“EDITH will be down in a very few moments,” Miss Madden assured Thorpe
that evening, when he entered the drawing-room of the house she had
taken in Grafton Street.
He looked into her eyes and smiled, as he bowed over the hand she
extended to him. His glance expressed with forceful directness his
thought: “Ah, then she has told you!”
The complacent consciousness of producing a fine effect in
evening-clothes had given to Mr. Stormont Thorpe habitually now a
mildness of manner, after the dressing hour, which was lacking to his
deportment in the day-time. The conventional attire of ceremony, juggled
in the hands of an inspired tailor, had been brought to lend to his
ponderous figure a dignity, and even something of a grace, which the
man within assimilated and made his own. It was an equable and rather
amiable Thorpe whom people encountered after nightfall--a gentleman who
looked impressive enough to have powerful performances believed of him,
yet seemed withal an approachable and easy-going person. Men who saw
him at midnight or later spoke of him to their womenkind with a certain
significant reserve, in which trained womankind read the suggestion that
the “Rubber King” drank a good deal, and was probably not wholly nice in
his cups.
This, however, could not be said to render him less interesting in any
eyes. There was indeed about it the implication of a generous nature, or
at the least of a blind side--and it is not unpleasant to discover these
attributes in a new man who has made his half-million, and has, or may
have, countless favours to bestow.
It was as if his tongue instead of his eyes had uttered the
exclamation--“Ah, then she has told you!”--for Miss Madden took it as
having been spoken. “I'm not disposed to pretend that I'm overjoyed
about it, you know,” she said to him bluntly, as their hands dropped,
and they stood facing each other. “If I said I congratulated you, it
would be only the emptiest form. And I hate empty forms.”
“Why should you think that I won't make a good husband?” Thorpe asked
the question with a good-natured if peremptory frankness which came
most readily to him in the presence of this American lady, herself so
outspoken and masterful.
“I don't know that I specially doubt it,” she replied. “I suppose any
man has in him the makings of what is called a good husband--if the
conditions are sufficiently propitious.”
“Well then--what's the matter with the conditions?” he demanded,
jocosely.
Miss Madden shrugged her shoulders slightly. Thorpe noted the somewhat
luxuriant curves of these splendid shoulders, and the creamy whiteness
of the skin, upon which, round the full throat, a chain of diamonds lay
as upon satin--and recalled that he had not seen her before in what he
phrased to himself as so much low-necked dress. The deep fire-gleam in
her broad plaits of hair gave a wonderful brilliancy to this colouring
of brow and throat and bosom. He marvelled at himself for discovering
only now that she also was beautiful--and then thrilled with pride at
the thought that henceforth his life might be passed altogether among
beautiful women, radiant in gems and costly fabrics, who would smile
upon him at his command.
“Oh, I have no wish to be a kill-joy,” she protested. “I'm sure I hope
all manner of good results from the--the experiment.”
“I suppose that's what it comes to,” he said, meditatively. “It's all an
experiment. Every marriage in the world must be that--neither more nor
less.”
“With all the experience of the ages against its coming out right.” She
had turned to move toward a chair, but looked now over her shoulder at
him. “Have you ever seen what seemed to you an absolutely happy marriage
in your life?”
Upon reflection he shook his head. “I don't recall one on the spur of
the minute,” he confessed. “Not the kind, I mean, that you read about
in books. But I've seen plenty where the couple got along together in
a good, easy, comfortable sort of way, without a notion of any sort
of unpleasantness. It's people who marry too young who do most of the
fighting, I imagine. After people have got to a sensible age, and know
what they want and what they can get along without, why then there's
no reason for any trouble. We don't start out with any school-boy and
school-girl moonshine.”
“Oh, there's a good deal to be said for the moonshine,” she interrupted
him, as she sank upon the sofa.
“Why certainly,” he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her.
“The more there is of it, the better--if it comes naturally, and people
know enough to understand that it is moonshine, and isn't the be-all and
end-all of everything.”
“There's a lover for you!” Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision
mingled in her laugh.
“Don't you worry about me,” he told her. “I'm a good enough lover,
all right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don't
precisely see what----”
“What business it is of mine?” she finished the sentence for him.
“You're entirely right. As you say, IF she's satisfied, no one else has
anything to do with it.”
