results, are never obtained
+that way."
+
+"I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing."
+
+"Oh, nothing like it in the least," he assured her,
+and made a mental note to find out what it was she had
+referred to. 
+
+"The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say,"
+she went on, "but it seems to me that the real thing
+is that there shouldn't be all this immense number of
+people with only fourpence or fivepence in their pocket. 
+That's where the real mischief lies."
+
+He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. 
+Then something occurred to him.  "Look here!" he said. 
+"If you're as keen about all this, are you game to give up
+this footling old shop, and devote your time to carrying
+out my plans, when I've licked 'em into shape?"
+
+She began shaking her head, but then something seemed
+also to occur to her.  "It'll be time enough to settle
+that when we get to it, won't it?" she observed. 
+
+"No--you've got to promise me now," he told her. 
+
+"Well that I won't!" she answered, roundly. 
+
+"You'd see the whole--the whole scheme come to nothing,
+would you?"--he scolded at her--"rather than abate a jot
+of your confounded mulishness."
+
+"Aha!" she commented, with a certain alertness of
+perception shining through the stolidity of her mien. 
+"I knew you were humbugging! If you'd meant what you said,
+you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because I
+won't do this or that.  I ought to have known better. 
+I'm always a goose when I believe what you tell me."
+
+A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. 
+"No you're not, Lou," he replied, coaxingly.  "I really
+mean it all--every word of it--and more.  It only occurred
+to me that it would all go better, if you helped. 
+Can't you understand how I should feel that?"
+
+She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions
+of sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract
+any promise.  "I don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get
+to it," she declared, when, on the point of his departure,
+he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that. 
+He took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel,
+and told him to read.  She had spoken so confidently
+of their illuminating value, that he found himself quite
+committed to their perusal--and almost to their endorsement. 
+He had thought during the day of running down to Newmarket,
+for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow,
+and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. 
+By the time he reached his hotel, however, an entirely
+new project had possessed his mind.  He packed his bag,
+and took the next train for home. 
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+"I DIDN'T ask your father, after all," was one of the things
+that Thorpe said to his wife next day.  He had the manner
+of one announcing a concession, albeit in an affable spirit,
+and she received the remark with a scant, silent nod. 
+
+Two days later he recurred to the subject.  They were
+again upon the terrace, where he had been lounging in an
+easy-chair most of the day, with the books his sister
+had bid him read on a table beside him.  He had glanced
+through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages
+at random here and there, but for the most part he
+had looked straight before him at the broad landscape,
+mellowing now into soft browns and yellows under the mild,
+vague October sun.  He had not thought much of the books,
+but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits
+of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they
+had helped to induce. 
+
+"About your father," he said now, as his wife,
+who had come out to speak with him on some other matter,
+was turning to go away again: "I'm afraid I annoyed
+you the other day by what I said."
+
+"I have no recollection of it," she told him,
+with tranquil politeness, over her shoulder. 
+
+He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a
+conversation on this topic.  "But I want you to recollect,"
+he said, as he rose to his feet.  There was a suggestion
+of urgency in his tone which arrested her attention. 
+She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little
+perched herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up
+at him where he leant against the parapet. 
+
+"I've thought of it a good deal," he went on,
+in halting explanation.  His purpose seemed clearer to
+him than were the right phrases in which to define it. 
+"I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't
+want me to do--something that was a good deal more
+your affair than mine--and I've blamed myself for it. 
+That isn't at all what I want to do."
+
+Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss
+for an appropriate comment.  She was plainly surprised,
+and seemingly embarrassed as well.  "I'm sure you always
+wish to be nice," she said at last.  The words and tone
+were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere
+a perfunctory note. 
+
+"Oh--nice!" he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience
+with the word.  "Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be
+'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten thousand times
+bigger than being 'nice.'"
+
+"I withdraw the word immediately--unreservedly," she put in,
+with a smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew
+so well. 
+
+"You laugh at me--whenever I try to talk seriously,"
+he objected. 
+
+"I laugh?" she queried, with an upward glance of demurely
+simulated amazement.  "Impossible! I assure you I've
+forgotten how."
+
+"Ah, now we get to it!" he broke out, with energy. 
+"You're really feeling about it just as I am. 
+You're not satisfied with what we're doing--with the
+life we're leading--any more than I am.  I see that,
+plain enough, now.  I didn't dream of it before.  Somehow I
+got the idea that you were enjoying it immensely--the
+greenhouses and gardens and all that sort of thing. 
+And do you know who it was that put me right--that told
+me you hated it?"
+
+"Oh, don't let us talk of him!" Edith exclaimed, swiftly. 
+
+Thorpe laughed.  "You're wrong.  It wasn't your father. 
+I didn't see him.  No--it was my sister.  She's never seen you,
+but all the same she knew enough to give me points. 
+She told me I was a fool to suppose you were happy here."
+
+"How clever of her!" A certain bantering smile accompanied
+the words, but on the instant it faded away.  She went
+on with a musing gravity.  "I'm sorry I don't get to know
+your sister.  She seems an extremely real sort of person. 
+I can understand that she might be difficult to live with--I
+daresay all genuine characters are--but she's very real. 
+Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point,
+still I enjoy talking with her."
+
+"How do you mean?" Thorpe asked, knitting his brows
+in puzzlement. 
+
+"Oh, I often go to her shop--or did when I was in town.
+I went almost immediately after our--our return to England. 
+I was half afraid she would recognize me--the portraits
+in the papers, you know--but apparently she didn't. And
+it's splendid--the way she says absolutely nothing more
+than it's necessary to say.  And her candour! If she
+thinks books are bad she says so.  Fancy that!"
+
+He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. 
+"You never mentioned to me that you had gone there,"
+he told her, as if in reproach. 
+
+"Ah, it was complicated," Edith explained.  "She objects
+to knowing me--I think secretly I respect her a great deal
+for that--and therefore there is something clandestine
+about my getting to know her--and I could not be sure
+how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest
+not to mention it."
+
+"It isn't that alone," he declared, grave-faced still,
+but with a softer voice.  "Do you remember what I said
+the other day? It would make all the difference in the world
+to me, if--if you were really--actually my other half!"
+
+The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon
+the air, to impregnate it with some benumbing quality. 
+The husband and wife looked dumbly, almost vacantly at
+one another, for what appeared a long time. 
+
+"I mean"--all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort
+of fluency as he progressed--"I mean, if you shared things
+really with me! Oh, I'm not complaining; you mustn't
+think that.  The agreement we made at the start--you've kept
+your part of it perfectly.  You've done better than that:
+you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy."
+
+"Oh no," she interposed, gently.  "It is not the fact
+that it has made me unhappy."
