THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts of the great
gardens, as the first shadows of evening began to dull the daylight.
For a long time he moved aimlessly about, sick at heart and benumbed of
mind, in the stupid oppression of a bad dream.
There ran through all his confused thoughts the exasperating
consciousness that it was nonsense to be frightened, or even disturbed;
that, in truth, nothing whatever had happened. But he could not lay hold
of it to any comforting purpose. Some perverse force within him insisted
on raising new phantoms in his path, and directing his reluctant gaze
to their unpleasant shapes. Forgotten terrors pushed themselves upon his
recollection. It was as if he stood again in the Board Room, with the
telegram telling of old Tavender's death in his hands, waiting to hear
the knock of Scotland Yard upon the door.
The coming of Gafferson took on a kind of supernatural aspect, when
Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which
had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the
very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed
a vivid picture of that approach--of the old ramshackle village trap,
and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent,
red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively
suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now
that he had at the time discerned a certain fateful quality in the
apparition. And he and his wife had actually been talking of old Kervick
at the moment! It was their disagreement over him which had prevented
her explaining about the new head-gardener. There was an effect of the
uncanny in all this.
And what did Gafferson want? How much did he know? The idea that perhaps
old Kervick had found him out, and patched up with him a scheme of
blackmail, occurred to him, and in the unreal atmosphere of his mood,
became a thing of substance. With blackmail, however, one could always
deal; it was almost a relief to see the complication assume that guise.
But if Gafferson was intent upon revenge and exposure instead? With such
a slug-like, patient, tenacious fool, was that not more likely?
Reasonable arguments presented themselves to his mind ever and again:
his wife had known of Gafferson's work, and thought highly of it, and
had been in a position to learn of his leaving Hadlow. What more natural
than that she should hasten to employ him? And what was it, after all,
that Gafferson could possibly know or prove? His brother-in-law had gone
off, and got too drunk to live, and had died. What in the name of all
that was sensible had this to do with Thorpe? Why should it even
be supposed that Gafferson associated Thorpe with any phase of the
business? And if he had any notion of a hostile movement, why should he
have delayed action so long? Why indeed!
Reassurance did not come to him, but at last an impulse to definite
action turned his footsteps toward the cluster of greenhouses in the
deepening shadow of the mansion. He would find Gafferson, and probe this
business to the uttermost. If there was discoverable in the man's manner
or glance the least evidence of a malevolent intention--he would know
what to do. Ah, what was it that he would do? He could not say, beyond
that it would be bad for Gafferson. He instinctively clenched the
fists in the pockets of his jacket as he quickened his pace. Inside the
congeries of glazed houses he was somewhat at sea. It was still light
enough to make one's way about in the passages between the stagings, but
he had no idea of the general plan of the buildings, and it seemed to
him that he frequently got back to places he had traversed before. There
were two or three subordinate gardeners in or about the houses, but
upon reflection he forbore to question them. He tried to assume an
idly indifferent air as he sauntered past, nodding almost imperceptible
acknowledgment of the forefingers they jerked upward in salutation.
He came at last upon a locked door, the key of which had been removed.
The fact vaguely surprised him, and he looked with awakened interest
through the panes of this door. The air inside seemed slightly
thickened--and then his eye caught the flicker of a flame, straight
ahead. It was nothing but the fumigation of a house; the burning spirits
in the lamp underneath the brazier were filling the structure with
vapours fatal to all insect life. In two or three hours the men would
come and open the doors and windows and ventilate the place. The
operation was quite familiar to him; it had indeed interested him more
when he first saw it done than had anything else connected with the
greenhouses.
His abstracted gaze happened to take note of the fact that the door-key
was hanging on a nail overhead, and then suddenly this seemed to be
related to something else in his thoughts--some obscure impression
or memory which evaded him. Continuing to look at the key, a certain
recollection all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it came
to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they were using warned
people against exposing themselves to its fumes more than was absolutely
necessary. That meant, of course, that their full force would kill a
human being. It was very interesting. He looked through the glass again,
but could not see that the air was any thicker. The lamp still burned
brightly.
He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron, at the
further end of the palm-house he was in, doing something to a plant.
Thorpe noted the fact that he felt no surprise in seeing that it was
Gafferson. Somehow the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading
flame inside the locked door, seemed to have prepared him for the
spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. He moved forward slowly toward the
head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at
each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into
non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house,
and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. The men
when they came back would find him there. But ah! they would know that
they had not left him there; they would have seen him outside, no doubt,
after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key could be left in the
unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had rashly entered, and
been overcome by the vapours. He approached the man silently, his brain
arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.
Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost
exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was
to be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his
wife talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have
a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of
conversation. Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole
household into confusion. And its effect upon his wife!--the progress
of his thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the
shock such a catastrophe might involve to her--or at the best, of the
gross unpleasantness she would find in it--flashed over his mind, and
then yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this
meant to him. It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. A
profoundly tender desire for her happiness was in complete possession.
Already the notion of doing anything to wound or grieve her appeared
incredible to him.
“Well, Gafferson,” he heard himself saying, in one of the more reserved
tones of his patriarchal manner. He had halted close to the inattentive
man, and stood looking down upon him. His glance was at once tolerant
and watchful.
Gafferson slowly rose from his slouching posture, surveyed the other
while his faculties in leisurely fashion worked out the problem of
recognition, aud then raised his finger to his cap-brim. “Good-evening,
sir,” he said.
This gesture of deference was eloquently convincing. Thorpe, after an
instant's alert scrutiny, smiled upon him. “I was glad to hear that you
had come to us,” he said with benevolent affability. “We shall expect
great things of a man of your reputation.”
“It'll be a fair comfort, sir,” the other replied, “to be in a place
where what one does is appreciated. What use is it to succeed in
hybridizing a Hippeastrum procera with a Pancratium Amancaes, after
over six hundred attempts in ten years, and then spend three years
a-hand-nursing the seedlings, and then your master won't take enough
interest in the thing to pay your fare up to London to the exhibition
with 'em? That's what 'ud break any man's heart.”
“Quite true,” Thorpe assented, with patrician kindliness. “You need fear
nothing of that sort here, Gafferson. We give you a free hand. Whatever
you want, you have only to let us know. And you can't do things too well
to please us.” “Thank you, sir,” said Gafferson, and really, as Thorpe
thought about it, the interview seemed at an end.
The master turned upon his heel, with a brief, oblique nod over his
shoulder, and made his way out into the open air. Here, as he walked,
he drew a succession of long consolatory breaths. It was almost as if
he had emerged from the lethal presence of the fumigator itself. He took
the largest cigar from his case, lighted it, and sighed smoke-laden new
relief as he strolled back toward the terrace.
But a few minutes before he had been struggling helplessly in the coils
of an evil nightmare. These terrors seemed infinitely far behind him
now. He gave an indifferent parting glance backward at them, as one
might over his after-breakfast cigar at the confused alarms of an early
awakening hours before. There was nothing worth remembering--only the
shapeless and foolish burden of a bad dream.
The assurance rose within him that he was not to have any more such
trouble. With a singular clearness of mental vision he perceived that
the part of him which brought bad dreams had been sloughed off, like a
serpent's skin. There had been two Thorpes, and one of them--the Thorpe
who had always been willing to profit by knavery, and at last in a
splendid coup as a master thief had stolen nearly a million, and would
have shrunk not at all from adding murder to the rest, to protect that
plunder--this vicious Thorpe had gone away altogether. There was no
longer a place for him in life; he would never be seen again by
mortal eye....There remained only the good Thorpe, the pleasant,
well-intentioned opulent gentleman; the excellent citizen; the
beneficent master, to whom, even Gafferson like the others, touched a
respectful forelock.
It passed in the procession of his reverie as a kind of triumph of
virtue that the good Thorpe retained the fortune which the bad Thorpe
had stolen. It was in all senses a fortunate fact, because now it would
be put to worthy uses. Considering that he had but dimly drifted
about heretofore on the outskirts of the altruistic impulse, it was
surprisingly plain to him now that he intended to be a philanthropist.
Even as he mentioned the word to himself, the possibilities suggested
by it expanded in his thoughts. His old dormant, formless lust for power
stirred again in his pulses. What other phase of power carried with it
such rewards, such gratitudes, such humble subservience on all sides
as far as the eye could reach--as that exercised by the intelligently
munificent philanthropist?
Intelligence! that was the note of it all. Many rich people dabbled at
the giving of money, but they did it so stupidly, in such a slip-shod
fashion, that they got no credit for it. Even millionaires more or less
in public life, great newspaper-owners, great brewer-peers, and the
like, men who should know how to do things well, gave huge sums in bulk
for public charities, such as the housing of the poor, and yet contrived
somehow to let the kudos that should have been theirs evaporate. He
would make no such mistake as that.
