The Market-Place Part 22

"You seem to have hit it off," the other objected. "This is as fine a house as I was ever in."

"With me it's different," Thorpe replied, carelessly. "I have the talent for money-making. I'm a man in armour. The 'gators can't bite me, nor yet the rattle-snakes."

"Yes--men are made up differently," Tavender a.s.sented, with philosophical gravity. Then he lurched gently in the over-large chair, and fixed an intent gaze upon his host. "What did you make your money in?" he demanded, not with entire distinctness of enunciation. "It wasn't rubber, was it?"

Thorpe shook his head. "There's no money in rubber. I'm entirely in finance--on the Stock Exchange--dealing in differences," he replied, with a serious face.

The explanation seemed wholly acceptable to Tavender. He mused upon it placidly for a time, with his reverend head pillowed askew against the corner of the chair. Then he let his cigar drop, and closed his eyes.

The master of the house bent forward, and noiselessly helped himself to another gla.s.s of whiskey and water. Then, sinking back again, he eyed his odd guest meditatively as he sipped the drink. He said to himself that in all the miraculous run of luck which the year had brought him, this was the most extraordinary manifestation of the lot. It had been so easy to ignore the existence of this tiresome and fatuous old man, so long as he was in remote Mexico, that he had practically forgotten him.

But he should not soon forget the frightened shock with which he had learned of his presence in London, that afternoon. For a minute or two, there in his sister's book-shop, it had seemed as if he were falling through the air--as if the substantial earth had crumbled away from under him. But then his nerve had returned to him, his resourceful brain had rea.s.serted itself. With ready shrewdness he had gone out, and met the emergency, and made it the servant of his own purposes.

He could be glad now, unreservedly glad, that Tavender had come to London, that things had turned out as they had. In truth, he stood now for the first time on solid ground. When he thought of it, now, the risk he had been running all these months gave him a little sinking of the heart. Upon reflection, the performance of having sold the same property first to Tavender in Mexico and then to the Rubber Consols Company in London might be subject to injurious comment, or worse. The fact that it was not a real property to begin with had no place in his thoughts.

It was a concession--and concessions were immemorially worth what they would fetch. But the other thing might have been so awkward--and now it was all right!

For an hour and more, till the fire burnt itself out and the guest's snoring became too active a nuisance, Thorpe sat lost in this congratulatory reverie. Then he rose, and sharply shaking Tavender into a semblance of consciousness, led him upstairs and put him to bed.

Three days later he personally saw Tavender off at Waterloo station by the steamer-train, en route for Southampton and New York. The old man was in childlike good spirits, looking more ecclesiastical than ever in the new clothes he had been enabled to buy. He visibly purred with content whenever his dim eyes caught sight of the new valise and steamer trunk, which belonged to him, on the busy platform.

"You've been very kind to me, Thorpe," he said more than once, as they stood together beside the open door of the compartment. "I was never so hospitably treated before in my life. Your attention to me has been wonderful. I call you a true friend."

"Oh, that's all right! Glad to do it," replied the other, lightly. In truth he had not let Tavender stray once out of his sight during those three days. He had dragged him tirelessly about London, showing him the sights from South Kensington Museum to the Tower, shopping with him, resting in old taverns with him, breakfasting, lunching, aud dining with him--in the indefatigable resolution that he should strike up no dangerous gossiping acquaintance with strangers. The task had been tiresome in the extreme--but it had been very well worth while.

"One thing I'm rather sorry about," Tavender remarked, in apologetic parenthesis--"I ought to have gone down and seen that brother-in-law of mine in Kent. He's been very good to me, and I'm not treating him very well. I wrote to tell him I was coming--but since then I haven't had a minute to myself. However, I can write to him and explain how it happened. And probably I'll be over again sometime."

"Why, of course," said Thorpe, absently. The allusion to the brother-in-law in Kent had escaped his notice, so intent was he upon a new congeries of projects taking vague shape in his mind.

"Think of yourself as my man out there," he said now, slowly, following the clue of his thoughts. "There may be big things to do. Write to me as often as you can. Tell me everything that's going on. Money will be no object to me--you can have as much as you like--if things turn up out there that are worth taking up. But mind you say nothing about me--or any connection you've ever had with me. You'll get a letter from the Secretary of a Company and the Chairman asking for a report on a certain property, and naming a fee. You simply make a good report--on its merits. You say nothing about anything else--about me, or the history of the concession, or its validity, or anything. I mustn't be alluded to in any way. You quite understand that?"

"Trust me!" said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.

It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched the train draw out of the station.