+
+"Well--discontented, then," he resumed, without pause. 
+"Here we are.  We do the thing we want to do--we make
+the kind of home for ourselves that we've agreed we
+would like--and then it turns out that somehow it
+doesn't come up to expectations.  You get tired of it. 
+I suppose, if the truth were known, I'm by way of being
+tired of it too.  Well, if you look at it, that fact is
+the most important thing in the world for both of us. 
+It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious
+to discuss, and examine frankly in all its bearings--in
+order to see if we can't better it--but that's precisely
+the thing that doesn't get talked about between us. 
+You would never have told me that you were unhappy----"
+
+"You use the word again," she reminded him, a wan smile
+softening her protest. 
+
+Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. 
+He held her glance with his own, as he stood then,
+his head bent, gravely regarding her. 
+
+"Do you tell me that you are happy?" he asked,
+with sober directness. 
+
+She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture
+of comment.  "You consider only the extremes," she told him. 
+"Between black and white there are so many colours and shades
+and half-tones! The whole spectrum, in fact.  Hardly anybody,
+I should think, gets over the edge into the true black
+or the true white.  There are always tints, modifications. 
+People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. 
+The worst that can be said of me is that I may be in the
+blues--in the light-blues--but it is fair to remember
+that they photograph white."
+
+Though there was an impulse within him to resent this
+as trifling, he resisted it, and judicially considered
+her allegory.  "That is to say"--he began hesitatingly. 
+
+"To the observer I am happy.  To myself I am not unhappy."
+
+"Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?"
+
+The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse.  The
+intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly. 
+
+"If I could tell myself," she answered him, after an
+instant's thought, "pray believe that I would tell you."
+
+The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he
+sighed heavily.  "I want to get nearer to you," he said,
+with gloom, "and I don't!"
+
+It occurred to her to remark: "You take exception to my
+phraseology when I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm
+sure you know what I mean." She offered him this assurance
+with a tentative smile, into which he gazed moodily. 
+
+"You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to
+marry me," he was suddenly inspired to say.  "I can't
+imagine your applying that word to me then in your mind. 
+God knows what it was you did say to yourself about me,
+but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last
+word that would have fitted me then--and now it's
+the only one you can think of." The hint that somehow
+he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries enveloping
+him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke.
+The year had wrought a baffling difference in him. 
+He lacked something now that then he had possessed,
+but he was powerless to define it. 
+
+He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand
+through her arm to keep her where she lightly rested
+beside him.  "Will you tell me," he said, with a kind
+of sombre gentleness, "what the word is that you would
+have used then? I know you wouldn't--couldn't--have
+called me 'nice.' What would you have called me?"
+
+She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from
+the chair and stood erect, still leaving her wrist within
+the restraining curve of his fingers.  "I suppose,"
+she said, musingly--"I suppose I should have said
+'powerful' or 'strong.'" Then she released her arm,
+and in turn moved to the parapet. 
+
+"And I am weak now--I am 'nice,'" he reflected, mechanically. 
+
+In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast
+distant horizon, there was something pensive, even sad. 
+She did not speak at once, and as he gazed at her more
+narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering. 
+A new sense of her great beauty came to him--and with it
+a hint that for the instant at least her guard was down. 
+He sprang to his feet, and stood beside her. 
+
+"You ARE going to be open with me--Edith!" he pleaded, softly. 
+
+She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of
+her agitation.  "Oh, what is there to say?" she demanded,
+in a tone which was almost a wail.  "It is not your fault. 
+I'm not blaming you."
+
+"WHAT is not my fault?" he persisted with patient gentleness. 
+
+Suddenly she confronted him.  There were the traces of tears
+upon her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. 
+"It is a mistake--a blunder," she began, hurriedly.  "I take
+it all upon my own shoulders.  I was the one who did it. 
+I should have had more judgment--more good sense!"
+
+"You are not telling me, are you," he asked with gravity,
+"that you are sorry you married me?"
+
+"Is either of us glad?" she retorted, breathlessly. 
+"What is there to be glad about? You are bored to death--you
+confess it.  And I--well, it is not what I thought
+it would be.  I deceived myself.  I do not reproach you."
+
+"No, you keep saying that," he observed, with gloomy
+slowness of utterance.  "But what is it you reproach
+yourself with, then? We might as well have it out."
+
+"Yes," she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. 
+Her eyes met his with a glance which had in it an
+implacable frankness.  "I married one man because he
+would be able to make me a Duchess.  I married another
+because he had eighty thousand a year.  That is the kind
+of beast I am.  There is bad blood in me.  You know
+my father; that is quite enough.  I am his daughter;
+that explains everything."
+
+The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious
+effect upon him.  He stared at her for a little,
+perceiving slowly that a new personage was being revealed
+to him.  The mask of delicately-balanced cynicism,
+of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted;
+there was a woman of flesh and blood beneath it,
+after all--a woman to whom he could talk on terms of intimacy. 
+
+"Rubbish!" he said, and his big face lightened into a genial,
+paternal smile.  "You didn't marry me for my money at all!
+What nonsense! I simply came along and carried you off. 
+You couldn't help yourself.  It would have been the same
+if I hadn't had sixpence."
+
+To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes
+a kind of answering gleam.  Then she hastily averted
+her glance, and in this action too there was a warrant
+for his mounting confidence. 
+
+"The trouble has been," he declared, "that I've been too
+much afraid of you.  I've thought that you were made of so
+much finer stuff than I am, that you mustn't be touched. 
+That was all a mistake.  I see it right enough now. 
+You ARE finer than I am--God knows there's no dispute
+about that--but that's no reason why I should have hung up
+signs of 'Hands off!' all around you, and been frightened
+by them myself.  I had the cheek to capture you and carry
+you off--and I ought to have had the pluck to make you
+love me afterward, and keep it up.  And that's what I'm
+going to do!"
+
+To this declaration she offered no immediate reply,
+but continued to gaze with a vaguely meditative air
+upon the expanse of landscape spread below them. 
+He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him,
+and then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. 
+He could not say that there was any responsive yielding
+to his embrace, but he did affirm to himself with
+new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small head
+at his shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn
+softly over the temples, and its glimpse of the matchless
+profile inclined beneath--that it was all right. 
+
+He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience,
+for her to speak.  The mere fact that she stood beneath
+his engirdling arm, and gave no thought to the potential
+servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present happiness. 
+He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his
+terrace with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest
+view in England--and something much more than that beside. 
+
+At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud--a silvery,
+amused little laugh under her breath.  "How comedy and
+tragedy tread forever on each other's heels!" she remarked. 
+Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon reflection
+he did not wholly like her words. 
+
+"There wasn't any tragedy," he said, "and there isn't
+any comedy."
+
+She laughed again.  "Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal
+to your sense of humour!" she urged, with mock fervour.
+
+Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this,
+that she seemed touched by his mood.  Without stirring from
+his hold, she lifted her face.  "Don't think I'm hateful,"
+she bade him, and her eyes were very kind.  "There's more
+truth in what you've been saying than even you imagine. 
+It really wasn't the money--or I mean it might easily have
+been the same if there had been no money.  But how shall I
+explain it? I am attracted by a big, bold, strong pirate,
+let us say, but as soon as he has carried me off--that
+is the phrase for it--then he straightway renounces
+crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. 
+My buccaneer transforms himself, under my very eyes,
+into an alderman! Do you say there is no comedy in that--and
+tragedy too?"
+
+"Oh, put it that way and it's all right," he declared,
+after a moment's consideration.  "I've got as much fun
+in me as anybody else," he went on, "only your jokes have
+a way of raising blisters on me, somehow.  But that's
+all done with now.  That's because I didn't know you--was
+frightened of you.  But I aint scared any more. 
+Everything is different!"
+
+With a certain graciousness of lingering movement,
+she withdrew herself from his clasp, and faced him with
+a doubtful smile.  "Ah, don't be too sure," she murmured. 
+
+"Everything is different!" he repeated, with confident emphasis. 
+"Don't you see yourself it is?"
+
+"You say it is," she replied, hesitatingly, "but that
+alone doesn't make it so.  The assertion that life
+isn't empty doesn't fill it."
+
+"Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that,"
+he broke in triumphantly.  "We've been standing off with
+one another.  We've been of no help to each other.  But we'll
+change that, now.  We'll talk over everything together. 
+We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do,
+and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out
+and do it."
+
+She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. 
+"Don't count on me for too much wisdom or invention,"
+she warned him.  "If things are to be done, you are still
+the one who will have to do them.  But undoubtedly you
+are at your best when you are doing things.  This really
+has been no sort of life for you, here."
+
+He gathered her arm into his.  "Come and show me your greenhouses,"
+he said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. 
+"It'll turn out to have been all right for me, this year
+that I've spent here," he continued, as they strolled along. 
+There was a delightful consciousness of new intimacy
+conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his tone
+with buoyancy.  "I've been learning all sorts of tricks here,
+and getting myself into your ways of life.  It's all
+been good training.  In every way I'm a better man than I was."
+
+They had descended from the terrace to a garden path,
+and approached now a long glass structure, through the
+panes of which masses of soft colour--whites, yellows,
+pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds--were dimly perceptible. 
+
+"The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year,"
+Edith observed, as they drew near to the door of this house. 
+"Collins did them very badly--as he did most other things. 
+But next year it will be very different.  Gafferson is the
+best chrysanthemum man in England.  That is he in there now,
+I think."
+
+Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the
+suggestions stirred by the sound of this name slowly
+shaped themselves. 
+
+"Gafferson?" he asked her, with a blank countenance. 
+
+"My new head-gardener," she explained.  "He was at Hadlow,
+and after poor old Lady Plowden died--why, surely you
+remember him there.  You spoke about him--you'd known him
+somewhere--in the West Indies, wasn't it?"
+
+He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied.
+"Did I?" he mumbled automatically. 
+
+Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. 
+"I've got a kind of headache coming on," he said.  "If you
+don't mind, we won't go inside among the flowers."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts
+of the great gardens, as the first shadows of evening
+began to dull the daylight.  For a long time he moved
+aimlessly about, sick at heart and benumbed of mind,
+in the stupid oppression of a bad dream. 
+
+There ran through all his confused thoughts the exasperating
+consciousness that it was nonsense to be frightened,
+or even disturbed; that, in truth, nothing whatever
+had happened.  But he could not lay hold of it to any
+comforting purpose.  Some perverse force within him
+insisted on raising new phantoms in his path, and directing
+his reluctant gaze to their unpleasant shapes. 
+Forgotten terrors pushed themselves upon his recollection. 
+It was as if he stood again in the Board Room, with the
+telegram telling of old Tavender's death in his hands,
+waiting to hear the knock of Scotland Yard upon the door. 
+
+The coming of Gafferson took on a kind of supernatural aspect,
+when Thorpe recalled its circumstances.  His own curious
+mental ferment, which had made this present week a period
+apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this
+man's approach to the house.  His memory reconstructed
+a vivid picture of that approach--of the old ramshackle
+village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow
+tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure,
+so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something
+out of the ordinary.  It seemed to him now that he had at the
+time discerned a certain fateful quality in the apparition. 
+And he and his wife had actually been talking of old
+Kervick at the moment! It was their disagreement over
+him which had prevented her explaining about the new
+head-gardener. There was an effect of the uncanny in all this. 
+
+And what did Gafferson want? How much did he know? The idea
+that perhaps old Kervick had found him out, and patched up
+with him a scheme of blackmail, occurred to him, and in the
+unreal atmosphere of his mood, became a thing of substance. 
+With blackmail, however, one could always deal; it was
+almost a relief to see the complication assume that guise. 
+But if Gafferson was intent upon revenge and exposure
+instead? With such a slug-like, patient, tenacious fool,
+was that not more likely?
+
+Reasonable arguments presented themselves to his mind
+ever and again: his wife had known of Gafferson's work,
+and thought highly of it, and had been in a position
+to learn of his leaving Hadlow.  What more natural than
+that she should hasten to employ him? And what was it,
+after all, that Gafferson could possibly know or prove? His
+brother-in-law had gone off, and got too drunk to live,
+and had died.  What in the name of all that was sensible
+had this to do with Thorpe? Why should it even be supposed
+that Gafferson associated Thorpe with any phase of the
+business? And if he had any notion of a hostile movement,
+why should he have delayed action so long? Why indeed!
+
+Reassurance did not come to him, but at last an impulse
+to definite action turned his footsteps toward the cluster
+of greenhouses in the deepening shadow of the mansion. 
+He would find Gafferson, and probe this business to
+the uttermost.  If there was discoverable in the man's
+manner or glance the least evidence of a malevolent
+intention--he would know what to do.  Ah, what was it
+that he would do? He could not say, beyond that it would
+be bad for Gafferson.  He instinctively clenched the fists
+in the pockets of his jacket as he quickened his pace. 
+Inside the congeries of glazed houses he was somewhat at sea. 
+It was still light enough to make one's way about in the
+passages between the stagings, but he had no idea of the
+general plan of the buildings, and it seemed to him that he
+frequently got back to places he had traversed before. 
