"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, G.o.d, 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumption of amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 l.u.s.t for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated n.o.body 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 abas.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d 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 spa.r.s.e 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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, pa.s.sive 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 G.o.d! so was I," he commented, l.u.s.tily. "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 rea.s.sured 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 gla.s.s 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!"
CHAPTER III
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 gla.s.s 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--G.o.d! 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 t.i.tle--a sky-sc.r.a.per of a t.i.tle too--to be my Chairman.