It was easy enough to see wherein they erred. They gave superciliously,
handing down their alms from a top lofty altitude of Tory superiority,
and the Radicals down below sniffed or growled even while they
grudgingly took these gifts--that was all nonsense. These aristocratic
or tuft-hunting philanthropists were the veriest duffers. They laid out
millions of pounds in the vain attempt to secure what might easily
be had for mere thousands, if they went sensibly to work. Their vast
benefactions yielded them at the most bare thanks, or more often no
thanks at all, because they lacked the wit to lay aside certain little
trivial but annoying pretensions, and waive a few empty prejudices.
They went on, year after year, tossing their fortunes into a sink of
contemptuous ingratitude, wondering feebly why they were not beloved in
return. It was because they were fools. They could not, or they would
not, understand the people they sought to manipulate.
What could not a man of real brain, of real breadth and energy and force
of character, do in London with two hundred thousand pounds? Why, he
could make himself master of the town! He could break into fragments the
political ascendency of the snob, “semi-detached” villa classes, in half
the Parliamentary divisions they now controlled. He could reverse
the partisan complexion of the Metropolitan delegation, and lead to
Westminster a party of his own, a solid phalanx of disciplined men,
standing for the implacable Democracy of reawakened London. With such a
backing, he could coerce ministries at will, and remake the politics of
England. The role of Great Oliver himself was not too hopelessly beyond
the scope of such a vision.
Thorpe threw his cigar-end aside, and then noted that it was almost
dark. He strode up to the terrace two steps at a time, and swung along
its length with a vigour and exhilaration of movement he had not known,
it seemed to him, for years. He felt the excitement of a new incentive
bubbling in his veins.
“Her Ladyship is in her sitting-room, sir,” a domestic replied to his
enquiry in the hall. The title arrested his attention from some
fresh point of view, and he pondered it, as he made his way along the
corridor, and knocked at a door. At the sound of a voice he pushed open
the door, and went in.
Lady Cressage, looking up, noted, with aroused interest, a marked change
in his carriage. He stood aggressively erect, his big shoulders squared,
and his head held high. On his massive face there was the smile, at once
buoyant and contained, of a strong man satisfied with himself.
Something impelled her to rise, and to put a certain wistfulness of
enquiry into her answering smile.
“Your headache is better then?” she asked him.
He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. “Oh--yes,” he
answered. Advancing, he caught her suddenly, almost vehemently, in his
arms, aud covered the face that was perforce upturned with kisses. When
she was released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting
and flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes, in which
mystification was mellowed by the gleam of not-displeased curiosity, he
preferred a request which completed her bewilderment.
“Mrs. Thorpe,” he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with
his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words--“would you mind if
we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little
breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead of the big place?”
“Why, not at all, if you wish it,” she answered readily enough, but
viewing him still with a puzzled glance.
“I'm full of new ideas,” he explained, impulsively impatient of the
necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. “I see great things
ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if
I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time
and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. You don't
know what it means to me to have something to do. It makes another man
of me, just to think about it. Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a
thing that can be done, and by God! I'm going to do it!”
She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the
man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through
the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large
features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance
as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a
conqueror--of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his
fellows, the appetites, energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast
of prey. Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the
frank barbarism of power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to
her that something more was to be read in this look; there was in it a
reservation of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for
her special self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces
and devour others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love
with all his strength. An involuntary trembling thrill ran through
her--and then she smiled up at him.
“What is it you're going to do?” she asked him, mechanically. Her mind
roved far afield.
“Rule England!” he told her with gravity.
For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in
the statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his
refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what
would be impossible to him.
She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of
good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before.
“Delightful,” she said gayly. “But I'm not sure that I quite understand
the--the precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room
with the project.” He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in
which she took him. “Just a whim,” he explained. “The things I've got
in mind don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and
men standing about. What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug
little evening with you alone, where I can talk to you and--and we can
be together by ourselves. You'd like it, wouldn't you?”
She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarrassment in her
mantling colour and down-spread lashes. It had always to his eyes been,
from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the
world--exquisitely matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene
yet sensitive grace. But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that
there could come to it, this crowning added loveliness of feminine
confusion.
“You would like it, wouldn't you?” he repeated in a lower, more
strenuous tone.
She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his
shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming.
She swayed rather than stepped toward him.
“I think,” she answered, in a musing murmur,--“I think I shall
like--everything.”