+There were two or three subordinate gardeners in or about
+the houses, but upon reflection he forbore to question them. 
+He tried to assume an idly indifferent air as he
+sauntered past, nodding almost imperceptible acknowledgment
+of the forefingers they jerked upward in salutation. 
+
+He came at last upon a locked door, the key of which had
+been removed.  The fact vaguely surprised him, and he looked
+with awakened interest through the panes of this door. 
+The air inside seemed slightly thickened--and then
+his eye caught the flicker of a flame, straight ahead. 
+It was nothing but the fumigation of a house; the burning
+spirits in the lamp underneath the brazier were filling
+the structure with vapours fatal to all insect life. 
+In two or three hours the men would come and open the doors
+and windows and ventilate the place.  The operation was
+quite familiar to him; it had indeed interested him more
+when he first saw it done than had anything else connected
+with the greenhouses. 
+
+His abstracted gaze happened to take note of the fact
+that the door-key was hanging on a nail overhead, and then
+suddenly this seemed to be related to something else in his
+thoughts--some obscure impression or memory which evaded him. 
+Continuing to look at the key, a certain recollection
+all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it
+came to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they
+were using warned people against exposing themselves to its
+fumes more than was absolutely necessary.  That meant,
+of course, that their full force would kill a human being. 
+It was very interesting.  He looked through the glass again,
+but could not see that the air was any thicker. 
+The lamp still burned brightly. 
+
+He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron,
+at the further end of the palm-house he was in,
+doing something to a plant.  Thorpe noted the fact that
+he felt no surprise in seeing that it was Gafferson. 
+Somehow the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading
+flame inside the locked door, seemed to have prepared
+him for the spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. 
+He moved forward slowly toward the head-gardener,
+and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made
+at each step.  He could strangle this annoying fool,
+or smother him, into non-resisting insensibility,
+and then put him inside that death-house, and let it
+be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. 
+The men when they came back would find him there. 
+But ah! they would know that they had not left him there;
+they would have seen him outside, no doubt, after the
+fire had been lighted.  Well, the key could be left
+in the unlocked door.  Then it could be supposed that he
+had rashly entered, and been overcome by the vapours. 
+He approached the man silently, his brain arranging the
+details of the deed with calm celerity. 
+
+Then some objections to the plan rose up before him:
+they dealt almost exclusively with the social nuisance
+the thing would entail.  There was to be a house-party,
+with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his wife talked
+so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have
+a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic
+of conversation.  Of course, too, it would more or less
+throw the whole household into confusion.  And its effect
+upon his wife!--the progress of his thoughts was checked
+abruptly by this suggestion.  A vision of the shock
+such a catastrophe might involve to her--or at the best,
+of the gross unpleasantness she would find in it--flashed
+over his mind, and then yielded to a softening,
+radiant consciousness of how much this meant to him. 
+It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. 
+A profoundly tender desire for her happiness was in
+complete possession.  Already the notion of doing anything
+to wound or grieve her appeared incredible to him. 
+
+"Well, Gafferson," he heard himself saying, in one
+of the more reserved tones of his patriarchal manner. 
+He had halted close to the inattentive man, and stood
+looking down upon him.  His glance was at once tolerant
+and watchful. 
+
+Gafferson slowly rose from his slouching posture,
+surveyed the other while his faculties in leisurely
+fashion worked out the problem of recognition, aud then
+raised his finger to his cap-brim. "Good-evening, sir,"
+he said. 
+
+This gesture of deference was eloquently convincing. 
+Thorpe, after an instant's alert scrutiny, smiled upon him. 
+"I was glad to hear that you had come to us," he said
+with benevolent affability.  "We shall expect great things
+of a man of your reputation."
+
+"It'll be a fair comfort, sir," the other replied,
+"to be in a place where what one does is appreciated. 
+What use is it to succeed in hybridizing a Hippeastrum
+procera with a Pancratium Amancaes, after over six
+hundred attempts in ten years, and then spend three years
+a-hand-nursing the seedlings, and then your master won't
+take enough interest in the thing to pay your fare up
+to London to the exhibition with 'em? That's what 'ud
+break any man's heart."
+
+"Quite true," Thorpe assented, with patrician kindliness. 
+"You need fear nothing of that sort here, Gafferson.  We give
+you a free hand.  Whatever you want, you have only to let
+us know.  And you can't do things too well to please us."
+"Thank you, sir," said Gafferson, and really, as Thorpe
+thought about it, the interview seemed at an end. 
+
+The master turned upon his heel, with a brief,
+oblique nod over his shoulder, and made his way out into
+the open air.  Here, as he walked, he drew a succession
+of long consolatory breaths.  It was almost as if he had
+emerged from the lethal presence of the fumigator itself. 
+He took the largest cigar from his case, lighted it,
+and sighed smoke-laden new relief as he strolled back
+toward the terrace. 
+
+But a few minutes before he had been struggling
+helplessly in the coils of an evil nightmare. 
+These terrors seemed infinitely far behind him now. 
+He gave an indifferent parting glance backward at them,
+as one might over his after-breakfast cigar at the
+confused alarms of an early awakening hours before. 
+There was nothing worth remembering--only the shapeless
+and foolish burden of a bad dream.
+
+The assurance rose within him that he was not to have any
+more such trouble.  With a singular clearness of mental
+vision he perceived that the part of him which brought
+bad dreams had been sloughed off, like a serpent's skin. 
+There had been two Thorpes, and one of them--the Thorpe
+who had always been willing to profit by knavery, and at
+last in a splendid coup as a master thief had stolen nearly
+a million, and would have shrunk not at all from adding
+murder to the rest, to protect that plunder--this vicious
+Thorpe had gone away altogether.  There was no longer
+a place for him in life; he would never be seen again
+by mortal eye....There remained only the good Thorpe,
+the pleasant, well-intentioned opulent gentleman;
+the excellent citizen; the beneficent master, to whom,
+even Gafferson like the others, touched a respectful forelock. 
+
+It passed in the procession of his reverie as a kind of
+triumph of virtue that the good Thorpe retained the fortune
+which the bad Thorpe had stolen.  It was in all senses a
+fortunate fact, because now it would be put to worthy uses.
+Considering that he had but dimly drifted about heretofore on
+the outskirts of the altruistic impulse, it was surprisingly
+plain to him now that he intended to be a philanthropist. 
+Even as he mentioned the word to himself, the possibilities
+suggested by it expanded in his thoughts.  His old dormant,
+formless lust for power stirred again in his pulses. 
+What other phase of power carried with it such rewards,
+such gratitudes, such humble subservience on all sides
+as far as the eye could reach--as that exercised by the
+intelligently munificent philanthropist?
