Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and though afterward, when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station under a clump of trees at the autocrat"s behest, he strove to soothe his ruffled feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely correct deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of which nettled him.
To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from the spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the skyline of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool which his valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment that he had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and he turned on his heel in the wet gra.s.s with a grunt of displeasure.
This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he hastened back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when he heard the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came his way, he liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended pride with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the responsibility he had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden"s guest had no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden"s over-arrogant keeper. Then a noise of a different character a.s.sailed his ears, punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!" These cries, and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own.
He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then, taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe"s first pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a plummet.
He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never have been a cleaner "kill." In the warming glow of his satisfaction in himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel delight of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and again the cry of "mark!" rose, strenuously addressed to him.
Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest of the party a.s.sembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game carried by two of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.
"Well, Thorpe?" asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his mood. "I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?"
Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. "Let some of the boys run over," he said slowly. "There are nine birds within sight, and there are two or three in the bushes--but they may have got away."
"Gad!" said Balder.
"Magnificent!" was his brother"s comment--and Thorpe permitted himself the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.
The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything that remained of Thorpe"s visit. He set down to it without hesitation the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him, but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally at arm"s length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the man of the pheasants.
Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to himself.
On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town, his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day.
He had been so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were some things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music of the voice lingered in his ears.
"And she is old Kervick"s daughter!" he said to himself more than once.
CHAPTER VIII
IT may be that every other pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sured 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, b.u.t.toned 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, impa.s.sively.
"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 unb.u.t.toned 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 h.e.l.l 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 n.o.body 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," a.s.sented 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.