“But have you got any right to assume that she isn't satisfied?” he
asked her with swift directness--“or any reason for supposing it?”
Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the
whimsical smile she gave him. “None whatever,” she said--and on the
instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
Thorpe's vision was flooded with the perception of his rare fortune as
he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the
smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to
it new forces in his eyes--forces which dazzled and troubled his glance.
The thought that this exquisite being--this ineffable compound
of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and
loveliness--belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his
mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from
diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder a gaze which he felt to be
overtly dimmed and embarrassed.
“I have kept you waiting,” she murmured.
The soft sound of her voice came to his ears as from a distance. It
bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a
detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from
all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror's
self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a
controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and
fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and
lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned
and led her toward the sofa. Halting, he bowed with an exaggerated
genuflection and flourish of his free hand to Miss Madden, the while he
flashed at her a glance at once of challenge and of deprecation. Through
the sensitized contact of the other hand, he felt that the woman he held
bowed also, and in his own spirit of confused defiance and entreaty.
The laugh he gave then seemed to dispel the awkwardness which had
momentarily hung over the mocking salutation.
Miss Madden laughed too. “Oh, I surrender,” she said. “You drag
congratulations from me.”
Some quality in the tone of this ungracious speech had the effect of
putting the party at its ease. Lady Cressage seated herself beside her
friend on the sofa, and gently, abstractedly, patted one of her hands.
Thorpe remained on his feet, looking down at the pair with satisfied
cheerfulness. He tool, a slip of paper from his pocket, to support a
statement he was making.
“I'm forever telling you what a strain the City is on a man in my
position,” he said--“and today I had the curiosity to keep an account of
what happened. Here it is. I had thirty callers. Of those, how many do
you suppose came to see me on my own business? Just eight. That is to
say, their errands were about investments of mine, but most of them
managed to get in some word about axes of their own to grind. All the
rest made no pretence at all of thinking about anybody but themselves.
I've classified them, one by one, here.
“First, there were six men who wanted me to take shares of one sort or
another, and I had to more or less listen to what they tried to make
out their companies were like. They were none of them any good. Eight
different fellows came to me with schemes that haven't reached the
company stage. One had a scheme for getting possession of a nigger
republic in the West Indies by raising a loan, and then repudiating all
the previous loans. Another wanted me to buy a paper for him, in which
he was to support all my enterprises. Another wanted to start a bank--I
apparently to find the money, and he the brains. One chap wanted me to
finance a theatrical syndicate--he had a bag full of photographs of an
actress all eyes and teeth and hair,--and another chap had a scheme all
worked out for getting a concession from Spain for one of the Caroline
Islands, and putting up a factory there for making porpoise-hide
leather.
“Then there were three inventors--let's see, here they are--one with a
coiled wire spring for scissors inside a pocket-knife, and one with
a bottle, the whole top of which unscrews instead of having a cork or
stopper, and one with an electrical fish-line, a fine wire inside the
silk, you know, which connects with some battery when a fish bites, and
rings a bell, and throws out hooks in various directions, and does all
sorts of things.
“Well then, there was a man who wanted me to take the chairmanship of
a company, and one who wanted me to guarantee an overdraft at his bank,
and two who wanted to borrow money on stock, and one parson-fellow who
tried to stick me for a subscription to some Home or other he said he
had for children in the country. He was the worst bounder of the lot.
“Well, there's twenty-seven people--and twenty of them strangers to
me, and not worth a penny to me, and all trying to get money out of me.
Isn't that a dog's life for one?”
“I don't know,” said Miss Madden, contemplatively. “A lady may have
twice that number of callers in an afternoon--quite as great strangers
to all intents and purposes--and not even have the satisfaction of
discovering that they had any object whatever in calling. At least your
people had some motive: the grey matter in their brain was working. And
besides, one of them might have had something to say which you would
value. I don't think that ever happens among a lady's callers; does it,
Edith?”
Edith smiled, pleasantly and yet a little wistfully, but said nothing.
“At any rate,” Thorpe went on, with a kind of purpose gathering in his
eyes, “none of those fellows cost me anything, except in time. But then
I had three callers, almost in a bunch, and one of them took out of me
thirty thousand pounds, and another fifteen thousand pounds, and the
third--an utter stranger he was--he got an absolute gratuity of ten
thousand pounds, besides my consent to a sale which, if I had refused
it, would have stood me in perhaps forty or fifty thousand pounds more.
