Produced by John Hamm

THE MARKET-PLACE

by Harold Frederic

CHAPTER I

THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the field--sitting alone
with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.

His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat
shapeless to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried
to define to himself what its limits would probably be. Vistas of
unchecked, expanding conquest stretched away in every direction. He held
at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, it rested entirely with
him to say whether there should be any such thing as mercy at all--and
until he chose to utter the restraining word the rout of the vanquished
would go on with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush and
torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired. The responsibility
of having to decide when he would stop grinding their faces might come
to weigh upon him later on, but he would not give it room in his mind
to-night.

A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames
in the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom
visages: they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright.
They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself above rage
and cunning. Only here and there did he recall a name with which to
label one of these countenances; very few of them raised a memory of
individual rancour. The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt,
but their persecution of him had been impersonal; his great revenge was
equally so. As he looked, in truth, there was only one face--a composite
mask of what he had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample
implacably under foot. He stared with a conqueror's cold frown at it,
and gave an abrupt laugh which started harsh echoes in the stillness of
the Board Room. Then he shook off the reverie, and got to his feet. He
shivered a little at the sudden touch of a chill.

A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the table where the
two least-considered of his lieutenants, the dummy Directors, had left
it. He poured a small quantity and sipped it. During the whole eventful
day it had not occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat
liquor seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain. With more
deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad, floridly-decorated
open box beside the bottle, lit it, and blew a long draught of smoke
thoughtfully through his nostrils. Then he put his hands in his pockets,
looked again into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile. God in heaven!
it was actually true!

This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel exhilaration,
which yet was not novel. Upon reflection, he perceived that he felt as
if he were a boy again--a boy excited by pleasure. It surprised as much
as it delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy of a
child. He caught the inkling of an idea that perhaps his years were an
illusion. He had latterly been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the
grey hairs thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him. Now all
at once he saw that he was not old at all. The buoyancy of veritable
youth bubbled in his veins. He began walking up and down the room,
regarding new halcyon visions with a sparkling eye. He was no longer
conscious of the hated foe beneath his feet; they trod instead elastic
upon the clouds.

The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside, and of trying
a door near by, suddenly caught his attention. He stood still and
listened with alertness for a surprised instant, then shrugged his
shoulders and began moving again. It must be nearly seven o'clock;
although the allotment work had kept the clerks later than usual that
day, everybody connected with the offices had certainly gone home. He
realized that his nerves had played him a trick in giving that alarmed
momentary start--and smiled almost tenderly as he remembered how notable
and even glorious a warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state.
They would be all right after a night's real rest. He would know how to
sleep NOW, thank God!

But yes--there was somebody outside--and this time knocking with
assurance at the right door, the entrance to the outer office. After a
second's consideration, he went into this unlighted outer office, and
called out through the opaque glass an enquiry. The sound of his voice,
as it analyzed itself in his own ears, seemed unduly peremptory. The
answer which came back brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes. He
hurriedly unlocked and opened the door.

"I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room," said
the newcomer, as he entered. "I assumed it must be you. Hope I don't
interrupt anything."

"Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden," replied
the other, leading the way back to the inner apartment. "In fact, I
couldn't have asked anything better."

The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it not quite
in harmony with this declaration. He turned, under the drop-light
overhanging the Board-table, and shook hands with his guest, as if to
atone for this doubtful accent. "I shake hands with you again," he
said, speaking rapidly, "because this afternoon it was what you may call
formal; it didn't count. And--my God!--you're the man I owe it all to."

"Oh, you mustn't go as far as that--even in the absence of witnesses,"
replied Lord Plowden, lightly. "I'll take off my coat for a few
minutes," he went on, very much at his ease. "It's hot in here. It's by
the merest chance I happened to be detained in the City--and I saw your
lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity whatever for a quiet
talk. No--I won't drink anything before dinner, but I'll light a cigar.
I want to say to you, Thorpe," he concluded, as he seated himself
"that I think what you've done is very wonderful. The Marquis thinks so
too--but I shouldn't like to swear that he understands much about it."

The implication that the speaker did understand remained in the air
like a tangible object. Thorpe took a chair, and the two men exchanged a
silent, intent look. Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from
the fire, pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them
from above, had for a moment a mysterious something in common. Then
the tension of the glance was relaxed--and on the instant no two men in
London looked less alike.

Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man. Thorpe had even
heard him called the handsomest man in England--though this seemed in
all likelihood an exaggeration. But handsome he undoubtedly was--tall
without suggesting the thought of height to the observer, erect yet
graceful, powerfully built, while preserving the effect of
slenderness. His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful
guardsman-type--regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness. When he
talked, or followed with interest the talk of others, it revealed almost
an excess of animation. Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his
glance, the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows, and saw
that it was not the guardsman face at all. His skin was fresh-hued, and
there was a shade of warm brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche,
but his hair, wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black. There
were perceptible veins of grey in it, though he had only entered his
thirty-fifth year. He was dressed habitually with the utmost possible
care.

The contrast between this personage and the older man confronting him
was abrupt. Thorpe was also tall, but of a burly and slouching figure.
His face, shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard, invited no
attention. One seemed always to have known this face--thick-featured,
immobile, undistinguished. Its accessories for the time being were even
more than ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were ragged with
neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes looked as if he had slept in
them. The hands resting on his big knees were coarse in shape, and
roughened, and ill-kept.

"I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in," he
repeated now, speaking with a drag, as of caution, on his words.
"Witnesses or no witnesses, I'm anxious to have you understand that I
realize what I owe to you."

"I only wish it were a great deal more than it is," replied the other,
with a frank smile.

"Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands," said Thorpe.

He could hear that there was a kind of reservation in his voice; the
suspicion that his companion detected it embarrassed him. He found
himself in the position of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings
impelled him to be perfectly open. He paused, and was awkwardly
conscious of constraint in the silence which ensued. "You are very kind
to put it in that way," said Lord Plowden, at last. He seemed also to be
finding words for his thoughts with a certain difficulty. He turned
his cigar round in his white fingers meditatively. "I gather that
your success has been complete--as complete as you yourself could have
desired. I congratulate you with all my heart."

"No--don't say my success--say our success," put in Thorpe.

"But, my dear man," the other corrected him, "my interest, compared with
yours, is hardly more than nominal. I'm a Director, of course, and I'm
not displeased that my few shares should be worth something instead of
nothing, but----"

Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands. "That isn't my view of the thing
at all. To be frank, I was turning over in my mind, just awhile ago,
before you came in, some way of arranging all that on a different
footing. If you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's all right."

Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore to Lord Plowden
his accustomed fluency of speech.

"I came here to say precisely that thing," he began--"that I do trust
it to you. We have never had any very definite talk on the subject--and
pray don't think that I want to go into details now. I'd much rather
not, in fact. But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe in
you. I feel sure that you are going to go far, as the saying is. Well,
I want to tie myself to your star. Do you see what I mean? You are going
to be a power in finance. You are going to be able to make and unmake
men as you choose. I should be very much obliged indeed if you would
make me."

Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion with what seemed
to the other a lethargic gaze. In truth, his mind was toiling with
strenuous activity to master, in all its bearings, the significance of
what had been said. This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye,
the while he was hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous asset which he
had never up to that time learned that he possessed. Unconsciously, he
dampened the spirits of his companion.

"Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you," Lord Plowden said,
growing cool in the face of this slow stare. "I'm asking nothing at all.
I had the impulse to come and say to you that you are a great man, and
that you've done a great thing--and done it, moreover, in a very great
way."

"You know how it was done!" The wondering exclamation forced itself from
Thorpe's unready lips. He bent forward a little, and took a new visual
hold, as it were, of his companion's countenance.

Lord Plowden smiled. "Did you think I was such a hopeless duffer, then?"
he rejoined.

For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs, and patted
his knee contentedly. All at once his face had lightened; a genial
speculation returned to his grey eyes.

"Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see," he began to
explain. The relief with which he spoke was palpable. "I could not for
the life of me make up my mind whether to tell you about it or not.
Let's see--this is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the
scheme didn't dawn on me myself until toward evening Tuesday.
But yesterday, of course, I could have told you--and again this
afternoon--but, as I say, I couldn't make up my mind. Once I had it on
the tip of my tongue--but somehow I didn't. And you--you never gave me a
hint that you saw what was going on."