+
+Intelligence! that was the note of it all.  Many rich people
+dabbled at the giving of money, but they did it so stupidly,
+in such a slip-shod fashion, that they got no credit
+for it.  Even millionaires more or less in public life,
+great newspaper-owners, great brewer-peers, and the like,
+men who should know how to do things well, gave huge
+sums in bulk for public charities, such as the housing
+of the poor, and yet contrived somehow to let the kudos
+that should have been theirs evaporate.  He would make
+no such mistake as that.
+
+It was easy enough to see wherein they erred. 
+They gave superciliously, handing down their alms from a top
+lofty altitude of Tory superiority, and the Radicals down
+below sniffed or growled even while they grudgingly took
+these gifts--that was all nonsense.  These aristocratic
+or tuft-hunting philanthropists were the veriest duffers. 
+They laid out millions of pounds in the vain attempt
+to secure what might easily be had for mere thousands,
+if they went sensibly to work.  Their vast benefactions
+yielded them at the most bare thanks, or more often no
+thanks at all, because they lacked the wit to lay aside
+certain little trivial but annoying pretensions, and waive
+a few empty prejudices.  They went on, year after year,
+tossing their fortunes into a sink of contemptuous ingratitude,
+wondering feebly why they were not beloved in return. 
+It was because they were fools.  They could not, or they
+would not, understand the people they sought to manipulate. 
+
+What could not a man of real brain, of real breadth
+and energy and force of character, do in London with two
+hundred thousand pounds? Why, he could make himself master
+of the town! He could break into fragments the political
+ascendency of the snob, "semi-detached" villa classes,
+in half the Parliamentary divisions they now controlled. 
+He could reverse the partisan complexion of the
+Metropolitan delegation, and lead to Westminster a
+party of his own, a solid phalanx of disciplined men,
+standing for the implacable Democracy of reawakened London. 
+With such a backing, he could coerce ministries at will,
+and remake the politics of England.  The role of Great
+Oliver himself was not too hopelessly beyond the scope
+of such a vision. 
+
+Thorpe threw his cigar-end aside, and then noted that it
+was almost dark.  He strode up to the terrace two steps
+at a time, and swung along its length with a vigour and
+exhilaration of movement he had not known, it seemed to him,
+for years.  He felt the excitement of a new incentive
+bubbling in his veins. 
+
+"Her Ladyship is in her sitting-room, sir," a domestic
+replied to his enquiry in the hall.  The title arrested
+his attention from some fresh point of view, and he
+pondered it, as he made his way along the corridor,
+and knocked at a door.  At the sound of a voice he pushed
+open the door, and went in. 
+
+Lady Cressage, looking up, noted, with aroused interest,
+a marked change in his carriage.  He stood aggressively erect,
+his big shoulders squared, and his head held high. 
+On his massive face there was the smile, at once buoyant
+and contained, of a strong man satisfied with himself. 
+
+Something impelled her to rise, and to put a certain
+wistfulness of enquiry into her answering smile. 
+
+"Your headache is better then?" she asked him. 
+
+He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. 
+"Oh--yes," he answered.  Advancing, he caught her suddenly,
+almost vehemently, in his arms, aud covered the face
+that was perforce upturned with kisses.  When she was
+released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting
+and flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes,
+in which mystification was mellowed by the gleam of
+not-displeased curiosity, he preferred a request which
+completed her bewilderment. 
+
+"Mrs. Thorpe," he began, with significant deliberation,
+but smiling with his eyes to show the tenderness
+underlying his words--"would you mind if we didn't dress
+for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little
+breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead
+of the big place?"
+
+"Why, not at all, if you wish it, "she answered
+readily enough, but viewing him still with a puzzled glance. 
+
+"I'm full of new ideas," he explained, impulsively impatient
+of the necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. 
+"I see great things ahead.  It's all come to me in a minute,
+but I couldn't see it clearer if I'd thought it out for
+a year.  Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time and
+didn't know it.  But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. 
+You don't know what it means to me to have something to do. 
+It makes another man of me, just to think about it. 
+Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a thing that can be done,
+and by God! I'm going to do it!"
+
+She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy
+glow of the man's native, coarse, imperious virility,
+reasserting itself through the mask of torpor which this
+vacuous year had superimposed.  The large features
+were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the
+countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. 
+It was the visage of a conqueror--of a man gathering
+within himself, to expend upon his fellows, the appetites,
+energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast of prey. 
+Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed,
+before the frank barbarism of power in the look he bent
+upon her.  Then it came to her that something more was
+to be read in this look; there was in it a reservation
+of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation,
+for her special self.  He might tear down with his claws,
+and pull to pieces and devour others; but his mate he
+would shelter and defend and love with all his strength. 
+An involuntary trembling thrill ran through her--and then she
+smiled up at him. 
+
+"What is it you're going to do?" she asked him, mechanically. 
+Her mind roved far afield. 
+
+"Rule England!" he told her with gravity. 
+
+For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively
+incongruous in the statement.  To look at him, as he
+loomed before her, uplifted by his refreshed and soaring
+self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what would
+be impossible to him. 
+
+She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of
+good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before. 
+"Delightful," she said gayly.  "But I'm not sure that I quite
+understand the--the precise connection of morning-dress
+and dinner in a small room with the project." He nodded
+pleased comprehension of the spirit in which she took him. 
+"Just a whim," he explained.  "The things I've got in mind
+don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room,
+and men standing about.  What I want more than anything
+else is a quiet snug little evening with you alone, where I
+can talk to you and--and we can be together by ourselves. 
+You'd like it, wouldn't you?"
+
+She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of
+embarrassment in her mantling colour and down-spread lashes. 
+It had always to his eyes been, from the moment he first
+beheld it, the most beautiful face in the world--exquisitely
+matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene
+yet sensitive grace.  But he had not seen in it before,
+or guessed that there could come to it, this crowning
+added loveliness of feminine confusion. 
+
+"You would like it, wouldn't you?" he repeated in a lower,
+more strenuous tone. 
+
+She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his,
+but over his shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation,
+half languorous dreaming.  She swayed rather than stepped
+toward him. 
+
+"I think," she answered, in a musing murmur,--"I think
+I shall like--everything."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+THORPE found the Duke of Glastonbury a much more interesting
+person to watch and to talk with, both during the dinner
+Saturday evening and later, than he had anticipated. 
+
+He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing
+in stature, but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness
+of carriage which had a distinction of its own.  His face,
+with its little black moustache and large dark eyes,
+was fine upon examination, but in some elusively foreign way.
+There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked. 