You ladies may thank your stars you don't have that kind of callers!”
The sound of these figures in the air brought a constrained look to the
faces of the women. Seemingly they confronted a subject which was not to
their liking. The American, however, after a moment's pause, took it up
in an indifferent manner.
“You speak of an 'absolute gratuity.' I know nothing of London City
methods--but isn't ten thousand pounds a gratuity on a rather large
scale?”
Thorpe hesitated briefly, then smiled, and, with slow deliberation, drew
up a chair and seated himself before them. “Perhaps I don't mind telling
you about it,” he began, and paused again. “I had a letter in my mail
this morning,” he went on at last, giving a sentimental significance to
both tone and glance--“a letter which changed everything in the world
for me, and made me the proudest and happiest man above ground. And
I put that letter in my pocket, right here on the left side--and it's
there now, for that matter”--he put his hand to his breast, as if under
the impulse to verify his words by the production of the missive, and
then stopped and flushed.
The ladies, watching him, seemed by their eyes to condone the
mawkishness of the demonstration which had tempted him. There was indeed
a kind of approving interest in their joint regard, which he had not
experienced before.
“I had it in my pocket,” he resumed, with an accession of mellow emotion
in his voice, “and none of the callers ever got my thoughts very far
from that letter. And one of these was an old man--a French banker who
must be seventy years old, but dyes his hair a kind of purple black--and
it seems that his nephew had got the firm into a terrible kind of
scrape, selling 2,000 of my shares when he hadn't got them to sell and
couldn't get them--and the old man came to beg me to let him out at
present market figures. He got Lord Chaldon--he's my Chairman, you
know--to bring him, and introduce him as his friend, and plead for
him--but I don't think all that, by itself, would have budged me an
atom. But then the old man told how he was just able to scrape together
money enough to buy the shares he needed, at the ruling price, and he
happened to mention that his niece's marriage portion would have to
be sacrificed. Well, then, do you know, that letter in my pocket said
something to me....And--well, that's the story. The girl' s portion, I
wormed it out of him, was ten thousand...and I struck that much off
the figure that I allowed him to buy his shares, and save his firm,
for....It was all the letter that did it, mind you!”
He concluded the halting narrative amid a marked silence. The ladies
looked at him and at each other, but they seemed surprised out of their
facility of comment. In this kind of flustered hush, the door was opened
and dinner was announced.
Miss Madden welcomed the diversion by rising with ostentatious vigour.
“I will take myself out,” she declared, with cheerful promptness leading
the way. Lady Cressage took the arm Thorpe offered her, and gave no
token of comprehending that her wrist was being caressingly pressed
against his side as they moved along.
At the little table shining in the centre of the dark, cool dining-room,
talk moved idly about among general topics. A thunderstorm broke over
the town, at an early stage of the dinner, and the sound of the rushing
downpour through the open windows, and the breath of freshness which
stirred the jaded air, were pleasanter than any speech. Thoughts roved
intuitively country-ward, where the long-needed rain would be dowering
the landscape with new life--where the earth at sunrise would be green
again, and buoyant in reawakened energy, and redolent with the perfumes
of sweetest summer. They spoke of the fields and the moors with the
longing of tired town-folk in August.
“Oh, when I get away”--said Thorpe, fervently, “it seems to me that I
don't want ever to come back. These last few weeks have got terribly on
my nerve. And really--why should I come back? I've been asking myself
the question--more today than ever before. Of course everything has
been different today. But if I'm to get any genuine good out of my--my
fortune--I must pull away from the City altogether sometime--and why not
now? Of course, some important things are still open--and they have to
be watched night and day--but after all, Semple--that's my Broker--he
could do it for me. At the most, it won't last more than another six
weeks. There is a settlement-day next week, the 15th, and another a
fortnight after, on the 29th, and another on September 12th. Well, those
three days, if they're worked as I intend they shall be, and nothing
unforeseen happens, will bring in over four hundred thousand pounds, and
close the 'corner' in Rubber Consols for good. Then I need never see the
City again, thank God! And for that matter--why, what is six weeks?
It's like tomorrow. I'm going to act as if I were free already. The rain
fills me full of the country. Will you both come with me tomorrow
or next day, and see the Pellesley place in Hertfordshire? By the
photographs it's the best thing in the market. The newest parts of it
are Tudor--and that's what I've always wanted.”