Again Lord Plowden smiled. "I voted with you," he put in softly.

Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar. "Well, I couldn't have asked
anything better than this," he declared once again. "It beats all the
rest put together, to my mind."

"Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning," commented the other
tentatively.

"Why man," Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his choice of words,
but speaking with evident fervour; "I was more anxious about you--and
the way you'd take it--than about anything else. I give you my word I
was. I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing. You might
think that it was all right, and then again you might round on me--or
no, I don't mean quite that--but you might say it wasn't good enough for
you, and wash your hands of the whole affair. And I can't tell you what
a relief it is to find that you--that you're satisfied. Now I can go
ahead."

"Ah, yes--ahead," said the younger man, thoughtfully. "Do you mind
telling me--you see I'm quite in the dark as to details--how much
further ahead we are likely to go? I comprehend the general nature of
our advance--but how far off is the goal you have in sight?"

"God knows!" answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of excitement in his
voice. "I don't give it any limit. I don't see why we should stop at
all. We've got them in such a position that--why, good heavens! we can
squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz." He chuckled grimly at
the suggestion of his simile. "We'll get more ounces to the ton out of
our crushings than they ever heard of on the Rand, too."

"Might I ask," interposed the other, "who may 'they' be?"

Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort to remember names.
"Oh, there are a lot of them," he said, vaguely. "I think I told you
of the way that Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let me
believe they were going to take me up, and then, because I wouldn't give
them everything--the very shirt off my back--turned and put their knife
into me. I don't know them apart, hardly--they've all got names like
Rhine wines--but I know the gang as a whole, and if I don't lift the
roof clean off their particular synagogue, then my name is mud."

Lord Plowden smiled. "I've always the greatest difficulty to remember
that you are an Englishman--a Londoner born," he declared pleasantly.
"You don't talk in the least like one. On shipboard I made sure you
were an American--a very characteristic one, I thought--of some curious
Western variety, you know. I never was more surprised in my life than
when you told me, the other day, that you only left England a few years
ago."

"Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen," Thorpe corrected him. He
studied his companion's face with slow deliberation.

"I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss," he remarked,
after a little pause. "If you'd known that I was an Englishman, when
we first met, there on the steamer, I kind o' suspect that you and I'd
never have got much beyond a nodding acquaintance--and even that mostly
on my side. I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything--that is,
not specially--but I've often thought since that it was a mighty good
thing I did. Now isn't that true--that if you had taken me for one of
your own countrymen you'd have given me the cold shoulder?"

"I dare say there's a good deal in what you say," the other admitted,
gently enough, but without contrition. "Things naturally shape
themselves that way, rather, you know. If they didn't, why then the
whole position would become difficult. But you are an American, to all
intents and purposes."

"Oh, no--I never took any step towards getting naturalized," Thorpe
protested. "I always intended to come back here. Or no, I won't say
that--because most of the time I was dog-poor--and this isn't the place
for a poor man. But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it
off--if I ever found my self a rich man--THEN I'd come piking across the
Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would carry me."

The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam in his eye. "And you
ARE a rich man, now," he observed, after a momentary pause.

"We are both rich men," replied Thorpe, gravely.

He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken. "This is
how it seems to me the thing figures itself out: It can't be said that
your name on the Board, or the Marquis's either, was of much use so far
as the public were concerned. To tell the truth, I saw some time ago
that they wouldn't be. Titles on prospectuses are played out in London.
I've rather a notion, indeed, that they're apt to do more harm than
good--just at present, at least. But all that aside--you are the man who
was civil to me at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about my
scheme, and you are the man who was good to me later on, when I didn't
know where to turn for a friendly word. Very well; here I am! I've made
my coup! And I'd be a sweep, wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so
glad to remember a week ago. But you see, I don't forget! The capital
of the Company is 500,000 pounds, all in pound shares. We offered the
public only a fifth of them. The other four hundred thousand shares are
mine as vendor--and I have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of
them to be yours."

Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words. "It is
too much--you don't reflect what it is you are saying," he murmured
confusedly. "Not a bit of it," the other reassured him. "Everything that
I've said goes."

The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet. "It is a preposterously
big reward for the merest act of courtesy," he insisted. "Of course it
takes my breath away for joy--and yet I feel I oughtn't to be consenting
to it at all. And it has its unpleasant side--it buries me under a
mountain of obligation. I don't know what to do or what to say."

"Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then," replied Thorpe, with a
gesture before which the other resumed his seat. "Just a word more--and
then I suppose we'd better be going. Look at it in this way. Your
grandfather was Lord Chancellor of England, and your father was
a General in the Crimea. My grandfather kept a small second-hand
book-shop, and my father followed him in the business. In one sense,
that puts us ten thousand miles apart. But in another sense, we'll say
that we like each other, and that there are ways in which we can be of
immense use to each other, and that brings us close together. You need
money--and here it is for you. I need--what shall I say?--a kind of
friendly lead in the matter of establishing myself on the right footing,
among the right people--and that's what you can do for me. Mind--I'd
prefer to put it all in quite another way; I'd like to say it was
all niceness on your part, all gratitude on mine. But if you want to
consider it on a business basis--why there you have it also--perfectly
plain and clear."

He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well. The two men
shook hands in silence.

When the latter spoke, it was to say: "Do you know how to open one of
those soda-water bottles? I've tried, but I can never get the trick. I
think I should like to have a drink--after this."

When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man was getting
into his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy and cigars within a
cabinet at the corner of the room, and carefully turned a key upon them.

"If you're going West, let me give you a lift," said Lord Plowden, hat
in hand. "I can set you down wherever you like. Unfortunately I've to go
out to dinner, and I must race, as it is, to get dressed."

Thorpe shook his head. "No, go along," he bade him. "I've some odds and
ends of things to do on the way."

"Then when shall I see you?"--began the other, and halted suddenly
with a new thought in his glance. "But what are you doing Saturday?"
he asked, in a brisker tone. "It's a dies non here. Come down with me
to-morrow evening, to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday,
and drive about on Sunday, if you like--and there we can talk at our
leisure. Yes, that is what you must do. I have a gun for you. Shall we
say, then--Charing Cross at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will
dine at home."

The elder man pondered his answer--frowning at the problem before him
with visible anxiety. "I'm afraid I'd better not come--it's very good of
you all the same."

"Nonsense," retorted the other. "My mother will be very glad indeed to
see you. There is no one else there--unless, perhaps, my sister has some
friend down. We shall make a purely family party."

Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. "All right. Charing Cross,
5:15," he said then, with the grave brevity of one who announces a
momentous decision.

He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments after his
companion had gone. Then, going to a closet at the end of the room, he
brought forth his coat and hat; something prompted him to hold them up,
and scrutinize them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put
them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused, playing in his
beard.

The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. He made
his way out, and downstairs to the street. It was a rainy, windy October
night, sloppy underfoot, dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a
cabman, motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening rubber
cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed
him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, "Strand!" as he
clambered into the hansom.

CHAPTER II

"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe, half an hour
later: "you never did believe in me, as a sister should do."

He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering
gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only
the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.
Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this
portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility
for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the
walls of which he was dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about
Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out
of the mists of his childhood.

Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with
quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The
peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like
snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at
the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same
rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights,
in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he
was a boy?

"I know you always say that," replied Louisa, impassively.

She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice
or intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair,
drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest
brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of
figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large,
capable hands on her knees.

"I believed in you as much as you'd let me," she went on, indifferently,
almost wearily. "But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did
or didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What
had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world
you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know
whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it
was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London--but
elsewhere you might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover, I
don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something very
different from the boy Joel that left the shop--it must be twenty years
ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell me."

"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
intent glance, "you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to
succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'"

She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued
failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless
point.

"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself," she admitted,
listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke
with more animation: "You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was
very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking
about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a
stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your
life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof
over my head--to keep the little business from disappearing altogether.
It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the
big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the
invalid husband to support for between three and four years--a dead
weight on me every week--and then the children to look after, to clothe
and educate."

At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. "Don't think
I'm ungrateful"--she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile--"but I
almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What
it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't
be able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of
life--and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what
will become of them."

The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam
in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
moustache.