+His speech was English enough to the ear, it was true,
+but it was the considered English of a book, and its
+phrases had a deftness which was hardly native.  He looked,
+if not a sad young man, then one conscious always of
+sufficient reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time,
+to see that the mood beneath was not melancholy.  It had
+even its sprightly side, which shone out irregularly in his
+glance and talk, from a sober mean of amiable weariness. 
+
+Thorpe knew his extraordinary story--that of a poor tutor,
+earning his living in ignorance of the fact that he had a
+birthright of any sort, who had been miraculously translated
+into the heir, not only to an ancient title but to vast
+collateral wealth.  He had been born and reared in France,
+and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change
+in his affairs had found him out.  There was a good deal
+more to the story, including numerous unsavoury legends
+about people now many years dead, and it was impossible
+to observe the young Duke and not seem to perceive signs
+that he was still nervously conscious of these legends.
+The story of his wife--a serene, grey-eyed, rather
+silent young person, with a pale face of some beauty,
+and with much purity and intellect--was strange enough
+to match.  She also had earned her own living, as a private
+secretary or type-writing girl, or something of the sort,
+and her husband had deliberately chosen her after he had
+come into his title.  One might study her very closely,
+however, and catch no hint that these facts in any degree
+disconcerted her. 
+
+Thorpe studied her a good deal, in a furtive way,
+with a curiosity born of his knowledge that the Duke had
+preferred her, when he might have married his widowed cousin,
+who was now Thorpe's own wife.  How he had come to know this,
+he could never have told.  He had breathed it in, somehow,
+with the gossip-laden atmosphere of that one London season
+of his.  It was patent enough, too, that his wife--his
+Edith--had not only liked this ducal youngster very much,
+but still entertained toward him a considerable affection. 
+She had never dissembled this feeling, and it visibly
+informed her glance and manner now, at her own table,
+when she turned to speak with him, where he sat at her
+right hand.  Thorpe had never dreamed of thinking ill
+of his wife's friendship, even when her indifference
+to what he thought had been most taken for granted. 
+Now that this was all changed, and the amazing new glory
+of a lover had enveloped him, he had a distinct delight
+in watching the myriad charming phases of her kind manner,
+half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the grave-faced
+young man.  It was all a part of the delicious change
+which these past few days had wrought in her, this warm
+and supple softness of mien, of eye and smile and voice. 
+
+But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith,
+could have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. 
+Thorpe gave more attention to this problem, during dinner,
+than he did to the conversation of the table. 
+His exchange of sporadic remarks with the young Duchess
+beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair,
+which left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile
+in silence, while she turned to listen to the general talk,
+of which Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred Plowden bore
+the chief burden.  The talk of these ladies interested
+him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter
+suggested that it was amusing.  He looked from his
+wife to the Duchess and back again, in ever-recurring
+surprise that the coronet had been carried past Edith. 
+And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke,
+and formulated the theory that she must have refused him. 
+No doubt that was why she bad been sympathetically fond
+of him ever since, and was being so nice to him now. 
+Yes--clearly that was it.  He felt upon this that he also
+liked the Duke very much. 
+
+It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. 
+Both he and his Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even
+deferentially polite, but there was a painstaking effect
+about it, which, seemingly, they lacked the art altogether
+to conceal.  It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests
+unconsciously took their cue from this august couple,
+and all exposed somewhat the effort their civility
+to him involved.  At another time the suspicion of this
+would have stung him.  He had only to glance across the
+table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. 
+What other people thought of him--how other people
+liked or disliked him--was of no earthly importance. 
+Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel from
+them the behaviour that he desired.  It was their dull
+inability to read character which prompted them to regard him
+as merely a rich outsider who had married Edith Cressage. 
+He viewed with a comfortable tolerance this infirmity
+of theirs.  When the time came, if he wanted to do so,
+he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning
+and the burst of thunder. 
+
+The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination,
+to contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. 
+The young man seemed both clever and sensible, and in
+a way impressionable as well.  Thorpe thought that he
+would probably have some interesting things to say,
+but still more he thought of him as a likely listener. 
+It would be the easier to detach him from the company,
+since the occasion was one of studied informality. 
+The Duke did not go about in society, in the ordinary sense
+of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe
+to meet a large party.  He was here as a kinsman and friend
+of his hostess for a quiet week; and the few other guests
+fitted readily enough into the picture of a family gathering. 
+The spirit of domesticity had indeed so obviously descended
+upon the little group in the drawing-room, an hour or
+so after dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural
+thing to put his arm through that of the Duke and lead
+him off to his personal smoking-room. He even published
+his intention by audibly bidding the Hon. Balder Plowden
+to remain with the ladies. 
+
+When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs,
+and the host had noted with pleasure that his guest had
+no effeminate qualms in the matter of large rich cigars,
+a brief silence ensued. 
+
+"I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject,"
+Thorpe was inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries
+aside.  "If a man of fortune wishes to do genuine good
+with his money, here in England, how should he best go about it?"
+
+The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash
+of surprise on his dark, mobile face.  He hesitated
+a moment, and smiled a little.  "You ask of me the sum of
+human wisdom," he said.  "It is the hardest of all problems;
+no one solves it."
+
+Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly.  "That's all
+the more reason why it ought to be solved," he declared,
+with slow emphasis. 
+
+The other expressed by look and tone an augmented
+consciousness of the unexpected.  "I did not know,"
+he remarked cautiously, "that this was a matter in which you
+were specially concerned.  It pleases me very much to hear it. 
+Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have
+as many as possible turning the problem over in their minds."
+
+"Oh, but I'm going to solve it!" Thorpe told him,
+with round confidence. 
+
+The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. 
+"Do not think me a cynic," he began at last. 
+"You are a man of affairs; you have made your own way;
+you should be even more free from illusions than I am. 
+If you tell me that these good things can be done,
+I am the last one to dispute you.  But I have seen near
+at hand experiments of exceptional importance, on a very
+grand scale, and the result does not encourage me. 
+I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power
+in these affairs as we think it has--for that matter,
+if it has any power at all.  The shifting of money can
+always disorganize what is going on at the moment--
+change it about and alter it in many ways--but its effect
+is only temporary.  As soon as the pressure is released,
+the human atoms rearrange themselves as they were before,
+and the old conditions return.  I think the only force which
+really makes any permanent difference is character--and yet
+about even that I am not sure.  The best man I have ever
+known--and in many respects the ablest--devoted untold
+energy and labour, and much money, too, to the service
+of a few thousand people in Somerset, on land of his own,
+upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and worked out. 
+Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony,
+his System?"
+
+Thorpe shook his head. 