“How unexpected you are!” commented Miss Madden. “You are almost
the last person I should have looked to for a sentiment about Tudor
foundations.”
Thorpe put out his lips a trifle. “Ah, you don't know me,” he replied,
in a voice milder than his look had promised. “Because I'm rough and
practical, you mustn't think I don't know good things when I see them.
Why, all the world is going to have living proof very soon”--he paused,
and sent a smile surcharged with meaning toward the silent member of the
trio--“living proof that I'm the greatest judge of perfection in beauty
of my time.”
He lifted his glass as he spoke, and the ladies accepted with an
inclination of the head, and a touch of the wine at their lips, his
tacit toast. “Oh, I think I do know you,” said Celia Madden, calmly
discursive. “Up to a certain point, you are not so unlike other men. If
people appeal to your imagination, and do not contradict you, or bore
you, or get in your way, you are capable of being very nice indeed
to them. But that isn't a very uncommon quality. What is uncommon
in you--at least that is my reading--is something which according
to circumstances may be nice, or very much the other way about. It's
something which stands quite apart from standards of morals or ethics or
the ordinary emotions. But I don't know, whether it is desirable for me
to enter into this extremely personal analysis.”
“Oh yes, go on,” Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost
excited interest.
“Well--I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and
capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning
and indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even
tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. You
have the kind of organization in which, within a second, without any
warning or reason, a passing whim may have worked itself up into an
imperative law--something you must obey.”
The man smiled and nodded approvingly: “You've got me down fine,” he
said.
“I talk with a good deal of confidence,” she went on, with a cheerless,
ruminative little laugh, “because it is my own organization that I am
describing, too. The difference is that I was allowed to exploit my
capacity for mischief very early. I had my own way in my teens--my own
money, my own power--of course only of a certain sort, and in a very
small place. But I know what I did with that power. I spread trouble
and misery about me--always of course on a small scale. Then a group of
things happened in a kind of climax--a very painful climax--and it
shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died--some other
sobering things happened...and luckily I was still young enough to stop
short, and take stock of myself, and say that there were certain paths
I would never set foot on again--and stick to it. But with you--do you
see?--power only comes to you when you are a mature man. Experiences, no
matter how unpleasant they are, will not change you now. You will not
be moved by this occurrence or that to distrust yourself, or reconsider
your methods, or form new resolutions. Oh no! Power will be terrible
in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel
courses----”
“Oh, dear--dear!” broke in Lady Cressage. “What a distressing Mrs.
Gummidge-Cassandra you are, Celia! Pray stop it!”
“No--she's right enough,” said Thorpe, gravely. “That's the kind of man
I am.”
He seemed so profoundly interested in the contemplation of this portrait
which had been drawn of him, that the others respected his reflective
silence. He sat for some moments, idly fingering a fork on the table,
and staring at a blotch of vivid red projected through a decanter upon
the cloth.
“It seems to me that's the only kind of man it's worth while to be,”
he added at last, still speaking with thoughtful deliberation. “There's
nothing else in the world so big as power--strength. If you have that,
you can get everything else. But if you have it, and don't use it, then
it rusts and decays on your hands. It's like a thoroughbred horse. You
can't keep it idle in the stable. If you don't exercise it, you lose
it.”
He appeared to be commenting upon some illustration which had occurred
to his own mind, but was not visible to his auditors. While they
regarded him, he was prompted to admit them to his confidence.
“There was a case of it today,” he said, and then paused.
“Precisely,” put in Miss Madden. “The fact that some Frenchwoman, of
whom you had never heard before, was going to lose her marriage portion
caught your attention, and on the instant you presented her with
$10,000, an exercise of power which happens to be on the generous
side--but still entirely unreasoning, and not deserving of any
intellectual respect. And here's the point: if it had happened that
somebody else chanced to produce an opposite impression upon you, you
would have been capable of taking $50,000 away from him with just as
light a heart.”