"But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over," he
persisted, doggedly--"and I told you there'd be more where that came
from, and that I stood to pull off the great event--even then, now, you
didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking
about, did you?"

She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. "For heaven's
sake, Joel," she said, sharply--"you become a bore with that stupid
nonsense. I want to be patient with you--I do indeed sympathize with you
in your misfortunes--you know that well enough--but you're very tiresome
with that eternal harping on what I believed and what I didn't believe.
Now, are you going to stop to supper or not?--because if you are I must
send the maid out. And there's another thing--would it be of any help to
you to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have Alfred's room
as well as not--till Christmas, at least."

"Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel till I'd settled
my bill," suggested Thorpe tentatively, in a muffled voice.

The practical woman reflected for an instant. "I was thinking," she
confessed then, "that it might be cheaper to leave your things there,
and buy what little you want--I don't imagine, from what I've seen, that
your wardrobe is so very valuable--but no, I suppose the bill ought to
be paid. Perhaps it can be managed; how much will it be?"

Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over to her chair. With
his thick hands on his sister's shoulders he stooped and kissed her on
the forehead.

"You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?" he said, as he straightened
himself behind her.

The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from the perfunctory
salute with which he had greeted her on his arrival from foreign parts,
six months before--brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain
face. Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted gaze she was
bending upon the fireless grate. Something extraordinary, unaccountable,
was in the manner of her brother. She recalled that, in truth, he was
more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell what wild,
uncanny second nature had not grown up in him under those
outlandish tropical skies? He had just told her that his ruin was
absolute--overwhelming--yet there had been a covert smile in the
recesses of his glance. Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle
from him, there as he stood behind her!

The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain loomed up and
possessed her. She flung herself out of the chair, and, wheeling, seized
its back and drew it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare
of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.

"What"--she began, stammering--"What is the matter, Joel?"

He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly at her for a further
moment. Then he tossed his head, and laughed abruptly.

"Sit down, old girl," he adjured her. "Try and hold yourself together,
now--to hear some different kind of news. I've been playing it rather
low down on you, for a fact. Instead of my being smashed, it's the other
way about."

She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp upon the chair-back.
Her breathing troubled her as she regarded him, and tried to take in the
meaning of his words.

"Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about your Company?" she
asked, confusedly.

"No--no--not at all," he replied, now all genial heartiness. "No--what
I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking a rise out of you all the
same." He seemed so unaffectedly pleased by his achievement in kindly
duplicity that she forced an awkward smile to her lips.

"I don't understand in the least," she said, striving to remember what
he had told her. "What you said was that the public had entirely failed
to come in--that there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
flotation expenses--those were your own words. Of course, I don't
pretend to understand these City matters--but it IS the case, isn't it,
that if people don't subscribe for the shares of a new company, then the
company is a failure?"

"Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule," he nodded at
her, still beaming.

"Well, then--of course--I don't understand," she owned.

"I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've explained it
to you," he said, seating himself, and motioning her to the other chair.
"But yes, of course you will. You're a business woman. You know what
figures mean. And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You
remember that I told you----"

"But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie out before the
shops close."

"Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked up for that. I'll
get something at the hotel before I go to bed, if I feel like it. But
say!"--the thought suddenly struck him--"if you want to come out with
me, I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London. What d'ye
say?"

She shook her head. "I shall have some bread and cheese and beer at
nine. That's my rule, you know. I don't like to break it. I'm always
queer next day if I do. But now make haste and tell me--you're really
not broken then? You have really come out well?"

For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height, and spread his
bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a
triumphant glow.

"Broken?" he echoed her word, with emphasis. "My dear Louisa, I'm not
the sort that gets broken. I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall
break them!"

He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender,
excitedly telling his story to her. Sometimes he threw the words over
his shoulder; again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his
hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the
meaning of his speech--and then she found it peculiarly difficult to
realize that he was her brother.

Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced
this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for
her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with
the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings
in strange lands--and these he had frequently told her about before.
Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a
new thread. One after another, these experiences of his, as he related
them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and
malice had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a
hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch
Indies, in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were
yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled
him--everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden
consummation. In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself. There
had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before the Empire fell,
in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in British Columbia when the
first rumours of rich ore were whispered about--many times when fortune
seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had always played him
false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the
temptation of profitable treason.

But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession slipping
through his fingers, only to strain and tighten them for a clutch at
another. It did not surprise his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly
attract her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the wage-earning
sort. Apparently, he had done no work at all, in the bread-winner's
sense of the word. This was so like Joel that it was taken for granted
in his sister's mind. All his voyages and adventures and painful
enterprises had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer--the
passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst, to get
something for nothing.

The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last
it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and
crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that
place that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago.
Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his narrative that he
now became vague as to details. There were concessions of rubber forests
mentioned, and the barter of these for other concessions with money
to boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about where the true
boundary of Guatemala ran--but she failed clearly to understand much
about it all. His other schemes and mishaps she had followed readily
enough. Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw everything
jumbled and distorted, as through a haze. Once or twice she interrupted
him to ask questions, but he seemed to attach such slight importance to
her comprehending these details that she forbore. Only one fact was
it necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode, apparently. When
he quitted Tehuantepec, to make his way straight to London, at the
beginning of the year, he left behind him a rubber plantation which he
desired to sell, and brought with him between six and seven thousand
pounds, with which to pay the expenses of selling it. How he had
obtained either the plantation or the money did not seem to have made
itself understood. No doubt, as his manner indicated when she ventured
her enquiries, it was quite irrelevant to the narrative.

In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that no
villain had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans. He at least
mentioned no one who had wronged him there. When he came to London,
however, there were villains and to spare. He moved to the mantel, when
he arrived at this stage of the story, and made clear a space for his
elbow to rest among the little trinkets and photographs with which it
was burdened. He stood still thereafter, looking down at her; his voice
took on a harsher note.

Much of this story, also, she knew by heart. This strange, bearded,
greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often during the past
half-year to the little book-shop, and the widow's home above it, his
misshapen handbag full of papers, his heart full of rage, hope, grief,
ambition, disgust, confidence--everything but despair. It was true, it
had never been quite real to her. He was right in his suggestion that
she had never wholly believed in him. She had not been able to take
altogether seriously this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who
talked about millions. It was true that he had sent her four hundred
pounds for the education of her son and daughter; it was equally true
that he had brought with him to London a sum which any of his ancestors,
so far as she knew about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he
treated as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate the machinery of
his great enterprise. She had heard, at various times, the embittered
details of the disappearance of this money, little by little. Nearly a
quarter of it, all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart
of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the belief that London
could be best approached through him. When at last this wretch was
kicked downstairs, the effect had been only to make room for a fresh
lot of bloodsuckers. There were so-called advertising agents, so-called
journalists, so-called "men of influence in the City,"--a swarm of
relentless and voracious harpies, who dragged from him in blackmail
nearly the half of what he had left, before he summoned the courage and
decision to shut them out.

Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands he stumbled
next--a group of City men concerned in the South African market, who
impressed him very favourably at the outset. He got to know them by
accident, and at the time when he began to comprehend the necessity of
securing influential support for his scheme. Everything that he heard
and could learn about them testified to the strength of their position
in the City. Because they displayed a certain amiability of manner
toward him and his project, he allowed himself to make sure of their
support. It grew to be a certainty in his mind that they would see him
through. He spent a good deal of money in dinners and suppers in their
honour, after they had let him understand that this form of propitiation
was not unpleasant to them. They chaffed him about some newspaper
paragraphs, in which he was described as the "Rubber King," with
an affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed that he
detected a genuine respect for his abilities.

Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for the better part
of two months, he laid before them, at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a
dinner in a private room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property, and place it
upon the market; in consideration of their finding the ready money for
this exploitation, they were to have for themselves two-fifths of the
shares in the Company ultimately to be floated. They listened to these
details, and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself, with
rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves that evening to
nothing definite. It took him nearly a week thereafter to get an answer
from any of them. Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at
all, it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving nine-tenths
of the shares.

He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his original amazement,
that they named these preposterous terms merely because they expected
to be beaten down, and he summoned all his good nature and tact for
the task of haggling with them. He misunderstood their first show of
impatience at this, and persevered in the face of their tacit rebuffs.
Then, one day, a couple of them treated him with overt rudeness, and
he, astonished out of his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he
could hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his. They
closed their office doors to him; even their clerks treated him with
contemptuous incivility.

