IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London
nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in
indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be
so brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage
irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged
dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which
the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke
about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid
gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South
Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its
wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however, upon
this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said
he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the
idea that any other railway could be half so bad.
The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the
champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up
additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay
and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the
newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing
a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and
inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues,
was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive
and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed
either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the
Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.
But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost too short.
The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the
Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the
window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit
from which he was returning.
When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his
mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to
him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over
and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself
with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at
the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street
through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.
Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small, huddled
rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a
corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like
one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.
The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk
who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish
this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in
a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the
personification of business--without an ounce of distracting superfluous
flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary
politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine
perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a
joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke
cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to
belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing
anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was
more than a touch of what the rustic calls “ginger” in his hair and
closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid
skin. His eyes--notably direct, confident eyes--were of a grey which had
in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.
He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin
lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. “Well?” he asked,
impassively.
“Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?” asked Thorpe in turn. “I want a
talk with you.”
For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two,
he remarked, “Go ahead till we're stopped,” and seated himself on the
corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig.
Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.
“I've worked out the whole scheme,” he began, as if introducing the
product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. “I'm going to leave
England almost immediately--go on the Continent and loaf about--I've
never seen the Continent.”
Semple regarded him in silence. “Well?” he observed at last.
“You see the idea, don't you?” Thorpe demanded.
The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. “Go on,” he said.
“But the idea is everything,” protested the other. “We've been thinking
of beginning the campaign straight away--but the true game now is to lie
low--silent as the grave. I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular
is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else--and so
there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me,
d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The
Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of
course, and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show,
but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general
impression that I've gone to pieces. Now d'ye see?”
“It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,” commented Semple.
“Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would move heaven
and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind
of what was going on. The only weak point in our game is just there.
Absolutely everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally,
then, our play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We
don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we're
up to, till after we're safe past that rock. So we go on in the way
to attract the least possible attention. You or your jobber makes the
ordinary application for a Special Settlement, with your six signatures
and so on; and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as shut
up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols--and the thing works
itself. You do see it, don't you?”
“I see well enough the things that are to be seen,” replied Semple, with
a certain brevity of manner. “There was a sermon of my father's that I
remember, and it had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are
seen, but at the things which are not seen.'”
Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. “Semple,” he said,
bringing his chair forward to the desk, “that's what I've come for. I
want to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you've laid
out already, in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid
back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that to one side.
Now then, leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought
to have out of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not
thinking of your 2,000 vendor's shares----”
“No--I'm not thinking much of them, either,” interposed Semple, with a
kind of dry significance.
“Oh, they'll be all right,” Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as
he did so. “No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come
to you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board.”
“Twenty thousand pounds,” said Semple, readily.
Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. “I had thought thirty would be
a fairer figure,” he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.
The broker put out his under-lip. “You will find people rather disposed
to distrust a man who promises more than he's asked,” he remarked
coldly.
“Yes--I know what you mean,” Thorpe hurried to say, flushing awkwardly,
even though the remark was so undeserved; “but it's in my nature. I'm
full of the notion of doing things for people that have done things
for me. That's the way I'm built. Why”--he halted to consider the
advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord Plowden,
and decided against it--“why, without you, what would the whole
thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone--the money for the
applications--I could have no more got at it than I could at the Crown
Jewels in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once--if you don't
mind the question--how did you happen to have so much ready money lying
about.”
“There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for
them,” the broker explained. “If they get five per cent. for the four
months, they'll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take
thirty thousand instead of twenty--if it presents itself to your mind in
that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course.”
“Of course,” assented Thorpe. “Write it now, if you like.” He pushed his
chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. “What
I want to do is this,” he said, looking up. “I'll make the promise for
thirty-two thousand, and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in
cash now--a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang about on
the Continent for four months. I judge you think it'll be four months
before things materialize, eh?”
“The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come
shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then
the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin--and it is for you to
say how long you allow that to go on.”