CHAPTER XVI

THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the City during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant German pine forests.

To the great ma.s.s of City people; this August in question began in a normal enough fas.h.i.+on. To one little group of operators, however, and to the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a ma.s.sacre. Even to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were princ.i.p.als in this fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives.

The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The "press"

seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing.

The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had been bribed to ignore. It was an a.s.sa.s.sination.

Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds for one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not at all. n.o.body knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the ident.i.ty of these people. Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal columns of the afternoon papers about a "Rubber King" of the name of Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so many "kings" that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the popular eye.

City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this "Rubber King." He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.

There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom, so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters and touts. They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits of his Rubber corner could fill it. To know such a man, however, could not but be useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin Friars on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other topics.

As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed at by those who did not turn away in cold silence. Of the fourteen men who had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and Semple, all the conspicuous ones belonged to the cla.s.s of "wreckers," a cla.s.s which does not endear itself to Capel Court.

Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men of great wealth, but they had systematically ama.s.sed these fortunes by strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they had been given a legitimate chance to live. Their system was legal enough, in the eyes alike of the law and of the Stock Exchange rules.

They had an undoubted right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and bring it down, and feed to the bone upon it. But the exercise of this right did not make them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their victims. When word first went round, on the last day of February, that a lamb had unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident wolves, and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell into a "corner," it was received on all sides with a gratified smile.

Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once more tragic and more satisfactory. Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others were in the cul de sac guarded by this surprising and b.l.o.o.d.y-minded lamb. Most of the names were well-known as those of "wreckers." In this category belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, Ascher, and Mendel, and if Harding, Carpenter, and Vesey could not be so confidently cla.s.sified, at least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy.

Two other names mentioned, those of Norfell and Pinney, were practically unknown.

There was some surprise, however, at the statement that the old and respected and extremely conservative firm of Fromentin Bros. was entangled in the thing. Egyptian bonds, minor Levantine loans, discounts in the Arabian and Persian trades--these had been specialties of the Fromentins for many years. Who could have expected to find them caught among the "shorts" in Mexican rubber? It was Mexico, wasn't it, that these Rubber Consols purported to be connected with?

Thorpe's Company, upon its commercial merits, had not been considered at all by the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, at the time of its flotation. Men vaguely and with difficulty recalled the fact of its prospectus, when the "corner" in its shares was first talked about.

They looked it up in their lists and files, later on, but its terms said nothing to them. n.o.body discussed the value of the a.s.sets owned by this Company, or the probability of its paying a dividend--even when the price bid for its shares was making the most sensational upward leaps.

How Thorpe stood with his shareholders, or whether he had any genuine shareholders behind him at all, was seen by the keen eyes of Capel Court to be beside the question. Very likely it was a queer affair, if the truth were known--but at least it had substance enough in it to be giving the "wreckers" a lively time.

By the end of July it was understood that the fight was better worth watching than anything that had been seen in a long time. The only trouble was that there was so little to see. The papers said nothing.

The sufferers were the reverse of garrulous. The little red Scotchman, Semple, who was the visible avenging sword of the "corner," was more imperturbably silent than anybody else. His fellow-members in the "House" watched him now, however, with a new respect. They discovered unsuspected elements of power in his thin, tight mouth, in the direct, cold glances of his brown-grey eyes, in the very way he carried his head and wore his hat. He came to be pointed out, and nodded about behind his back, more than anyone else in the "House," and important men sought his acquaintance, with an awkward show of civility, who were notorious for their rude exclusiveness.

It might be, of course, that his "corner" would break under him at any fortnightly settlement, but already he had carried it much further than such things often went, and the planning of the coup had been beyond doubt Napoleonic.

Had this small sandy Scot planned it, or was he merely the weapon in Thorpe's hand? Both views had their supporters on the Exchange, but after the wrench of August 1st, when with an abrupt eighty-s.h.i.+lling rise the price of Rubber Consols stood at 15 pounds, and it was to be computed that Semple had received on that single day nearly 75,000 pounds in differences and "backwardation," a story was set afloat which gave Thorpe the undivided credit of the invention. It was related as coming from his own lips that he had schemed it all out to be revenged upon a group of Jewish operators, against whom he had a grievance. In confirmation of this tale, it was pointed out that, of the seven men still held pinned in the fatal "corner," six were Jews--and this did, upon first glance, look significant. But then it was objected, upon reflection, that Blaustein and Ascher had both been permitted to make their escape, and this hardly justified the theory of an implacable anti-Semitic vendetta. The objection seemed reasonable, but it was met in turn by the point that Blaustein and Ascher had been bled white, as Bismarck's phrase went, before they were released, whereas the five Christians had been liberated with relatively moderate fines. Upon the whole, a certain odour of the Judenhetze clung thereafter about the "corner" in Rubber Consols.