This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him, curiously enough, as
no other misadventure of his life had done.

Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her, at the
time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why it should disturb
him so profoundly: to her mind, these men had done nothing so monstrous
after all. But to him, their offense swallowed up all the other
indignities suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. A
sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated
nobody else as he hated them. How often she had heard him swear, in
solemn vibrating tones, that to the day of his death his most sacred
ambition should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust and
mire!

And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant against
the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took point and shape. It was
about these very men that he was talking.

"And think of it!" he was saying, impressively. "It's magnificent enough
for me to make this great hit--but I don't count it as anything at
all by comparison with the fact that I make it at their expense. You
remember the fellows I told you about?" he asked abruptly, deferring to
the confused look on her face.

"Yes--you make it out of them," she repeated, in an uncertain voice. It
occurred to her that she must have been almost asleep. "But did I miss
anything? Have you been telling what it is that you have made?"

"No--that you shall have in good time. You don't seem to realize it,
Louisa. I can hardly realize it myself. I am actually a very rich man.
I can't tell how much I've got--in fact, it can be almost as much as I
like--half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want to make
it that much. Yes--it takes the breath away, doesn't it? But best of
all--a thousand times best of all--practically every dollar of it comes
out of those Kaffir swine--the very men that tried to rob me, and
that have been trying to ruin me ever since. I tell you what I wish,
Louise--I wish to God there could only be time enough, and I'd take it
all in half-sovereigns--two millions of them, or three millions--and
just untwist every coin, one by one, out from among their heart-strings.
Oh--but it'll be all right as it is. It's enough to make a man feel
religious--to think how those thieves are going to suffer."

"Well" she said, slowly after reflection, "it all rather frightens me."

As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly
accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and,
stooping, lit the fire.

He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff awkwardness
over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note
of the room--the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that
had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and
begrimed low ceiling--all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to which
she had been condemned.

"Frightens you?" he queried, with a kind of jovial tenderness, as she
got to her feet; "frightens you, eh? Why, within a month's time, old
lady, you'll be riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers
folding their arms up behind, and you'll be taking it all as easy and as
natural as if you'd been born in a barouche."

He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows: "Barouche?
That's what we'd call in England a landau."

She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined
meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the
snapping sparks. "No," she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling
with pride in her voice. "I was born here over the shop."

"Well, good God! so was I," he commented, lustily. "But that's no reason
why I shouldn't wind up in Park Lane--or you either."

She had nothing to say to this, apparently. After a little, she seated
herself again, drawing her chair closer to the hearth. "It's years since
I've lit this fire before the first of November," she remarked, with the
air of defending the action to herself.

"Oh, we're celebrating," he said, rubbing his hands over the reluctant
blaze. "Everything goes, tonight!"

Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment of her
mind. "You set out to tell me what it was all about," she reminded him.
"You see I'm completely in the dark. I only hear you say that you've
made a great fortune. That's all I know. Or perhaps you've told me as
much as you care to."

"Why, not at all," he reassured her, pulling his own chair toward him
with his foot, and sprawling into it with a grunt of relief. "If you'll
draw me a glass of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. It's
not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed to a human being,
for that matter--but you'll enjoy it, and it'll be safe enough with
you."

As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily after her: "No
more beer when that keg runs dry, you know. Nothing but champagne!"

THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister brought him.

"Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty," he said, when he put the glass
down. "Truth is--I've lost track of myself altogether since--since the
big thing happened. I seem to be somebody else--a comparative stranger,
so to speak. I've got to get acquainted with myself, all over again. You
can't imagine what an extraordinary feeling it is--this being hit every
few minutes with the recollection that you're worth half a million.
It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down. There are such
thousands of things to do--you dance about, all of a flutter. You don't
know where to begin."

"Begin where you left off," suggested Louisa. "You were going to tell me
how--how 'the big thing' happened. You're always coming to it--and never
getting any further."

Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification, he plunged
forthwith into the tale.

"You remember my telling you at the time how I got my Board together.
I'm speaking now of the present Company--after I'd decided to be my own
promoter, and have at least some kind of 'a look-in' for my money. There
wasn't much money left, by the way; it was considerably under three
thousand. But I come to that later. First there was the Board. Here was
where that Lord Plowden that I told you about--the man that came over on
the ship with me--came in. I went to him. I--God! I was desperate--but I
hadn't much of an idea he'd consent. But he did! He listened to me, and
I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the Syndicate would have cut my
throat if I hadn't pulled away,--and he said, 'Why, yes, I'll go on your
Board.' Then I told him more about it, and presently he said he'd get me
another man of title--a sky-scraper of a title too--to be my Chairman.
That's the Marquis of Chaldon, a tremendous diplomatic swell, you know,
Ambassador at Vienna in his time, and Lord Lieutenant and all sorts of
things, but willing to gather in his five hundred a year, all the same."

"Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?" asked the
sister.

"Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten quid a week, and a
few extras. The other Directors get three hundred. This Lord Plowden
is one of them--but I'll tell you more about him later on. Then there's
Watkin, he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson, he's a
wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm in Dundee, but gets along
the best way he can on a very dicky business here in London, now. And
then there's General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say,
but I guess he needs all he can get. He's started wearing his fur-coat
already. Well, that's my Board. I couldn't join it, of course, till
after allotment--that's because I'm the vendor, as they call it--but
that hasn't interfered at all with my running the whole show. The Board
doesn't really count, you know. It only does what I want it to do. It's
just a form that costs me seventeen hundred a year, that's all."

"Seventeen hundred a year," she repeated, mechanically.

"Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see. Or first, there were
other things to be done. I saw that a good broker's name counted for
a lot on a prospectus. I picked out one that I'd heard was
reasonable--it'd been a splendid name if I could have got it--but he
calmly said his price was two thousand pounds, all cash down--and I came
away. Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much of anything yet, and
so wasn't so stiff about his figure. He agreed to take 500 pounds cash,
and 2,000 in shares. It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned
out, at the pinch, to be the one man in a million for me. But I'll tell
you about him later. He's the Broker, mind; you mustn't forget him.
Well, then, he and I got a Solicitor--he took 200 pounds cash, but he
had to have 2,000 shares--and the firm of Auditors--they were 100 pounds
cash and 1,000 shares. Every company has to have these people pasted on
to it, by law. Oh yes, and then you must have your Bankers. You
don't pay them anything, though, thank God! Well, then, there was
the machinery complete, all ready to start. I took a handsome set of
offices, and furnished them up to the nines--but that I was able to do
pretty well on credit. You see, ready money was getting short.

"And now came the biggest pull of all. There was the press to be
worked."

He spoke as if there were no other papers in London but the financial
journals.

"I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up. You've got no more
idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have of--of a coil of
snakes thawing out hungry in the spring. Why, if one blackmailer came
to me, I swear a hundred did. They scared the life out of me, the first
month or so. And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say
they can keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it worth their
while. But they all wanted too much money for me--and for a while I was
at my wits' ends. At last I got a fellow--he's not behaved so badly, all
things considered--who had some sporting blood in his veins, and he was
willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds, if I could pay 1,500
pounds down, and the rest in shares. But that was just what I couldn't
do, you see, so finally he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in
shares--and as I say he's done it tolerably well. There was one editor
that I had to square personally--that is to say, 100 pounds cash--it
had to be in sovereigns, for notes could be traced--and a call of 2,000
shares at par,--he's the boss pirate that everybody has to square--and
of course there were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule
I just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out. The moment a
fellow came in, and handed me his card, and said he had proofs of two
kinds of articles in his pocket, one praising me, one damning me, I told
him to go and see my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then
to go to hell. That's the way you've got to talk in the City," he added,
as if in apologetic explanation.

Louisa looked impassively at her brother. "Oh, I've heard the expression
as far west as the Strand," she remarked.

"Well, then came the issue. That was last Saturday. You saw the
prospectus in Saturday morning's papers, and in the weeklies. The
list was to be kept open, it said, till Wednesday morning--that was
yesterday. That is to say, during all that time, people could apply for
shares."

"Which they didn't do--according to your account," the sister suggested,
dryly.

Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair, and eyed her with
a momentary quizzical gleam in his eye. Then he became serious again.
The recollection of what he was now to narrate brought a frown to his
brows.

