he said with feeling. Then he added, in tones of dejected resignation: "When will you want it?"
"At the moment when the payments of Rostocker and Aronson are made to you, or to your bankers or agents," Lord Plowden replied, with prepared facility. He had evidently given much thought to this part of the proceedings. "And of course I shall expect you to draw up now an agreement to that effect. I happen to have a stamped paper with me this time. And if you don"t mind, we will have it properly witnessed--this time."
Thorpe looked at him with a disconcertingly leaden stare, the while he thought over what had been proposed. "That"s right enough," he announced at last, "but I shall expect you to do some writing too. Since we"re dealing on this basis, there must be no doubt about the guarantee that you will perform your part of the contract."
"The performance itself, since payment is conditional upon it--" began Plowden, but the other interrupted him.
"No, I want something better than that. Here--give me your stamped paper." He took the bluish sheet, and, without hesitation, wrote several lines rapidly. "Here--this is my promise," he said, "to pay you 150,000 pounds, upon your satisfactory performance of a certain undertaking to be separately nominated in a doc.u.ment called "A," which we will jointly draw up and agree to and sign, and deposit wherever you like--for safe keeping. Now, if you"ll sit here, and write out for me a similar thing--that in consideration of my promise of 150,000 pounds, you covenant to perform the undertaking to be nominated in the doc.u.ment "A"--and so on."
Lord Plowden treated as a matter of course the ready and business-like suggestion of the other. Taking his place at the desk in turn, he wrote out what had been suggested. Thorpe touched a bell, and the clerk who came in perfunctorily attested the signatures upon both papers. Each princ.i.p.al folded and pocketed the pledge of the other.
"Now," said Thorpe, when he had seated himself again at the desk, "we are all right so far as protection against each other goes. If you don"t mind, I will draw up a suggestion of what the separate doc.u.ment "A"
should set forth. If you don"t like it, you can write one."
He took more time to this task, frowning laboriously over the fresh sheet of foolscap, and screening from observation with his hand what he was writing. Finally, the task seemed finished to his mind. He took up the paper, glanced through it once more, and handed it in silence to the other.
In silence also, and with an expression of arrested attention, Lord Plowden read these lines:
"The undertaking referred to in the two doc.u.ments of even date, signed respectively by Lord Plowden and Stormont Thorpe, is to the effect that at some hour between eleven A.M. and three P.M. of September 12th, instant, Lord Plowden shall produce before a special meeting of the Committee of the Stock Exchange, the person of one Jerome P. Tavender, to explain to said Committee his share in the blackmailing scheme of which Lord Plowden, over his own signature, has furnished doc.u.mentary evidence."
The n.o.bleman continued to look down at the paper, after the power to hold it without shaking had left his hand. There came into his face, mingling with and vitiating its rich natural hues of health, a kind of grey shadow. It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint.
He did not lift his eyes.
Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation of his trick with boisterous and scornful mirth. Even while the victim was deciphering the fatal paper, he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst out into bitter laughter. But now there was something in the aspect of Plowden"s collapse which seemed to forbid triumphant derision. He was taking his blow so like a gentleman,--ashen-pale and quivering, but clinging to a high-bred dignity of silence,--that the impulse to exhibit equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant.
"Well--you see how little business you"ve got, setting yourself to buck against a grown-up man."
He offered the observation in the tone of the school-teacher, affectedly philosophical but secretly jubilant, who harangues a defeated and humiliated urchin upon his folly.
"Oh, chuck it!" growled Lord Plowden, staring still at the calamitous paper.
Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence was after all most decorous. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and tipping back his chair, surveyed the discomfited Viscount impa.s.sively. He forbore even to smile.
"So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!" Lord Plowden had found words at last. As he spoke, he lifted his face, and made a show of looking the other in the eye.
"Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even, that you haven"t an inkling of," Thorpe told him, lightly. "I"ve been watching every move you"ve made, seeing further ahead in your own game than you did. Why, it was too easy! It was like playing draughts with a girl. I knew you would come today, for example. I told the people out there that I expected you."
"Yes-s," said the other, with rueful bewilderment. "You seem to have been rather on the spot--I confess."
"On the spot? All over the place!" Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his chair, and put more animation into his voice.
"It"s the mistake you people make!" he declared oracularly. "You think that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat "em, and make for himself a big fortune--and still be a fool! You imagine that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked by amateurs like yourself. It"s too ridiculous!"
The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun to spread through Plowden"s consciousness. It was almost more surprising to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed himself to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept back into his glance. He breathed more easily.
"You are right!" he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of fervid conviction to the tone of his words. The big brute"s pride in his own brains and power was still his weakest point. "You are right! I did play the fool. And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first man in London to recognize the immense forces in you. I said to you at the very outset, "You are going to go far. You are going to be a great man." You remember that, don"t you?"
Thorpe nodded. "Yes--I remember it."
