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