"Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER son-in-law. He has large estates in one of the healthiest and most beautiful parts; he has a palace, and more money than he knows what to do with--but it seems that he"s not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well--but that doesn"t enter into anyone"s calculations. No! let the worn-out old soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb! That"s the spirit of woman-kind.
And my daughter Edith--does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me--I secured for her the very greatest marriage in England. She would have been d.u.c.h.ess of Glas...o...b..ry today if her husband had not played the fool and drowned himself."
"What"s that you say?" put in Thorpe, swiftly.
"It was as good as suicide," insisted the General, with doggedness. His face had become a deeper red. "They didn"t hit it off together, and he left in a huff, and went yachting with his father, who was his own sailing-master--and, as might be expected, they were both drowned. The t.i.tle would have gone to her son--but no, of course, she had no son--and so it pa.s.sed to a stranger--an outsider that had been an usher in a school, or something of that sort. You can fancy what a blow this was to me. Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless widow thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then, to cap all, she takes her six hundred a year and goes off by herself, and gives me the cold shoulder completely. What is it Shakespeare says? "How sharper than a serpent"s teeth"----"
Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an emphasis which abruptly broke the quotation in half. He had been frowning moodily at his guest for some minutes, relighting his cigar more than once meanwhile. He had made a mental calculation of what the old man had had to drink, and had rea.s.sured himself as to his condition. His garrulity might have an alcoholic basis, but his wits were clear enough. It was time to take a new line with him.
"I don"t want to hear you abuse your daughter," he admonished him now, with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance. "d.a.m.n it all, why shouldn"t she go off by herself, and take care of her own money her own way? It"s little enough, G.o.d knows, for such a lady as she is. Why should you expect her to support you out of it? No--sit still! Listen to me!"--he stretched out his hand, and laid it with restraining heaviness upon the General"s arm--"you don"t want to have any row with me.
You can"t afford it. Just think that over to yourself--you--can"t afford--it."
Major-General Kervick"s prominent blue eyes had bulged forth in rage till their appearance had disconcerted the other"s gaze. They remained still too much in the foreground, as it were, and the angry scarlets and violets of the cheeks beneath them carried an unabated threat of apoplexy--but their owner, after a moment"s silence, made a sign with his stiff white brows that the crisis was over. "You must remember that--that I have a father"s feelings," he gasped then, huskily.
Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected. He had learned what he wanted to know about this veteran. If he had the fierce meannesses of a famished old dog, he had also a dog"s awe of a stick. It was almost too easy to terrorize him.
"Oh, I make allowances for all that," Thorpe began, vaguely. "But it"s important that you should understand me. I"m this sort of a man: whatever I set out to do, and put my strength into it, that I do! I kill every pheasant I fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It"s a way I have.
To those that help me, and are loyal to me, I"m the best friend in the world. To those that get in my way, or try to trip me up, I"m the devil--just plain devil. Now then--you"re getting three hundred a year from my Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my friend Plowden. You don"t do anything to earn this money; you"re of no earthly use on the Board. If I chose, I could put you off at the end of the year as easily as I can blow out this match. But I propose not only to keep you on, but to make you independent. Why do I do that? You should ask yourself that question. It can"t be on account of anything you can do for the Company. What else then? Why, first and foremost, because you are the father of your daughter."
"Let me tell you the kind of man I am," said the General, inflating his chest, and speaking with solemnity.
"Oh, I know the kind of man you are," Thorpe interrupted him, coolly. "I want to talk now."
"It was merely," Kervick ventured, in an injured tone, "that I can be as loyal as any man alive to a true friend."
"Well, I"ll be the true friend, then," said Thorpe, with impatient finality. "And now this is what I want to say. I"m going to be a very rich man. You"re not to say so to anybody, mind you, until the thing speaks for itself. We"re keeping dark for a few months, d"ye see?--lying low. Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well now, I wouldn"t give a d.a.m.n to be rich, unless I did with my money the things that I wanted to do, and got the things with it that I wanted to get. Whatever takes my fancy, that"s what I"ll do."
He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-new project which seemed, by some surrept.i.tious agency, to have already taken his fancy.
It was a curious project; there were attractive things about it, and objections to it suggested themselves as well.
"I may decide," he began speaking again, still revolving this hypothetical scheme in his thoughts--"I may want to--well, here"s what occurs to me as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter, d"ye see? and it seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be so poor. Well, then--I might say to you, here"s two thousand a year, say, made over to you in your name, on the understanding that you turn over half of it, say, to her. She could take it from you, of course, as her father. You could say you made it out of the Company. Of course it might happen, later on, that I might like to have a gentle hint dropped to her, d"ye see, as to where it really came from. Mind, I don"t say this is what is going to be done. It merely occurred to me."