The n.o.bleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket, and extracted a match. "Do you mind?" he asked, and scarcely waiting for a token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. The two men watched it curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate, without a word.
This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.
"It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me," he said, in an altered, harsh tone, "but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old b.u.m of a Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and he"s a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and spend your money,--money I gave you, by the way,--in bringing Tavender over here. You do this on the double chance, we"ll say, of using him against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for a still bigger profit. You see it"s all at my fingers" ends."
Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified a.s.sent.
"Well then--Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to meet him? Have you said to yourself: "I"ve set out to fight one of the smartest and strongest men in England, and I"ve got to keep every atom of wits about me, and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every point of the game as a tiger watches a snake"? Not a bit of it! You snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson--Gafferson!--the mud-head of the earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and bring him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My G.o.d!
You"ve only got two clear days left to do the whole thing in--and you don"t even come up to town to get ready for them! You send Gafferson--and he goes off to see a flower-show--Mother of Moses! think of it! a FLOWER-show!--and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so on, to our hearts" content. Really, it"s too easy! You make me tired!"
The n.o.bleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile. "I confess to a certain degree of weariness myself," he said, humbly.
Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion for a little.
"I may tell you that if you HAD got hold of Tavender," he decided to tell him, "he shouldn"t have been of the faintest use to you. I know what it was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn"t understand it when he first told me, but afterwards I saw through it,--and it was merely a maudlin misapprehension of his. He"d got three or four things all mixed up together. You"ve never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You"d enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred yards off. What little brain he"s got left is soaked in it. The first time I was ever camping with him, I had to lick him for drinking the methylated spirits we were using with our tin stove. Oh, you"d have liked him!"
"Evidently," said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, "it was all a most unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake." With inspiration, he made bold to add: "The most amazing thing, though--to my mind--is that you don"t seem--what shall I say?--particularly enraged with me about it."
"Yes--that surprises me, too," Thorpe meditatively admitted. "I was ent.i.tled to kill you--crush you to jelly. Any other man I would. But you,--I don"t know,--I do funny things with you."
"I wish you would give me a drink, now--as one of them," Plowden ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry.
Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved across the room.
He set out upon the big official table in the middle, that mockingly pretentious reminder of a Board which never met, a decanter and two gla.s.ses and some rec.u.mbent, round-bottomed bottles. He handed one of these last to Plowden, as the latter strolled toward the table.
"You know how to open these, don"t you?" he said, languidly. "Somehow I never could manage it."
The n.o.bleman submissively took the bottle, and picked with awkwardness at its wire and cork, and all at once achieved a premature and not over-successful explosion. He wiped his dripping cuff in silence, when the tumblers were supplied.
"Well--here"s better luck to you next time," Thorpe said, lifting his gla.s.s. The audacious irony of his words filled Plowden with an instant purpose.
"What on earth did you round on me in that way for, Thorpe--when I was here last?" He put the question with bravery enough, but at sight of the other"s unresponsive face grew suddenly timorous aud explanatory. "No man was ever more astounded in the world than I was. To this day I"m as unable to account for it as a babe unborn. What conceivable thing had I done to you?"
Thorpe slowly thought of something that had not occurred to him before, and seized upon it with a certain satisfaction.
"That day that you took me shooting," he said, with the tone of one finally exposing a long-nursed grievance, "you stayed in bed for hours after you knew I was up and waiting for you--and when we went out, you had a servant to carry a chair for you, but I--by G.o.d!--I had to stand up."
"Heavens above!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Plowden, in unfeigned amazement.
"These are little things--mere trifles," continued Thorpe, dogmatically, "but with men of my temper and make-up those are just the things that aggravate and rankle and hurt. Maybe it"s foolish, but that"s the kind of man I am. You ought to have had the intelligence to see that--and not let these stupid little things happen to annoy me. Why just think what you did. I was going to do G.o.d knows what for you--make your fortune and everything else,--and you didn"t show consideration enough for me to get out of bed at a decent hour--much less see to it that I had a chair if you were going to have one."
"Upon my word, I can"t tell how ashamed and sorry I am," Lord Plowden a.s.sured him, with fervent contrition in his voice.
"Well, those are the things to guard against," said Thorpe, approaching a dismissal of the subject. "People who show consideration for me; people who take pains to do the little pleasant things for me, and see that I"m not annoyed and worried by trifles--they"re the people that I, on my side, do the big things for. I can be the best friend in the world, but only to those who show that they care for me, and do what they know I"ll like. I don"t want toadies about me, but I do want people who feel bound to me, and are as keen about me and my feelings and interests as they are about their own."
"It is delightfully feudal--all this," commented the n.o.bleman, smilingly addressing the remark to n.o.body in particular. Then he looked at Thorpe.
"Let me be one of them--one of the people you speak of," he said, with directness.
Thorpe returned his look with the good-natured beginnings of a grin.
"But what would you be good for?" he queried, in a bantering tone.