"On Tuesday afternoon," he began, with portentous deliberation--"Or no,
first I must explain something. You see, in bringing out a company, you
can't put up too stout a bluff. I mean, you've got to behave as if
you were rolling in wealth--as if everything was coming your way, and
fortunes were to be made by fastening to you. I don't know that it often
fools anybody very much, but it's part of the game, and you must play
it. Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday morning, and
has his jobber shout out that he'll buy 'Rubber Consols'--that's what
our shares are called on the street--at an eighth premium; that is to
say, he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were offering to
the public for twenty shillings. Of course, you see, the object of that
was to create the impression that there was a regular God-almighty
rush for our shares. As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled
anybody--but at least there was the chance that it might start up some
dealing in the shares--and all those things help. Besides, you got the
sales noticed in the papers, and that might start up applications from
the public. Well, the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday.
On Monday, when it might still be possible to change the luck, he bought
3,500 more, still at that premium of an eighth. He bought some Tuesday
morning too--say 4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and
keep an eye on the Broker. He's worth watching--as you'll see."

"What's his name?" asked the sister, with an accession of alertness in
her face. "You call him 'Broker'--and that doesn't mean anything to me.
They're all brokers, aren't they?"

"Semple--Colin Semple, that's his name. He's a young Scotchman--father's
a Presbyterian minister. He's a little, insignificant runt of a chap to
look at--but I learned a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by his
looks. However--where was I?"

"You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon, weren't you?"

He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long breath in
preparation for the dramatic recital before him. "On Tuesday afternoon,"
he began again, with impressive slowness, "I was walking on Throgmorton
Street, about four o'clock. It was raining a little--it had been raining
on and off all day--a miserable, rotten sort of a day, with greasy mud
everywhere, and everybody poking umbrellas into you. I was out walking
because I'd 'a' cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office another
ten minutes. All that day I hadn't eaten anything. I hadn't slept worth
speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was worse
than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds
in the bank--and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I tell you, I
was just plumb busted.

"There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen the cuss before
during the day, walking up and down near my offices. I took notice
of him, because he was the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking
cripple you ever saw in your life. Now I read what was on his boards. It
was the bill of a paper that I had refused to be bled by, and there
it was in big letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!' 'Thorpe's Audacity
Punished!' Those were the words. I can see them with my eyes shut. I
stood there, looking at the fellow, and I suppose there was something in
the way I looked, for he stopped too. Of course, he didn't know me from
Adam, but all the same, I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me--as
if we two had a joke between us. And at that I burst out laughing--I
simply roared with laughter, like a boy at a pantomime--and I took that
last half-crown out of my pocket, and I gave it to the sandwich-man.
God! you should have seen his face."

"I don't particularly mind, Joel," said his sister, "but I never heard
you swear so much before."

"Oh, what the--what the deuce!" he protested, impatiently. "Don't
interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street. The members of the
Stock Exchange were coming out of 'the house,' and making up little
groups on the pavement. They do business inside, you know, until closing
time--this day it happened to be four o'clock--and then they come out
and deal in the street with one another, with the kerb-stone mob, who
are not allowed inside, standing round to watch the thing. I came along
into the thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts of
things--'East Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,' and what not, but
these went in one ear and out the other. If there ever was a man with no
stomach for the market it was me. But then someone roared out:

"'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five hundred Rubber at
seven-eighths! Sell five hundred at three-quarters! At three-quarters
you have 'em! Rubber Consols! Sell a thou. at three-quarters!'

"This thing went into my brain like a live coal. I stopped and looked
up at the fellow--and by God, it was one of the men I've been
talking about--one of those Kaffir scoundrels. I wish I was better at
remembering names--but I knew his face. There were some of the others
around him, and they laughed at me, and he laughed at me. Oh, they had
a heap of fun out of me--for a minute or two. Pretty good fun, too! I
guess they'll remember it quite a while."

"Go on!" Louisa adjured him. The obvious proximity of the dramatic
climax drew her forward in her chair, and brought a glow of expectation
to her eyes.

"I got myself away from that crowd somehow--I think I was afraid if I
stayed I'd strangle the one who was shouting on the steps--and I went
toward my office. But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage
to go in. I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any other office
in Austin Friars, and I had a kind of feeling that the sight of those
carpets, and oak-tables and desks, and brass-railings and so on would
make me sick. I owed for 'em all, bear in mind----"

"But--Joel," the sister interposed. "One thing I don't understand. How
many people had applied for shares? You haven't mentioned that."

A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of his present mood. "It
was hardly worth mentioning," he answered, with bitter mirth. "Between
five and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. I think the
withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand.
We offered a hundred thousand, you know.--But let me go on with my
story. I stood there, in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance.
The words of that Jew--'Sell Rubber Consols at three-quarters!'--buzzed
inside my head as if they would burst it open. I turned--and I happened
to see my Broker--the Scotchman, Semple, you know--coming along toward
me. Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on me. In less
than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten outfit turned upside down,
with me on top. I made a jump, and ran to meet Semple.

"'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him, with a grip
tight on his arm.

"The little chap was looking mighty sick. He figured up in his mind.
'I'm afraid it's eight thousand five hundred, all told,' he said, in a
sort of Presbyterian whimper.

"'Well--how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver their
goods--that is, supposing we got a settlement?'

"I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face. He looked puzzled for a
minute. Then he put out his lip. Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a
razor, and we looked into one another's eyes.

"'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters, a minute ago,' I
told him.

"He was onto the game like lightning. 'Wait for me in the office,' he
whispered. 'We'll go nap on this!'

"With that he was off like a streak. He stopped running just before he
got to the corner, though, and began walking slowly, sauntering along,
you know, as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books. I watched
him out of sight--and then I went back, and up to the offices. The
furniture didn't scare me a bit this time. Why, I stopped and felt
of the brass-railing just outside the Board Room, and I said to
myself--'Pshaw! We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'"

He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she felt was intended
to be a significant look. She shrank from the confession that its
meaning was Greek to her. "Well--and what next?" she asked, guardedly.

"Semple came back in twenty minutes or so--and the next morning he was
at it again--and what with him and his jobber, by George, on the quiet,
they picked up nearly eighteen thousand of our shares. Some they paid
fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six and even ten.
That doesn't matter; it's of no more importance than the coppers you
give to crossing-sweepers. The thing was to get the shares--and by God
we've got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares, that's what
we've got. Now, do you see what that means?"

"Why yes," she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption of confidence.
"Of course, you know the property is so good that you'll make a profit
on the shares you've bought far below their value. But I don't think I
quite see----"

He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter. "Don't think you
quite see?" he gurgled at her, with tears of pleasure in his eye. "Why,
you dummy, you haven't got the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's
all about. The value of the property's got nothing in the world to
do with it. That's neither here nor there. If there wasn't any such
property in existence, it would be just the same."

He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this, and explained
more gently: "Why, don't you see, Lou, it's this way. This is what has
happened. We've got what's called a corner on the bears. They're caught
short, and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content. What--you don't
understand now? Why, see here! These fellows who've sold twenty-six
thousand of our shares--they haven't got them to sell, and they
can't get them. That is the point--they can't get them for love nor
money--they must pay me my own price for them, or be ruined men. The
moment they realize the situation, they will begin offering a premium
for Rubber Consols. The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds,
then four--six--ten--twenty--thirty--whatever I want to drive it to."

Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes. It seemed to her that she
understood now. It was very exciting.

"You see," he went on, taking approving note of the new light of
comprehension in her glance, "we did something that Tuesday afternoon
beside buy up these shares. Semple rushed off to his office, and he and
his clerks got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out in
all the different names they could be safe in using, and they put these
into the bank with the application money--Semple found that--and next
day he went and saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
auditors--and got them to pool the shares that I've promised to give
them. A pool? That means they agree to transfer their shares to me
as trustee, and let me deal with them as I like--of course to their
advantage. In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't
be dealt with in this transaction. So you see the thing is hermetically
sealed. Nobody can get a share except from me, and at my price. But
these fellows that have sold them--they've got to have them, don't you
see. They had their little temporary joke with me on the street that
afternoon--and now they must walk up to the captain's office and settle.
They've got to pay me at least half a million pounds for that few
minutes' fun of theirs. I may make it a good deal more; I don't know
yet."