After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added a second thought: "You"d have to set about making friends with her, you know. In any case, you"d better begin at that at once."
The General remained buried in reflection. He lighted a cigarette, and poured out for himself still another pet.i.t verre. His pursed lips and knitted brows were eloquent of intense mental activity.
"Well, do you see any objections to it?" demanded Thorpe, at last.
"I do not quite see the reasons for it," answered the other, slowly.
"What would you gain by it?"
"How do you mean--gain?" put in the other, with peremptory intolerance of tone.
General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture. These hands were withered, but remarkably well-kept. "I suppose one doesn"t do something for nothing," he said. "I see what I would gain, and what she would gain, but I confess I don"t see what advantage you would get out of it."
"No-o, I daresay you don"t," a.s.sented Thorpe, with sneering serenity.
"But what does that matter? You admit that you see what you would gain.
That"s enough, isn"t it?"
The older man"s veined temples twitched for an instant. He straightened himself in his chair, and looked hard at his companion. There was a glistening of moisture about his staring eyes.
"It surely isn"t necessary--among gentlemen"--he began, cautiously picking his phrases--"to have quite so much that"s unpleasant, is it?"
"No--you"re right--I didn"t mean to be so rough," Thorpe declared, with spontaneous contrition. Upon the instant, however, he perceived the danger that advantage might be taken of his softness. "I"m a plain-spoken man," he went on, with a hardening voice, "and people must take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance, that I intended to be of service to you--and that that ought to interest you."
The General seemed to have digested his pique. "And what I was trying to say," he commented deferentially, "was that I thought I saw ways of being of service to you. But that did not seem to interest you at all."
"How--service?" Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.
"I know my daughter so much better than you do," explained the other; "I know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar with the whole situation than you can possibly be--I wonder that you won"t listen to my opinion. I don"t suggest that you should be guided by it, but I think you should hear it."
"I think so, too," Thorpe declared, readily enough. "What IS your opinion?"
General Kervick sipped daintily at his gla.s.s, and then gave an embarra.s.sed little laugh. "But I can"t form what you might call an opinion," he protested, apologetically, "till I understand a bit more clearly what it is you propose to yourself. You mustn"t be annoyed if I return to that--"still harping on my daughter," you know. If I MUST ask the question--is it your wish to marry her?"
Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking of something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness that the question had been unduly intimate.
"I can"t in the least be sure that I shall ever marry," he replied, thoughtfully. "I may, and I may not. But--starting with that proviso--I suppose I haven"t seen any other woman that I"d rather think about marrying than--than the lady we"re speaking of. However, you see it"s all in the air, so far as my plans go."
"In the air be it," the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. "Let us consider it as if it were in the air--a possible contingency. This is what I would say--My--"the lady we are speaking of" is by way of being a difficult lady--"uncertain, coy, and hard to please" as Scott says, you know--and it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which brings her to the surface. She"s been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror of it. Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you know. I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother carried it through.
But--yes--about her--I think she is afraid to marry again. If she does ever consent, it will be because poverty has broken her nerve. If she is kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved, so to speak, into taking a husband. If she had sixteen hundred--either she would never marry at all, or she would be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught her fancy. That would be particularly like her. You would be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her for yourself. D"ye follow me? If you"ll leave it to me, I can find a much better way than that--better for all of us."
"Hm!" said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. "I see what you mean," he remarked at last. "Yes--I see."
The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time, deferring to the reverie of his host. When finally he offered a diversion, in the form of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook himself, and then ponderously rose to his feet. He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made his way out without a word.
At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the Embankment garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him the fact of his presence. "Which way are you going?" he asked.
"I don"t know," Thorpe answered absently. "I think--I think I"ll take a walk on the Embankment--by myself."
The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. "But when am I to see you again?" he enquired, with an effect of solicitude that defied control.
"See me?" Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him by surprise.
"There are things to be settled, are there not?" the other faltered, in distressed doubt as to the judicious tone to take. "You spoke, you know, of--of some employment that--that would suit me."
Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort to recall his wandering attention. "Oh yes," he said, with lethargic vagueness--"I haven"t thought it out yet. I"ll let you know--within the week, probably."
With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. Walking heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he pa.s.sed, he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter self-disgust.
The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep, had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all," he said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is a cad, in the presence of a gentleman."
CHAPTER X
ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.