Thorpe's face beamed with repressed amusement. “As a matter of fact it
was that kind of case I was going to mention. I wasn't referring to the
girl and her marriage portion. A young man came to me today--came into
my room all cock-a-whoop, smiling to himself with the notion that he had
only to name what he wanted, and I would give it to him--and----”
He stopped abruptly, with a confused little laugh. He had been upon the
brink of telling about Lord Plowden's discomfiture, and even now the
story itched upon his tongue. It cost him an effort to put the narrative
aside, the while he pondered the arguments which had suddenly reared
themselves against publicity. When at last he spoke, it was with a
glance of conscious magnanimity toward the lady who had consented to be
his wife.
“Never mind,” he said, lightly. “There wasn't much to it. The man
annoyed me, somehow--and he didn't get what he came for--that's all.”
“But he was entitled to get it?” asked Celia Madden. Thorpe's lips
pouted over a reply. “Well--no,” he said, with a kind of reluctance.
“He got strictly what he was entitled to--precisely what I had promised
him--and he wrung up his nose at that--and then I actually gave him
15,000 pounds he wasn't entitled to at all.”
“I hardly see what it proves, then,” Edith Cressage remarked, and the
subject was dropped.
Some two hours later, Thorpe took his departure. It was not until he
was getting into the hansom which had been summoned, that it all at
once occurred to him that he had not for a moment been alone with his
betrothed. Upon reflection, as the cab sped smoothly forward, this
seemed odd to him. He decided finally that there was probably some
social rule about such things which he didn't understand.
*****
In the drawing-room of the house in Grafton Street which he had quitted,
the two ladies sat with faces averted from each other, in constrained
silence.
Edith Cressage rose at last, and took a few aimless steps, with her
hands at her hair. “Well--I'm embarked--fairly under way!” she said, in
clear-cut, almost provocative tones.
“I don't at all know what to say,” her companion replied, slowly. “I
fancy that you exaggerate my disapproval. Perhaps it ought not even to
be called disapproval at all. It is only that I am puzzled--and a little
frightened.”
“Oh, I am frightened too,” said the other, but with eagerness rather
than trepidation in her voice. “That is why I did not give you the
signal to leave us alone. I couldn't quite get up the nerve for it. But
would you believe it?--that is one of the charms of the thing. There
is an excitement about it that exhilarates me. To get happiness through
terror--you can't understand that, can you?”
“I'm trying. I think I'm beginning to understand,” said Miss Madden,
vaguely.
“Did you ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married
Bothwell?” asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating
fixity. “You have it all--all there. Marie got tired of the smooth
people, the usual people. There was the promise of adventure, and risk,
and peril, and the grand emotions with the big, dark brute.”
“It isn't a happy story--this parallel that you pick out,” commented
Celia, absently.
“Happy! Pah!” retorted Edith, with spirit. “Who knows if it wasn't the
only really happy thing in her life? The snobs and prigs all scold
her and preach sermons at her--they did it in her lifetime: they do it
now----” “Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig,” put in Celia, looking
up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone--“I
don't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her. I never was
even able to mind about her killing Darnley. You see I take an extremely
liberal view. One might almost call it broad. But if I had been one of
her ladies--her bosom friends--say Catherine Seton--and she had
talked with me about it--I think I should have confessed to some
forebodings--some little misgivings.”
“And do you know what she would have said?” Edith's swift question, put
with a glowing face and a confident voice, had in it the ring of assured
triumph. “She would have answered you: 'My dearest girl, all my life I
have done what other people told me to do. In my childhood I was
given in marriage to a criminal idiot. In my premature widowhood I
was governed by a committee of scoundrels of both sexes until another
criminal idiot was imposed upon me as a second husband. My own
personality has never had the gleam of a chance. I have never yet
done any single thing because I wanted to do it. Between first my
politician-mother and her band of tonsured swindlers, and then my
cantankerous brother and his crew of snarling and sour-minded preachers,
and all the court liars and parasites and spies that both sides
surrounded me with, I have lived an existence that isn't life at all. I
purport to be a woman, but I have never been suffered to see a genuine
man. And now here is one--or what I think to be one--and I'm given to
understand that he is a pirate and a murderer and an unspeakable ruffian
generally--but he takes my fancy, and he has beckoned to me to come to
him, and so you will kindly get me my hat and jacket and gloves.' That's
what she would have said to you, my dear.”
“And I”--said Celia, rising after a moment's pause, and putting her hand
upon Edith's arm--“I would have answered, 'Dearest lady, in whatever
befalls, I pray you never to forget that I am to the end your fond and
devoted and loyal servant.'”