"Oh, Joel!" she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction. His rather
languid indecision as to whether half a million was going to be enough,
impressed her more powerfully than had any detail of his narrative.

In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for her what there was
to tell. "This afternoon my Board met to allot the shares. They saw the
applications, amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares. It took
their breath away--they had heard that things were going quite the
other way with us. They were so tickled that they asked no questions The
allotment went through like a greased pig. About 5,000 shares went to
those who had actually applied for them, and 88,000 were solemnly given
to the dummy applicants. Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these
dummies. Nobody winked so much as an eyelash. But I've found since that
one of the directors--that Lord Plowden I told you about--was onto
the thing all the while. But he's all right. Everybody's all right. Of
course the dummies' shares still stand in their names--on paper--but in
reality I've got them all in my safe--in my pocket you might say. They
are really mine, you understand. So now there's nothing for us to do
but to apply to the Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and
meanwhile lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. Or fry
in their own fat, eh? That's better."

"But," she commented slowly, "you say there are no shares to be
bought--and yet as I understand it, there are those five thousand that
were sent out to the people who really applied."

"Bravo, Lou!" he answered her jovially. "You actually do understand the
thing. You've put your finger straight on the point. It is true that
those shares are out against us--or might be turned against us if they
could be bought up. But in reality, they don't count at all. In the
first place, you see, they're scattered about among small holders,
country clergymen and old maids on an annuity and so on--all over the
country. Even if these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose
it was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell. The bigger the
price they were offered, the more mulish they would be about holding.
That's always the way with them. But even if they did all sell, their
five thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket. There would be over
twenty thousand others to be accounted for. That would be quite enough
for my purposes. Oh, I figured all that out very carefully. My own first
notion was to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand, and
even a little over. Then, you see, we might have allotted everything
to the dummies, and sent back the money and applications of the genuine
ones. But that would have been rather hard to manage with the Board. The
Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made pro rata--that
is, giving everybody a part of what they applied for--and that would
have mixed everything up. And then, too, if anybody suspected
anything, why the Stock Exchange Committee would refuse us a special
settlement--and, of course, without that the whole transaction is
moonshine. It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny."

"It's all pretty risky, I should think," she declared as she rose. "I
should think you'd lie awake more than ever now--now that you've built
your hopes so high and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing."

He smilingly shook his head. "No, it can no more fail than that gas
can fail to burn when you put a light to it. It's all absolute. My
half-million is as right as if it were lying to my credit in the Bank of
England. Oh, that reminds me," he went on in a slightly altered
tone--"it's damned comical, but I've got to ask you for a little money.
I've only got about seven pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it
would give me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. Of course
he'd let me have anything I wanted--but, you can see--I don't like to
ask him just at the moment."

She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a wistful gaze. "You're
quite sure, Joel?"--she began--"and you haven't told me--how long will
it be before you come into some of this money?"

"Well,"--he in turn paused over his words--"well, I suppose that by next
week things will be in such shape that my bank will see I'm good for an
overdraft. Oh heavens, yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some
ready. But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I tell
you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill, paying one
hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me have now. Come, old lady:
you don't get such interest every day, I'll bet."

"I don't want any interest from you, Joel," she replied, simply. "If
you're sure I can have it back before Christmas, I think I can manage
thirty pounds. It will do in the morning, I suppose?"

He nodded an amused affirmative. "Why--you don't imagine, do you,"
he said, "that all this gold is to rain down, and none of it hit you?
Interest? Why of course you'll get interest--and capital thrown in. What
did you suppose?"

"I don't ask anything for myself," she made answer, with a note of
resolution in her voice. "Of course if you like to do things for the
children, it won't be me who'll stand in their light. They've been
spoiled for my kind of life as it is."

"I'll do things for everybody," he affirmed roundly. "Let's see--how old
is Alfred?"

"He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months older than he is."

"Gad!" was Thorpe's meditative comment. "How they shoot up! Why I was
thinking she was a little girl." "She never will be tall, I'm afraid,"
said the literal mother. "She favours her father's family. But Alfred is
more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer--but of
course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them--and
they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in
the country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age:
he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's not a bit
fonder of hard work."

"There's one mighty big difference between us, though," remarked Thorpe.
"He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old
father hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich
man."

"I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head," she replied,
with visible apprehension. "You mustn't encourage him to build too high
hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know--and anything might happen to
you. And then--you may marry, and have sons of your own."

He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new to his mind. A
slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his
lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.

"Well," he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an
eye about for his coat and hat. "I'll be round in the morning--on my way
to the City. Good-bye till then."

CHAPTER IV

IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by
the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.
This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the
last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud
nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some
quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a
piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the
general upheaval in the routine of his life.

From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that
his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar
things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to
him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now,
as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all
disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With
the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and shining
hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of
discovery in the unknown.

Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to
the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after
breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in
the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin,
tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence;
the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen
years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant
where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he
had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the
looking-glass. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most
in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all
the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous
distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an
average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.

His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old
book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his
own clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring
implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived
his youth. The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man
spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing
all earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he
had had during the day in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and
embroidered braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors,
toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the
gratified tradesmen to give him the best of everything--this delight had
been distinctively boyish. He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could
have risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected
upon the contents of his portmanteaus. To apprehend their full value one
must have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful
advantage--that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could
be without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and
mostly unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to
appreciate to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.

It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good
tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and
his evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume
for shooting harassed his mind. He had brought along with him, for
this eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and
leather, much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable
by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic
country. At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had
packed it, to be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject
had soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy
as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's
investigations and purchases. He had reached the point now of hoping
that it would rain bitterly on the morrow.

It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since
he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time
was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in
this matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in
readiness on the arrival of his host. As it was, he could not even tell
the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now
less than two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of
intercepting his friend at the front of the station; then halted, and
went back, upon the recollection that while he was going out one way,
Plowden might come in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now,
became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere
beyond the barrier provoked within him an impulse to tearful profanity.

Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken
young man came up, touched his hat, and asked: "Will you kindly show me
which is your luggage, sir?"

Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the
glaringly new bags--and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at
discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.

"It's all right; my man will look out for your things," said the latter,
as they shook hands. "We will go and get our places."

The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. A lean, elderly man
in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled obsequiously before them down the
platform, opened to them a first-class compartment with a low bow and a
deprecatory wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door upon
them. "The engine will be the other way, my Lord, after you leave Cannon
Street," he remarked through the open window, with earnest deference.
"Are there any of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?"

Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook his head at the second.
The elderly man at this, with still another bow, flapped out a green
flag which he had been holding furled behind his back, and extended it
at arm's length. The train began slowly to move. Mr. Thorpe reflected to
himself that the peerage was by no means so played-out an institution as
some people imagined.

"Ho-ho!" the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed his hat into the
rack above his head. "We shall both be the better for some pure air.
London quite does me up. And you--you've been sticking at it months
on end, haven't you? You look rather fagged--or at all events you did
yesterday. You've smartened yourself so--without your beard--that I
can't say I'd notice it to-day. But I take it every sensible person is
glad to get away from London."

"Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put my nose outside
London since I landed here." Thorpe rose as he spoke, to deposit his hat
also in the rack. He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's
was an ordinary low black bowler. "I can tell you, I SHALL be glad of
the change. I would have bought the tickets," he went on, giving words
at random to the thought which he found fixed on the surface of his
mind, "if I'd only known what our station was."

Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss the subject.
He took a cigar case from his pocket, and offered it to Thorpe.

"It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether," he said, as they
lighted their cigars. "I was up late last night--turned out late this
morning, been late all day, somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock
for the life of me. Your statement to me last night--you know it rather
upset me."

The other smiled. "Well, I guess I know something about that feeling
myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today like a hen with her head cut
off. But it's fun, though, aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every
once in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course it means a
thousand times more to me than it does to you."

The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern of Cannon
Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro on the platform, and a
number of them shook the handle of the locked door. There was an effect
of curses in the sound of their remarks which came through the closed
window. Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.

"Ah, that's where you mistake," said Plowden, contemplating the mouthful
of smoke he slowly blew forth. "My dear man, you can't imagine anybody
to whom it would mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those
fellows have a key. They're an awful bore on this train. I almost
never go by it, for that reason. Ah, thank God we're off!--But as I was
saying, this thing makes a greater difference to me than you can think
of. I couldn't sleep last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me
so. I take it you--you have never had much money before; that is, you
know from experience what poverty is?"

Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.

"Well--but you"--the other began, and then paused. "What I mean is,"
he resumed, "you were never, at any rate, responsible to anybody but
yourself. If you had only a sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for
that matter, you could accommodate yourself to the requirements of
the situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy it any more than I
should--but at least it was open to you to do it, without attracting
much attention. But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty
has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine. You see, there is
no way in which I can earn a penny. I had to leave the Army when I was
twenty-three--the other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it
was impossible for me to drag along with a title and an empty pocket. I
daresay that I ought to have stuck to it, because it isn't nearly so bad
now, but twelve years ago it was too cruel for any youngster who had any
pride about him--and, of course, my father having made rather a name in
the Army, that made it so much harder for me. And after that, what was
there? Of course, the bar and medicine and engineering and those things
were out of the question, in those days at least. The Church?--that was
more so still. I had a try at politics--but you need money there as
much as anywhere else--money or big family connections. I voted in
practically every division for four years, and I made the rottenest
speeches you ever heard of at Primrose League meetings in small places,
and after all that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet
in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took in depreciated
rupees. When I tried to talk about something at home, they practically
laughed in my face. I had no leverage upon them whatever. They didn't
care in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home. Their
majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty to one. So that door
was shut in my face. I've never been inside the House since--except once
to show it to an American lady last summer--but when I do go again I
rather fancy"--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome head
significantly--"I rather fancy I shall turn up on the other side."

"I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics," interposed Thorpe.

Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left London
Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions, and leant back
comfortably. "Of course there was the City," he went on, speaking
diagonally across to his companion, between leisurely intervals of
absorption in his cigar. "There have been some directors' fees, no
doubt, and once or twice I've come very near to what promised to be a
big thing--but I never quite pulled it off. Really, without capital what
can one do?--I'm curious to know--did you bring much ready money with
you to England?"

"Between six and seven thousand pounds."

"And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you got left?"

Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question,
but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to
answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. "Oh, less than a hundred," he
said, and laughed aloud.

Plowden also laughed. "By George, that's fine!" he cried. "It's
splendid. There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know.
Something told me it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was
that that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you were
a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of
courage is so rare! When a man has it, he can stand the world on
its head." "But I was plumb scared, all the while, myself," Thorpe
protested, genially. "Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots."

"Ah, yes, but that's the great thing," insisted the other. "You didn't
look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was
sublime. And nothing else matters--it was sublime."

"Curious--that thing happened to me once before," commented Thorpe, with
ruminating slowness. "It was out on the plains, years ago, and I was
in pretty hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north, and
some cowboys held me up, and were going to make kindling wood of me,
they being under the impression that I was a horse-thief they were
looking after. There was five or six minutes there when my life
wasn't worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was the
scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life. And then something
happened to be said that put the matter right--they saw I was the wrong
man--and then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. They half
emptied their flasks down my throat, and they rode with me all the way
to the next town, and there they wanted to buy everything liquid in the
place for me. But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows got
a tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much that they told me
so, but they told others about it. They really thought I was game to the
core--when in reality, as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you
ever heard of."

"That's just it," said Plowden, "the part of you which was engaged in
making mental notes of the occasion thought you were frightened; we will
say that it was itself frightened. But the other part of you, the part
that was transacting business, so to speak--that wasn't in the least
alarmed. I fancy all born commanders are built like that. Did you ever
see General Grant?"

Thorpe shook his head.

"What reminded me of him--there is an account in his Memoirs of how he
felt when he first was given a command, at the beginning of the Civil
War. He was looking about for the enemy, who was known to be in the
vicinity, and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was, the
more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed as if cowardice
were getting complete mastery of him. And then suddenly it occurred to
him that very likely the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of
the enemy, and that moment his bravery all returned to him. He went in
and gave the other man a terrible thrashing. It doesn't apply to your
case, particularly--but I fancy that all really brave men have those
inner convictions of weakness, even while they are behaving like
lions. Those must have been extraordinarily interesting experiences of
yours--on the plains. I wish I could have seen something of that part
of America when I was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come my
way."

"I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West."

Plowden smiled. "I'm afraid I did think it was West at the time. But
since my return I've been warned that I mustn't call Chicago West. That
was as far as I went. I had some business there, or thought I had. When
my father died, that was in 1884, we found among his papers a lot of
bonds of some corporation purporting to be chartered by the State of
Illinois. Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find out
nothing about them, and there the matter rested. Finally, last year,
when I decided to make the trip, I recollected these old bonds, and
took them with me. I thought they might at least pay my expenses. But
it wasn't the least good. Nobody knew anything about them. It seems they
related to something that was burned up in the Great Fire--either that,
or had disappeared before that time. That fire seems to have operated
like the Deluge--it cancelled everything that had happened previously.
My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment. I shall
have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow, a very picturesque and
comprehensive collection of Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I
remember it, eighty thousand dollars--that is, sixteen thousand pounds.
I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot.
My dear father bought them--I should not be surprised to learn that he
bought them at a premium. If they ever touched a premium for a day, that
is certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too
rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of
paper--that is, on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I
think it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine how he got
them--but there were actually bonds among them issued by Kossuth's
Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well--now you can see the kind of
inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and sister more or less to
look after, too."

Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated
expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now
betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.

"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what I don't perhaps
quite understand--well, this is it. You have this place of yours in the
country, and preserve game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable
living, is poverty to a man in your position."

"Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all. I could never have
kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has
been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you
know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three
daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest,
got the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me
eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as
my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to
explain to everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's
enough. It's a dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that
you're going to see it."

"I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.

"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman went on, sitting
upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, "centre round
Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are
things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very
small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud
voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics.
He got a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a
soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart. He gave a certain military
distinction to the peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the
fortune. And then I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General,
and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think of a more
idiotic box for a man to be in. But now--thanks to you--there comes
this prospect of an immense change. If I have money at my back--at once
everything is different with me. People will remember then promptly
enough that I am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party
whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet in India at
four hundred a year that they'll offer me, but a Governorship at six
thousand--that is, if I wish to leave England at all. And we'll see
which set of whips are to have the honour of offering me anything. But
all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment, to realize that
things have really come my way. And about that--about the success of the
affair--I suppose there can be no question whatever?"

"Not the slightest," Thorpe assured him. "Rubber Consols can go up to
any figure we choose to name."

Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped
himself after he had given his companion a light. Then he threw himself
back against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. "I'm not going
to say another word about myself," he announced, pleasantly. "I've had
more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a
moment the reverse of the medal. You're doing wonderful things for me. I
only wish it were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I can
do for you."

"Oh, that'll be all right," said the other, rather vaguely.

"Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind
just what you want to do," Plowden reflected aloud. "Of course it has
come suddenly upon you--just as it has upon me. There are things in
plenty that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a
long way off. It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we
shall proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands. But have
you any plans at all? Do you fancy going into Parliament, for example?"

"Yes," answered Thorpe, meditatively. "I think I should like to go into
Parliament. But that would be some way ahead. I guess I've got my plans
worked out a trifle more than you think. They may not be very definite,
as regards details, but their main direction I know well enough. I'm
going to be an English country gentleman."

Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. He seemed
annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so, turning abruptly first
to stare out of the window, then shifting his position on the seat, and
at last stealing an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his
tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment.

Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. Plowden
saw that at once, but it relieved even more than it surprised him to see
also that Thorpe appeared not to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in
good-natured if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.

"Oh, that'll be all right, too," he said, with the evident intention
of reassurance. "I can do it right enough, so far as the big things are
concerned. It'll be in the little things that I'll want some steering."

"I've already told you--you may command me to the utmost of my power,"
the other declared. Upon reflection, he was disposed to be ashamed
of himself. His nerves and facial muscles had been guilty of an
unpardonable lapse into snobbishness--and toward a man, too, who
had been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its courtesy and
generosity than any he had encountered in all the "upper circles" put
together. He recalled all at once, moreover, that Thorpe's "h's" were
perfect--aud, for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.

"My dear fellow"--he began again, confronting with verbal awkwardness
the other's quizzical smile--"don't think I doubt anything about you. I
know well enough that you can do anything--be anything--you like."

