Upon reflection he shook his head. "I don"t recall one on the spur of the minute," he confessed. "Not the kind, I mean, that you read about in books. But I"ve seen plenty where the couple got along together in a good, easy, comfortable sort of way, without a notion of any sort of unpleasantness. It"s people who marry too young who do most of the fighting, I imagine. After people have got to a sensible age, and know what they want and what they can get along without, why then there"s no reason for any trouble. We don"t start out with any school-boy and school-girl moonshine."
"Oh, there"s a good deal to be said for the moonshine," she interrupted him, as she sank upon the sofa.
"Why certainly," he a.s.sented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her.
"The more there is of it, the better--if it comes naturally, and people know enough to understand that it is moonshine, and isn"t the be-all and end-all of everything."
"There"s a lover for you!" Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision mingled in her laugh.
"Don"t you worry about me," he told her. "I"m a good enough lover, all right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don"t precisely see what----"
"What business it is of mine?" she finished the sentence for him.
"You"re entirely right. As you say, IF she"s satisfied, no one else has anything to do with it."
"But have you got any right to a.s.sume that she isn"t satisfied?" he asked her with swift directness--"or any reason for supposing it?"
Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the whimsical smile she gave him. "None whatever," she said--and on the instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
Thorpe"s vision was flooded with the perception of his rare fortune as he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to it new forces in his eyes--forces which dazzled and troubled his glance.
The thought that this exquisite being--this ineffable compound of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness--belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder a gaze which he felt to be overtly dimmed and embarra.s.sed.
"I have kept you waiting," she murmured.
The soft sound of her voice came to his ears as from a distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror"s self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and led her toward the sofa. Halting, he bowed with an exaggerated genuflection and flourish of his free hand to Miss Madden, the while he flashed at her a glance at once of challenge and of deprecation. Through the sensitized contact of the other hand, he felt that the woman he held bowed also, and in his own spirit of confused defiance and entreaty.
The laugh he gave then seemed to dispel the awkwardness which had momentarily hung over the mocking salutation.
Miss Madden laughed too. "Oh, I surrender," she said. "You drag congratulations from me."
Some quality in the tone of this ungracious speech had the effect of putting the party at its ease. Lady Cressage seated herself beside her friend on the sofa, and gently, abstractedly, patted one of her hands.
Thorpe remained on his feet, looking down at the pair with satisfied cheerfulness. He tool, a slip of paper from his pocket, to support a statement he was making.
"I"m forever telling you what a strain the City is on a man in my position," he said--"and today I had the curiosity to keep an account of what happened. Here it is. I had thirty callers. Of those, how many do you suppose came to see me on my own business? Just eight. That is to say, their errands were about investments of mine, but most of them managed to get in some word about axes of their own to grind. All the rest made no pretence at all of thinking about anybody but themselves.
I"ve cla.s.sified them, one by one, here.
"First, there were six men who wanted me to take shares of one sort or another, and I had to more or less listen to what they tried to make out their companies were like. They were none of them any good. Eight different fellows came to me with schemes that haven"t reached the company stage. One had a scheme for getting possession of a n.i.g.g.e.r republic in the West Indies by raising a loan, and then repudiating all the previous loans. Another wanted me to buy a paper for him, in which he was to support all my enterprises. Another wanted to start a bank--I apparently to find the money, and he the brains. One chap wanted me to finance a theatrical syndicate--he had a bag full of photographs of an actress all eyes and teeth and hair,--and another chap had a scheme all worked out for getting a concession from Spain for one of the Caroline Islands, and putting up a factory there for making porpoise-hide leather.
"Then there were three inventors--let"s see, here they are--one with a coiled wire spring for scissors inside a pocket-knife, and one with a bottle, the whole top of which unscrews instead of having a cork or stopper, and one with an electrical fish-line, a fine wire inside the silk, you know, which connects with some battery when a fish bites, and rings a bell, and throws out hooks in various directions, and does all sorts of things.
"Well then, there was a man who wanted me to take the chairmanship of a company, and one who wanted me to guarantee an overdraft at his bank, and two who wanted to borrow money on stock, and one parson-fellow who tried to stick me for a subscription to some Home or other he said he had for children in the country. He was the worst bounder of the lot.
"Well, there"s twenty-seven people--and twenty of them strangers to me, and not worth a penny to me, and all trying to get money out of me.
