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.