+
+"He had worked tremendously for years at it.  He fell
+ill and went away--and in a day all the results of his
+labours and outlay were flat on the ground.  The property
+is mine now, and it is farmed and managed again in the
+ordinary way, and really the people there seem already
+to have forgotten that they had a prophet among them. 
+The marvelous character of the man--you look in vain
+for any sign of an impress that it left upon them. 
+I never go there.  I cannot bear those people.  I have
+sometimes the feeling that if it were feasible I should
+like to oppress them in some way--to hurt them."
+
+"Oh! 'the people' are hogs, right enough," Thorpe commented
+genially, "but they ARE 'the people,' and they're
+the only tools we've got to work with to make the world go round."
+
+"But if you leave the world alone," objected the Duke,
+"it goes round of itself.  And if you don't leave it alone,
+it goes round just the same, without any reference whatever
+to your exertions.  Some few men are always cleverer
+or noisier or more restless than the others, and their
+activity produces certain deviations and peculiarities
+in their generation.  The record of these--generally
+a very faulty and foolish record--we call history. 
+We say of these movements in the past that some of them were
+good and some were bad.  Our sons very likely will differ
+totally from us about which were good and which were bad;
+quite possibly, in turn, their sons may agree with us. 
+I do not see that it matters.  We cannot treat anything
+as final--except that the world goes round.  We appear out
+of the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried across
+and pitched off into the darkness at the other edge of it. 
+We are certain about nothing else."
+
+"Except that some of us have to pay for our ride,
+and others don't," put in Thorpe.  The tone in which he
+spoke made his meaning so clear that his Grace sat up. 
+
+"Ah, you think we do not pay?" he queried, his countenance
+brightening with the animation of debate.  "My dear sir,
+we pay more than anyone else.  Our fares are graduated,
+just as our death-duties are.  No doubt there are some idle
+and stupid, thick-skinned rich fellows, who escape the
+ticket-collector. But for each of them there are a thousand
+idle poor fellows who do the same.  You, for example,
+are a man of large wealth.  I, for my sins, carry upon my
+back the burden of a prodigious fortune.  Could we not go
+out now, and walk down the road to your nearest village,
+and find in the pub.  there a dozen day-labourers happier
+than we are? Why--it is Saturday night.  Then I will not
+say a dozen, but as many as the tap will hold.  It is not
+the beer alone that makes them happy.  Do not think that. 
+It is the ability to rest untroubled, the sense that till
+Monday they have no more responsibility than a tree-toad.
+Does the coming of Sunday make that difference to you
+or to me? When night comes, does it mean to us that we
+are to sleep off into oblivion all we have done that day,
+and begin life afresh next morning? No-o! We are the
+tired people; the load is never lifted from our backs. 
+Ah, do we not pay indeed!"
+
+"Oh-ho!" ejaculated Thorpe.  He had been listening
+with growing astonishment to the other's confession. 
+He was still surprised as he spoke, but a note of satisfaction
+mounted into his voice as he went on.  "You are unhappy,
+too! You are a young man, in excellent health;
+you have the wife you want; you understand good tobacco;
+you have a son.  That is a great deal--but my God! think
+what else you've got.  You're the Duke of Glastonbury--one
+of the oldest titles in England.  You're one of the richest
+men in the country--the richest in the old peerage,
+at any rate, I'm told.  And YOU'RE not happy!"
+
+The other smiled.  "Ah, the terms and forms survive,"
+he said, with a kind of pedagogic affability, "after the
+substance has disappeared.  The nobleman, the prince,
+was a great person in the times when he monopolized wealth. 
+It enabled him to monopolize almost everything else
+that was pleasant or superb.  He had the arts and the
+books and the musicians and the silks and velvets,
+and the bath-tubs--everything that made existence
+gorgeous--all to himself.  He had war to amuse himself with,
+and the seven deadly sins.  The barriers are down now. 
+Everything which used to be exclusively the nobleman's
+is now within everybody's reach, including the sins. 
+And it is not only that others have levelled up to him;
+they have levelled him down.  He cannot dress now more
+expensively than other people.  Gambling used to be
+recognized as one of his normal relaxations, but now,
+the higher his rank, the more sharply he is scolded for it. 
+Naturally he does not know what to do with himself. 
+As an institution, he descends from a period when the only
+imaginable use for wealth was to be magnificent with it. 
+But now in this business age, where the recognized use
+of wealth is to make more wealth, he is so much out of
+place that he has even forgotten how to be magnificent. 
+There are some illustrated articles in one of the magazines,
+giving photographs of the great historic country-houses
+of England.  You should see the pictures of the interiors.
+The furniture and decorations are precisely what a Brixton
+dressmaker would buy, if she suddenly came into some
+money."
+
+"All the same," Thorpe stuck to his point, "you are
+not happy."
+
+The Duke frowned faintly, as if at the other's persistency. 
+Then he shrugged his shoulders and answered in a
+lighter tone.  "It hardly amounts to that, I think. 
+I confess that there are alleviations to my lot. 
+In the opinion of the world I am one of its most fortunate
+citizens--and it is not for me to say that the world is
+altogether wrong.  The chief point is--I don't know if you
+will quite follow me--there are limits to what position
+and fortune can give a man.  And so easily they may deprive
+him of pleasures which poorer men enjoy! I may be wrong,
+but it seems impossible to me that any rich man who has
+acres of gardens and vineries and glass can get up the same
+affection for it all that the cottager will have for his
+little flower-plot, that he tends with his own hands.
+One seems outside the realities of life--a mere spectator
+at the show."
+
+"Ah, but why not DO things?" Thorpe demanded of him. 
+"Why merely stand, as you say, and look on?"
+
+The other leant his head back again.  "Pray what do
+you recommend?" he asked almost listlessly. 
+
+"Why--politics, for example."
+
+The Duke nodded, with an air of according to the suggestion
+a certain respect.  "Unhappily I am too much of a foreigner,"
+he commented.  "I know Englishmen and their affairs
+too imperfectly.  Sometime--perhaps."
+
+"And philanthropic work--you don't care about that,"
+pursued the other. 
+
+"Oh--we go not so far as that," said his Grace,
+with a deprecatory wave of the hands.  "My wife finds
+many interests in it, only she would not like to have you
+call it philanthropical.  She is London-born, and it
+is a great pleasure to her to be of assistance to poorer
+young women in London, who have so little done for them
+by the community, and can do so little for themselves. 
+I am much less skeptical about that particular work,
+I may tell you, than about philanthropy in general. 
+In fact, I am quite clear that it is doing good.  At least
+it is doing a kindness, and that is a pleasant occupation. 