Isn"t that a dog"s life for one?"
"I don"t know," said Miss Madden, contemplatively. "A lady may have twice that number of callers in an afternoon--quite as great strangers to all intents and purposes--and not even have the satisfaction of discovering that they had any object whatever in calling. At least your people had some motive: the grey matter in their brain was working. And besides, one of them might have had something to say which you would value. I don"t think that ever happens among a lady"s callers; does it, Edith?"
Edith smiled, pleasantly and yet a little wistfully, but said nothing.
"At any rate," Thorpe went on, with a kind of purpose gathering in his eyes, "none of those fellows cost me anything, except in time. But then I had three callers, almost in a bunch, and one of them took out of me thirty thousand pounds, and another fifteen thousand pounds, and the third--an utter stranger he was--he got an absolute gratuity of ten thousand pounds, besides my consent to a sale which, if I had refused it, would have stood me in perhaps forty or fifty thousand pounds more.
You ladies may thank your stars you don"t have that kind of callers!"
The sound of these figures in the air brought a constrained look to the faces of the women. Seemingly they confronted a subject which was not to their liking. The American, however, after a moment"s pause, took it up in an indifferent manner.
"You speak of an "absolute gratuity." I know nothing of London City methods--but isn"t ten thousand pounds a gratuity on a rather large scale?"
Thorpe hesitated briefly, then smiled, and, with slow deliberation, drew up a chair and seated himself before them. "Perhaps I don"t mind telling you about it," he began, and paused again. "I had a letter in my mail this morning," he went on at last, giving a sentimental significance to both tone and glance--"a letter which changed everything in the world for me, and made me the proudest and happiest man above ground. And I put that letter in my pocket, right here on the left side--and it"s there now, for that matter"--he put his hand to his breast, as if under the impulse to verify his words by the production of the missive, and then stopped and flushed.
The ladies, watching him, seemed by their eyes to condone the mawkishness of the demonstration which had tempted him. There was indeed a kind of approving interest in their joint regard, which he had not experienced before.
"I had it in my pocket," he resumed, with an accession of mellow emotion in his voice, "and none of the callers ever got my thoughts very far from that letter. And one of these was an old man--a French banker who must be seventy years old, but dyes his hair a kind of purple black--and it seems that his nephew had got the firm into a terrible kind of sc.r.a.pe, selling 2,000 of my shares when he hadn"t got them to sell and couldn"t get them--and the old man came to beg me to let him out at present market figures. He got Lord Chaldon--he"s my Chairman, you know--to bring him, and introduce him as his friend, and plead for him--but I don"t think all that, by itself, would have budged me an atom. But then the old man told how he was just able to sc.r.a.pe together money enough to buy the shares he needed, at the ruling price, and he happened to mention that his niece"s marriage portion would have to be sacrificed. Well, then, do you know, that letter in my pocket said something to me....And--well, that"s the story. The girl" s portion, I wormed it out of him, was ten thousand...and I struck that much off the figure that I allowed him to buy his shares, and save his firm, for....It was all the letter that did it, mind you!"
He concluded the halting narrative amid a marked silence. The ladies looked at him and at each other, but they seemed surprised out of their facility of comment. In this kind of fl.u.s.tered hush, the door was opened and dinner was announced.
Miss Madden welcomed the diversion by rising with ostentatious vigour.
"I will take myself out," she declared, with cheerful promptness leading the way. Lady Cressage took the arm Thorpe offered her, and gave no token of comprehending that her wrist was being caressingly pressed against his side as they moved along.
At the little table shining in the centre of the dark, cool dining-room, talk moved idly about among general topics. A thunderstorm broke over the town, at an early stage of the dinner, and the sound of the rushing downpour through the open windows, and the breath of freshness which stirred the jaded air, were pleasanter than any speech. Thoughts roved intuitively country-ward, where the long-needed rain would be dowering the landscape with new life--where the earth at sunrise would be green again, and buoyant in reawakened energy, and redolent with the perfumes of sweetest summer. They spoke of the fields and the moors with the longing of tired town-folk in August.
