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?”