“But about the two thousand pounds now,” Thorpe reminded him.
“I think I will do that in this way,” said Semple, kicking his small
legs nonchalantly. “I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you,
for cash down, NOT vendor's shares, you observe--and then I will take
your acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given
date. In that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would
have a stake in the game.” “Your stake's pretty big, already,” commented
Thorpe, tentatively.
“It's just a fancy of mine,” said the other, with his first smile. “I
like to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very
exciting.”
“All right,” said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two
letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on
the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and
wrote a cheque.
“Do you want it open?” he asked over his shoulder. “Are you going to get
it cashed at once?”
“No--cross it,” said the other. “I want it to go through my bankers.
It'll warm their hearts toward me. I shan't be going till the end of the
week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart.”
“On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business in Frankfort
once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all.”
“But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?” Thorpe asked him, as he
folded the cheque in his pocket-book.
“Oh yes--many things,” responded the broker, lightly. “It's a pleasure,
for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par.”
“Oh, if you call it buying,” said Thorpe, and then softened his words
with an apologetic laugh. “I didn't tell you, did I? I've been spending
Saturday and Sunday with Plowden--you know, the Lord Plowden on my
Board.”
“I know of him very well,” observed the Scotchman.
“Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual
form with guinea-pigs.”
“Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,” Thorpe asserted,
warmly. “He's really a splendid fellow--with his little oddities, like
the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place?
I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and it's kept
up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his
real income is supposed to be?”
Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly
with the palm of his hand.
“I asked,” Thorpe went on, “because he had so much to say about his
poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his
doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all
over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of
England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I
knocked the pheasants!” A clerk showed his head at the door, with a
meaning gesture. “I must go now,” said Semple, briskly, and led the way
out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
brief injunction, “Don't go away without seeing me.”
It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's
slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe
noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of
fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him
luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had
been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only
a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab,
and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very
agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the “Court” section of
a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two
messages. They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick
at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square
country--and the other looked for him at his club. Both begged him to
lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.
There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his
hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to
his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway,
and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned
presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop
of his family.
In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks
and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy
to his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a
dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that
the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of
different planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and
she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the
doorway bore still its century-old legend, “Thorpe, Bookseller.”
He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the
books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy
guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious
recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its
expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions
if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with
a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered
if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young
fool. No--no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day--and
especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of
what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague
as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those
days there still were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.
Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to
apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's
servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before
how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men.
The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two
generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named
Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of
buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked
acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and
friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the
law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a
book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as
the Plowdens.
A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way
along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small
open space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a
high desk. She did not look up.
“Well--I visited his Lordship all right.” He announced his presence thus
genially.
“I hope you're the better for it,” she remarked, turning to him, after a
pause, her emotionless, plain face.
“Oh, immensely,” he affirmed, with robust jocularity. “You should have
seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe'
there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself at
breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer than silk. Oh, it's
clear as daylight--I was intended for a fashionable career.”
She smiled in a faint, passive way. “Well--they say 'better late
than never,' you know.” “And after all, IS it so very late?” he said,
adopting her phrase as an expression of his thought. “I'm just turned
forty, and I feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first
Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into
the House of Commons until he was seven-and-forty.”
“You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,” she commented.
“I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The
mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me feel as if I was at the very
least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me,
and listened to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her.”
Louisa laughed in his face. “Don't be a fool, Joel,” she adjured him,
with a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience
with the buoyancy of his smile. “Why, of course, you'll know her,” he
protested. “What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going
to allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in
your window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm
a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a
thing!”
“There's no good talking about it at all,” she observed, after a little
pause. “It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And as I said the other
night, if you want to do things for the children, that's another matter.
They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody chooses to teach
them.”
“Where are they now?” he asked. Upon the instant another plan began to
unfold itself in the background of his mind.