On an afternoon of the following week, Mr. Stormont Thorpe was alone in the Board Room of the offices in Austin Friars. He had risen from the great roller-topped desk over between the windows, and walked now with a lethargic, tired step to and fro before the empty fireplace, yawning more than once, and stretching out his arms in the supreme gesture of fatigue. After a dozen listless rounds, something occurred to him. He moved with a certain directness of purpose to the cabinet in the corner, unlocked it, and poured out for himself a tumbler of brandy and soda.

He drank it without a pause, then turned again, and began pacing up and down as before, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent in thought.

The intervening six months had effected visible changes in the outer man. One noted most readily that the face had grown fuller in its lower parts, and was far less browned than formerly. The large, heavy countenance, with its square jaws masked now under increased flesh, its beginnings of a double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect of pallor, was no longer lacking in individual distinction. It was palpably the visage of a dictator. The moustache had been cut down to military brevity, and the line of mouth below it was eloquent of rough power. The steady grey eyes, seemingly smaller yet more conspicuous than before, revealed in their glance new elements of secretiveness, of strategy supported by abundant and confident personal force.

The man himself seemed scarcely to have grown stouter. He held himself more compactly, as it were; seemed more the master of all his physical expressions. He was dressed like a magnate who was also a person of taste. There was a flower in the lapel of his well-shaped frock-coat, and the rustle of his starched and spotless white waistcoat murmured pleasantly of refined toilets.

"The Marquis of Chaldon--and a gentleman, with him."

The announcement, from a clerk who had noiselessly opened the door, imposed itself with decorum upon Thorpe's reverie.

"Who is the gentleman with him?" Thorpe began austerely to ask, after an instant's hesitation. But this briefest of delays had brought the callers into plain view behind the clerk, and with a slight gesture the master a.s.sented to their entrance.

This large apartment was no longer called the Board Room by anybody. By tacit processes, it had become Mr. Thorpe's room. Not even the t.i.tular Chairman of the Company, the renowned and eminent Lord Chaldon, ex-Amba.s.sador and ex-Viceroy, entered this chamber now with any a.s.sumption of proprietors.h.i.+p in it. No hint of a recollection that there were such things as the Company and the Board, or that he was nominally the head of both, expressed itself in his Lords.h.i.+p's demeanour as he advanced, his hand a little extended.

The n.o.ble Chairman was white of beard and hair, and extremely courteous of manner--a small, carefully-clad, gracious old gentleman, whose mild pink countenance had, with years of anxiety about ways and means, disposed itself in lines which produced a chronic expression of solicitude. A nervous affection of the eyelids lent to this look, at intervals, a beseeching quality which embarra.s.sed the beholder. All men had liked him, and spoken well of him throughout his long and hard-worked career. Thorpe was very fond of him indeed, and put a respectful cordiality into his grasp of the proffered hand. Then he looked, with a certain thinly-veiled bluntness of enquiry, past the Marquis to his companion.

"You were very kind to give me the appointment," said Lord Chaldon, with a little purring gloss of affability upon the earnestness of his tone.

"I wish very much to introduce to you my friend, my old friend I may say, Monsieur Alexandre Fromentin. We slept together under the same tent, in the Persian country beyond Bagdad--oh, it must have been quite forty years ago. We were youngsters looking to win our first spurs then--I in my line, he in his. And often since we have renewed that old friends.h.i.+p--at many different places--India, and Constantinople, and Egypt. I wish heartily to commend him to your--your kindness."

Thorpe had perfunctorily shaken hands with the stranger--a tall, slender, sharp-faced, clean-shaven, narrow-shouldered man, who by these accounts of his years ought not to have such excessively black hair. He bowed in a foreign fas.h.i.+on, and uttered some words which Thorpe, though he recognized them as English in intent, failed to follow. The voice was that of an elderly man, and at a second glance there were plenty of proofs that he might have been older than the Marquis, out there in Persia, forty years ago. But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their hair, and he offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the table toward his desk, with a certain reserve of manner. Seating himself in the revolving chair at the desk itself, he put the tips of his fingers together, and looked this gentleman with the Continental name and experience in the face.

"Is there something you wish me to do?" he asked, pa.s.sively facilitating the opening of conversation.

"Ah, my G.o.d! 'Something'!"--repeated the other, with a fluttering gesture of his hands over his thin, pointed knees--"everything, Mr.

Thorpe!"