+We are really not so idle as one might think.  We work at it
+a good deal, my wife and I."
+
+"So am I London-born," Thorpe remarked, with a certain irrelevancy. 
+After a moment's pause he turned a sharply enquiring glance
+upon his guest.  "This thing that you're doing in London--does
+it give you any 'pull' there?" "Pull?" repeated the other helplessly. 
+
+"If there was something you wanted the people of London
+to do, would they do it for you because of what you've
+been doing for them--or for their girls?"
+
+The Duke looked puzzled for a moment.  "But it isn't
+conceivable that I should want London to do anything--
+unless it might be to consume its own smoke," he observed. 
+
+"Quite so!" said Thorpe, rising bulkily to his feet,
+but signifying by a gesture that his companion was
+to remain seated.  He puffed at his cigar till its tip
+gleamed angrily through the smoke about him, and moved
+a few steps with his hands in his pockets.  "That is
+what I wanted to get at.  Now I'm London-born, I've got
+the town in my blood.  The Thorpes have been booksellers
+there for generations.  The old name is over the old
+shop still.  I think I know what Londoners are like;
+I ought to.  It's my belief that they don't want gifts. 
+They'll take 'em, but it isn't what they want. 
+They're a trading people--one of the oldest in the world. 
+Commercial traditions, the merchant's pride--these are bred
+in their bones.  They don't want something for nothing. 
+They like an honest bargain--fair on both sides.  'You help
+me and I'll help you.' And it's the only way you can do
+anything worth doing."
+
+"Well," said the Duke, passively. 
+
+Thorpe halted, and still with the cigar between his teeth,
+looked down at him. 
+
+"I can go into London, and study out the things
+that are to be done--that need to be done--and divide
+these into two parts, those that belong to private
+enterprise and those that ought to be done publicly. 
+And I can say to Londoners--not in so many words, mind you,
+but in a way the sharper ones will understand: 'Here,
+you fellows.  I'll begin doing out of my own pocket one set
+of these things, and you in turn must put yourselves at
+my back, and stand by me, and put me in a position where I
+can make the Government do this other set of things.'
+That will appeal to them.  A poor man couldn't lead them
+any distance, because he could always be killed by the
+cry that he was filling his pockets.  They will believe
+in a man whose ambition is to win an earldom and five
+thousand a year out of politics, but they will stone
+to death the man who merely tries to get a few hundreds
+a year out of it for his wife and children.  And a man
+like you can't do anything in London, because they can't
+see that there's anything you want in return--and besides,
+in their hearts, they don't like your class.  Don't forget
+it! This is the city that chopped off the king's head!"
+
+"Ah, but this is also the city," retorted the other,
+with placid pleasure in his argument, "which decked
+itself in banners and ribbons to welcome back the son
+of that same king.  And if you think of it, he was rather
+a quaint thing in sons, too."
+
+"It was the women did that," Thorpe affirmed with readiness. 
+"They get their own way once in a while, when the men are
+tired out, and they have their little spell of nonsense
+and monkey-shines, but it never lasts long.  Charles II. 
+doesn't matter at all--but take my word for it, his father
+matters a great deal.  There was a Thorpe among the judges
+who voted to behead him.  I am descended in a straight
+line from him."
+
+His Grace shrugged his slight shoulders again. 
+"It happens that my ancestors had extremely large facilities
+for doing unpleasant things, and, God knows, they did
+them--but I don't quite see what that goes to prove, now."
+
+"No, you don't grasp the idea," said Thorpe, resignedly. 
+After a moment's pause he took the cigar from his lips,
+and straightened himself "All the same," he declared roundly,
+"I am going to do the trick.  London has been waiting
+for an organizer--a leader--for a hundred years.  The right
+kind of a man, going the right way to work, can stand
+London on its head, as surely as I can burn this cigar. 
+And I'm going to have a try at it."
+
+"It is very interesting," remarked the Duke, with vagueness. 
+"But--are the ladies waiting for us? And if so, aren't we
+keeping them up unconscionably?"
+
+As if in comment upon his words, there was the sound of a
+faint rap at the door.  Then it opened, and through the
+dense blue haze of the room they saw some shadowed forms
+softly indistinct save where the light from the ceiling
+outside shone down upon a group of coiffured heads. 
+A noise of mingled coughing and laughter specifically
+completed the introduction. 
+
+"Oh, I'm--it's unendurable in there," spoke the voice
+of the hostess.  "We WERE coming in to smoke with you,"
+she called out through the cloud, "since you wouldn't stop
+with us."
+
+"Come along!" answered Thorpe, cheerily.  He strode
+to the end of the room and raised a window.  From the
+same corner he turned on some added lights. 
+
+Under this more effective illumination, the lady of the
+house advanced, with Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred
+close behind her.  "Frank has gone to bed," she explained
+to the Duke, who had risen.  Then she turned to her husband
+a bright-eyed glance: " You don't mind--our coming?"
+she asked.
+
+"Mind!" he called out, with robust impressiveness. 
+"Mind!" As if to complete the expression of his meaning,
+he threw his arm loosely about her, where she stood,
+and brought her to his side.  They remained standing thus,
+before the fireplace, after the others were all seated. 
+
+"Mr. Thorpe has been outlining to me the most wonderful plans,"
+said the Duke, looking from one face to another, with a
+reserved smile.  "It seems that philanthropy fails unless
+it is combined with very advanced politics.  It is a new
+idea to me--but he certainly states it with vigour. 
+Do you understand it, Edith?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly," replied the wife, smilingly.  "I am
+his first convert.  Behold in me the original disciple."
+
+"The worst of that is," commented Thorpe, with radiant joviality,
+"she would subscribe to any other new doctrine of mine
+just as readily." He tightened the arm encircling her
+by a perceptible trifle.  "Wouldn't you, sweetheart?" he demanded.
+
+She seemed in nowise embarrassed by these overt endearments. 
+There was indeed the dimmest suggestion in her face and voice
+of a responsive mood.  "Really," she began, with a soft glance,
+half-deprecation, half-pride, bent upon the others,
+and with thoughtful deliberation,--"really the important
+thing is that he should pursue some object--have in view
+something that he is determined to master.  Without that,
+he is not contented--not at his best.  He should have been
+a soldier.  He has a passion for battle in his blood.
+And now that he sees something he is eager to do--I am
+very glad.  It makes it none the less acceptable that good
+is to come from it."
+
+"I still maintain," said Miss Madden, interpolating her words
+through the task of lighting a cigarette, and contriving
+for them an effect of drollery which appealed to Thorpe
+most of all--"I shall always insist, just the same,
+that crime was his true vocation."
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Market-Place
+
+
+
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