Thorpe laughed softly.

"I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-school man," he said.

Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. "No--I didn't know
that," he admitted, frankly.

"Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon," Thorpe went on, "as they called them in
my day. That's gone out now, I'm told, since they've moved to the big
buildings in Hammersmith. I did very well at school, too; came out in
the first fourteen. But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further.
He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's and
learning the book-business. He had precisely the same kind of dynastic
idea, you know, that you fellows have. His father and his grand-father
had been booksellers, and he was going to hand on the tradition to me,
and my son after me. That was his idea. And he thought that Paul's would
help this--but that Oxford would kill it.

"Of course, he was right there--but he was wrong in supposing there was
a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough, mind you--but damn
the people that came to buy them, I couldn't stand it. You stood two
hours watching to see that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and
at the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. While you
were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off with a book worth
eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. I didn't hit it off with the old
man, either. We didn't precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook.
I hung about London for some years, trying this thing and that. Once I
started a book-shop of my own--but I did no good here. Finally I turned
it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been in
almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to be
shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting
to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger--but
I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my father's
book-shop."

Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the other's mood.
He was silent for a moment, then lifted his head as if something had
occurred to him. "You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed
to your father's business--and your son after you--you're not married,
are you?"

Thorpe slowly shook his head.

"Our station is the next," said the younger man. "It's a drive of
something under two miles. You'd better light another cigar." He added,
as if upon a casual afterthought: "We can both of us think of marrying
now."

CHAPTER V

FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied
with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed
suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively
by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins,
and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial
silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them
from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close
behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the
question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst
forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies
to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the
animal--"So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so"--and
his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth
of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a
modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed,
in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good
deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence
was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could
not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.

It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the
most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily
developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower
than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all
at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel
road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse.
Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a
low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
front of the central portion of this house.

A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the
vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what
the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing
richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.

What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once
there were a number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back
and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and
beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica
of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them
apart.

Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at
his watch. "We did it in a bit over eight minutes," he remarked, with
obvious satisfaction. "With four people and heavy roads that's not so
bad--not so bad. But come inside."

They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like
of which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with
a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and
left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old
and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of
tigers and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase
about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic
weapons caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer
peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of
hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a
fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low
chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic
occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table in
the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books,
flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers,
and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides--all this
self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a
profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to
overflowing with servants, amazed him.

The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His
mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished
at nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.

"If you will follow Pangbourn," said his host, indicating this second
domestic, "he will look after you. You would like to go up and change
now, wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room."

Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus,
taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low
passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing
of the house. The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite of
himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and
most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be--spacious and quaintly
rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and
chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm,
cozy glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at
the photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted
face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.

This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe
looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was
conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to
unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel
after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa
beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he
had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.

Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of
his tongue--but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands
in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented
something which it seemed better for him to say.

"I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things," he remarked,
casually. "My man has been buying them today--and I don't know what he
mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray
or was stolen at some station or other--the first part of the week--I
think it must have been Leeds."

"Yes, sir," said Pangbourn, without emotion. "They're very careless,
sir."

He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading
them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging
the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to
foresee everything--for there was not an instant's hesitation in the
clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in
one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set
the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican
shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its
constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the
trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been
fashioned expressly for them.

Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for
Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now
he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind.
Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though
he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why not
Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became
apparent that the man's task was nearing completion--and then frowned
at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the
end of a visit.

"Will you dress now, sir?" asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct
enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.

"Eh?" said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's
thought.

"Shall you require me any further, sir?" the man reframed the question,
deferentially.

"Oh! Oh--no," replied Thorpe. "No--I'll get along all right."

Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing.
The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror
presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he
was used to--but upon second thought he preferred this restrained
aristocratic glimmer.

He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with
his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the
darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait
for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before
he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and
firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward
to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a
cigarette.

"Have they looked after you all right?" said Plowden, nonchalantly.
"Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never
will keep matches in a bedroom."

He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and
stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. "I thought I'd tell
you before we went down"--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the
mantel, looked down at his handsome head--"my sister has a couple of
ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on
shipboard a Miss Madden--an American, you know--very tall and fine, with
bright red hair--rather remarkable hair it was?"

"I remember the lady," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "but we didn't
meet." He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those
days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to
him to know them.

Lord Plowden smiled a little. "Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun--if
she's in the mood. My mother and sister--I had them call on her in
London last spring--and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no
end of money, you know--at least a million and a half--dollars,
unfortunately. Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if they'd crossed
over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous
country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told
you--it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you
were English."

Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence.
This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was
not altogether grateful to his ears.

"The other one," continued Plowden, "is Lady Cressage. You'll be
interested in her--because a few years ago she was supposed to be the
most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder--he
would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he was
drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!" he
started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face--"it didn't in
the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How
did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?"

Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. "Why, you introduced me to him
yourself, didn't you?" he asked, slowly.

Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it
over in his mind. "By George! I think you're right," he said. "I'd quite
forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he can get. He was
bothering her about money--that was it, I remember now--but what an
idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying--there's no one else but
my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty or
thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army.
If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but
cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the
party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If
you've finished your cigarette"--he threw his own into the grate, and
rose as he spoke--"we may as well be moving along. By the way," he
concluded, as they walked toward the door, "I've an idea that we won't
say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to
keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister, you know."

Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored
equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He
had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in
the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much
at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had
feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had
wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with
serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious
of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a
new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of
everything.

The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous
shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows
and eyelashes--had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for
his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers
toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy
firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated
at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent
his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened
to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were
concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He
said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed
to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor
throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and
smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him,
whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original
half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify
itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the
other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent
smile that he could command. He reasoned it out that Plowden must have
said something pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to
the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth
to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own
merits--and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her
where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of
alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.

He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder,
of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all
a busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She
was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner
life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired
to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate
aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few
words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve
close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only
that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did--but to him,
really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago--why, yes, even a
fortnight ago--the golden rumour of millions would have shone round
her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a
mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman
to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference
with which he considered her.

The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a
sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in
part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano.
Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told
him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's
hand. This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung
together, these two young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions
all the evening, that this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady
Cressage, and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the
house, peering through her pince-nez from under unduly thick black
brows, formed a party of their own. Their politeness toward him had been
as identical in all its little shades of distance and reservation as if
they had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would be unfair
to them to assume from their manner that they disliked him, or were even
unfavourably impressed by him. The finesse of that manner was far too
delicate a thing to call into use such rough characterizations. It was
rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. He thought he
could see that they united upon a common demeanour toward the American
girl, although of course they knew her much better than they knew
him. It was not even clear to him that there were not traces of this
combination in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. The
bond between them had twisted in it strands of social exclusiveness, and
strands of sex sympathy.

He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the
impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed
these impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him
consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He
had formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the
idea that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest
weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions
about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had
scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
which included ladies--certainly never in the presence of such
certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however,
was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this
briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of
the great subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women
sticking together, for example--here before his eyes was one of the
prettiest instances of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two
figures on the sofa, so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit
to each other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really
touching.

Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the
piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of
it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline--sensitive,
high-spirited, somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. He
moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces,
and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the
Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious
wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
the music said less than nothing to his ears--that it was the face that
had beckoned him to advance.

Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and
chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he
could not be sure.

So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said
to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which
belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in
diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of
the great lady--they were all there in their supreme expression. And
yet--why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his
old General Kervick--the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military
gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did
what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three
hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter, and she also was poor.
Plowden had said so.

Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to
have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a
directorship. But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have
been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady
Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he
could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by
directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered
Kervick's name, when the chance arose to give the old boy a leg up, and
then had clean forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
his liking for Plowden.

He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer
sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so
nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of
him but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's
daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him,
and about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial
position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very
fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should
render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the
piano before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from
the others a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and
enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been
deaf to something that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks
which seemed to be regarded as apposite.

"What IS it?" asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. "I don't know
when anything has touched me so much."

"Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or
two," replied Miss Madden. "I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly
enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?"

"We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and musicians--like
this," affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.

With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the
conversation.

CHAPTER VI

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