“They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at different places, of
course. I was recommended to send Julia there--one of our old customers
is a Governor, or whatever it's called--and he got special terms for
her. She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged it
very nicely for her--and there is such a good boys' college there,
it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. Julia is to finish at
Christmas-time--and what I'm going to do with her afterward is more than
I know.”
“Is she pretty?” the uncle of Julia enquired.
“She's very nice,” the mother answered, with vague extenuation in her
tone. “I don't know about her looks--she varies so much. Sometimes I
think she's pretty--and then again I can't think it. She's got
good features, and she holds herself well, and she's very much the
lady--rather too much, I think, sometimes--but it all depends upon what
you call pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after her father's
family. The Dabneys are all little people.”
Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. “And what's Alfred like?”
he asked.
“He wants to be an artist!” There was a perceptible note of apprehension
in the mother's confession.
“Well--why shouldn't he--if he's got a bent that way?” demanded Thorpe,
with reproof in his tone. “Did you want him to be a shop-keeper?”
“I should like to see him a doctor,” she replied with dignity. “It was
always my idea for him.”
“Well, it's no good--even as an idea,” he told her. “Doctors are like
parsons--they can't keep up with the times. The age is outgrowing them.
Only the fakirs in either profession get anything out of it, nowadays.
It's all mystery and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick--medicine
is--and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist, you're not
in it. But an artist stands on his merits. There is his work--done by
his own hands. It speaks for itself. There's no deception--it's easy
enough to tell whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good,
people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them. Of course, it
won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking, whether his pictures sell
well or not. But probably he'd give it up, if he didn't make a hit of
it.
“I don't know that there's any crying need that he should do anything.
My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army, but I wouldn't dream of
forcing it on him against his will. I had a bitter enough dose of that,
myself, with father. I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps
argue with him, if I thought he was making a jack of himself--but I
wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he wants to be an artist, in God's
name let him go ahead. It can be made a gentlemanly trade--and the main
thing is that he should be a gentleman.”
Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. “If you
don't mind, I don't know that I do,” she said when it was finished.
“Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick
temper. He reminds me of father--oh, ever so much more than you do. He
contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows it all.”
“But he's a good fellow, isn't he?” urged Thorpe. “I mean, he's got his
likable points? I'm going to be able to get along with him?”
“I didn't get along with him very well,” the mother admitted,
reluctantly, “but I daresay with a man it would be different. You see,
his father was ill all those four years, and Alfred hated the shop as
bad as you did, and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair.
I want to be fair to him, you know.”
“But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word,” Thorpe insisted.
“Oh, mercy yes,” Louisa made ready answer. “My only fear is--whether you
won't find him too much of a gentleman.”
Thorpe knitted his brows. “I only hope we're talking about the same
thing,” he said, in a doubtful tone. Before she could speak, he lifted
his hand. “Never mind--I can see for myself in ten minutes more than you
could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan. I'm going on the Continent
in a few days' time, to stay for three or four months. I've got nothing
special to do--just to travel about and see things and kill time--I
shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland and Paris and the Rhine
and all sorts of places--and it occurred to me that I'd take the two
youngsters with me. I could get acquainted with them, that way, and
they'd be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would feel good
to have some of my own flesh and blood about me--and I suppose they'd be
tickled to death to go.”
“Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,” Mrs. Dabney
objected, blankly.
“Bah!” Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something
good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. “What on earth
difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and
let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl
was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four
months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around
in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?
“And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought
to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him.
Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special
start for it.” He added, upon a luminous afterthought: “Perhaps his
seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of
wanting to be an artist.”
The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction.
“Well--if you really think it's best,” she began, “I don't know that
I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if
they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now
you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and all
I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write
them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have
some travelling clothes.”
“I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry up about it.”
Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on
the desk. “I will give you back that thirty,” he said, as he wrote, “and
here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
will you? and if you want more tell me.”
A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for
leaving.
His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand,
was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible
letters before her mental vision. “Even now I don't believe in him,” the
impalpable legend ran.