"Oh, when I get away"--said Thorpe, fervently, "it seems to me that I don"t want ever to come back. These last few weeks have got terribly on my nerve. And really--why should I come back? I"ve been asking myself the question--more today than ever before. Of course everything has been different today. But if I"m to get any genuine good out of my--my fortune--I must pull away from the City altogether sometime--and why not now? Of course, some important things are still open--and they have to be watched night and day--but after all, Semple--that"s my Broker--he could do it for me. At the most, it won"t last more than another six weeks. There is a settlement-day next week, the 15th, and another a fortnight after, on the 29th, and another on September 12th. Well, those three days, if they"re worked as I intend they shall be, and nothing unforeseen happens, will bring in over four hundred thousand pounds, and close the "corner" in Rubber Consols for good. Then I need never see the City again, thank G.o.d! And for that matter--why, what is six weeks?
It"s like tomorrow. I"m going to act as if I were free already. The rain fills me full of the country. Will you both come with me tomorrow or next day, and see the Pellesley place in Hertfordshire? By the photographs it"s the best thing in the market. The newest parts of it are Tudor--and that"s what I"ve always wanted."
"How unexpected you are!" commented Miss Madden. "You are almost the last person I should have looked to for a sentiment about Tudor foundations."
Thorpe put out his lips a trifle. "Ah, you don"t know me," he replied, in a voice milder than his look had promised. "Because I"m rough and practical, you mustn"t think I don"t know good things when I see them.
Why, all the world is going to have living proof very soon"--he paused, and sent a smile surcharged with meaning toward the silent member of the trio--"living proof that I"m the greatest judge of perfection in beauty of my time."
He lifted his gla.s.s as he spoke, and the ladies accepted with an inclination of the head, and a touch of the wine at their lips, his tacit toast. "Oh, I think I do know you," said Celia Madden, calmly discursive. "Up to a certain point, you are not so unlike other men. If people appeal to your imagination, and do not contradict you, or bore you, or get in your way, you are capable of being very nice indeed to them. But that isn"t a very uncommon quality. What is uncommon in you--at least that is my reading--is something which according to circ.u.mstances may be nice, or very much the other way about. It"s something which stands quite apart from standards of morals or ethics or the ordinary emotions. But I don"t know, whether it is desirable for me to enter into this extremely personal a.n.a.lysis."
"Oh yes, go on," Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost excited interest.
"Well--I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning and indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. You have the kind of organization in which, within a second, without any warning or reason, a pa.s.sing whim may have worked itself up into an imperative law--something you must obey."
The man smiled and nodded approvingly: "You"ve got me down fine," he said.
"I talk with a good deal of confidence," she went on, with a cheerless, ruminative little laugh, "because it is my own organization that I am describing, too. The difference is that I was allowed to exploit my capacity for mischief very early. I had my own way in my teens--my own money, my own power--of course only of a certain sort, and in a very small place. But I know what I did with that power. I spread trouble and misery about me--always of course on a small scale. Then a group of things happened in a kind of climax--a very painful climax--and it shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died--some other sobering things happened...and luckily I was still young enough to stop short, and take stock of myself, and say that there were certain paths I would never set foot on again--and stick to it. But with you--do you see?--power only comes to you when you are a mature man. Experiences, no matter how unpleasant they are, will not change you now. You will not be moved by this occurrence or that to distrust yourself, or reconsider your methods, or form new resolutions. Oh no! Power will be terrible in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel courses----"
"Oh, dear--dear!" broke in Lady Cressage. "What a distressing Mrs.
Gummidge-Ca.s.sandra you are, Celia! Pray stop it!"
"No--she"s right enough," said Thorpe, gravely. "That"s the kind of man I am."
He seemed so profoundly interested in the contemplation of this portrait which had been drawn of him, that the others respected his reflective silence. He sat for some moments, idly fingering a fork on the table, and staring at a blotch of vivid red projected through a decanter upon the cloth.
"It seems to me that"s the only kind of man it"s worth while to be,"
he added at last, still speaking with thoughtful deliberation. "There"s nothing else in the world so big as power--strength. If you have that, you can get everything else. But if you have it, and don"t use it, then it rusts and decays on your hands. It"s like a thoroughbred horse. You can"t keep it idle in the stable. If you don"t exercise it, you lose it."
He appeared to be commenting upon some ill.u.s.tration which had occurred to his own mind, but was not visible to his auditors. While they regarded him, he was prompted to admit them to his confidence.
"There was a case of it today," he said, and then paused.