The Market-Place Part 27

"Precisely," put in Miss Madden. "The fact that some Frenchwoman, of whom you had never heard before, was going to lose her marriage portion caught your attention, and on the instant you presented her with $10,000, an exercise of power which happens to be on the generous side--but still entirely unreasoning, and not deserving of any intellectual respect. And here's the point: if it had happened that somebody else chanced to produce an opposite impression upon you, you would have been capable of taking $50,000 away from him with just as light a heart."

Thorpe's face beamed with repressed amus.e.m.e.nt. "As a matter of fact it was that kind of case I was going to mention. I wasn't referring to the girl and her marriage portion. A young man came to me today--came into my room all c.o.c.k-a-whoop, smiling to himself with the notion that he had only to name what he wanted, and I would give it to him--and----"

He stopped abruptly, with a confused little laugh. He had been upon the brink of telling about Lord Plowden's discomfiture, and even now the story itched upon his tongue. It cost him an effort to put the narrative aside, the while he pondered the arguments which had suddenly reared themselves against publicity. When at last he spoke, it was with a glance of conscious magnanimity toward the lady who had consented to be his wife.

"Never mind," he said, lightly. "There wasn't much to it. The man annoyed me, somehow--and he didn't get what he came for--that's all."

"But he was ent.i.tled to get it?" asked Celia Madden. Thorpe's lips pouted over a reply. "Well--no," he said, with a kind of reluctance.

"He got strictly what he was ent.i.tled to--precisely what I had promised him--and he wrung up his nose at that--and then I actually gave him 15,000 pounds he wasn't ent.i.tled to at all."

"I hardly see what it proves, then," Edith Cressage remarked, and the subject was dropped.

Some two hours later, Thorpe took his departure. It was not until he was getting into the hansom which had been summoned, that it all at once occurred to him that he had not for a moment been alone with his betrothed. Upon reflection, as the cab sped smoothly forward, this seemed odd to him. He decided finally that there was probably some social rule about such things which he didn't understand.

In the drawing-room of the house in Grafton Street which he had quitted, the two ladies sat with faces averted from each other, in constrained silence.

Edith Cressage rose at last, and took a few aimless steps, with her hands at her hair. "Well--I'm embarked--fairly under way!" she said, in clear-cut, almost provocative tones.

"I don't at all know what to say," her companion replied, slowly. "I fancy that you exaggerate my disapproval. Perhaps it ought not even to be called disapproval at all. It is only that I am puzzled--and a little frightened."

"Oh, I am frightened too," said the other, but with eagerness rather than trepidation in her voice. "That is why I did not give you the signal to leave us alone. I couldn't quite get up the nerve for it. But would you believe it?--that is one of the charms of the thing. There is an excitement about it that exhilarates me. To get happiness through terror--you can't understand that, can you?"

"I'm trying. I think I'm beginning to understand," said Miss Madden, vaguely.

"Did you ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married Bothwell?" asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating fixity. "You have it all--all there. Marie got tired of the smooth people, the usual people. There was the promise of adventure, and risk, and peril, and the grand emotions with the big, dark brute."

"It isn't a happy story--this parallel that you pick out," commented Celia, absently.

"Happy! Pah!" retorted Edith, with spirit. "Who knows if it wasn't the only really happy thing in her life? The sn.o.bs and prigs all scold her and preach sermons at her--they did it in her lifetime: they do it now----" "Oh come, I'm neither a sn.o.b nor a prig," put in Celia, looking up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone--"I don't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her. I never was even able to mind about her killing Darnley. You see I take an extremely liberal view. One might almost call it broad. But if I had been one of her ladies--her bosom friends--say Catherine Seton--and she had talked with me about it--I think I should have confessed to some forebodings--some little misgivings."

"And do you know what she would have said?" Edith's swift question, put with a glowing face and a confident voice, had in it the ring of a.s.sured triumph. "She would have answered you: 'My dearest girl, all my life I have done what other people told me to do. In my childhood I was given in marriage to a criminal idiot. In my premature widowhood I was governed by a committee of scoundrels of both s.e.xes until another criminal idiot was imposed upon me as a second husband. My own personality has never had the gleam of a chance. I have never yet done any single thing because I wanted to do it. Between first my politician-mother and her band of tonsured swindlers, and then my cantankerous brother and his crew of snarling and sour-minded preachers, and all the court liars and parasites and spies that both sides surrounded me with, I have lived an existence that isn't life at all. I purport to be a woman, but I have never been suffered to see a genuine man. And now here is one--or what I think to be one--and I'm given to understand that he is a pirate and a murderer and an unspeakable ruffian generally--but he takes my fancy, and he has beckoned to me to come to him, and so you will kindly get me my hat and jacket and gloves.' That's what she would have said to you, my dear."

"And I"--said Celia, rising after a moment's pause, and putting her hand upon Edith's arm--"I would have answered, 'Dearest lady, in whatever befalls, I pray you never to forget that I am to the end your fond and devoted and loyal servant.'"

CHAPTER XIX

AUGUST wore itself out in parched tedium, and a September began which seemed even more unbearable in town,--and still Thorpe did not get away from London.

So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance, and the receipt of innumerable letters from a restless and fussy steward whom he had not yet seen, went as evidence, he knew himself to be the tenant in possession of a great shooting in Morays.h.i.+re. He had several photographs of what was called the lodge, but looked like something between a mansion and a baronial castle, on the mantel of the Board Room. The reflection that this sumptuous residence had been his for a month, and that it daily stood waiting for him, furnished and swept and provisioned for his coming, did nothing to help the pa.s.sing of time in the hot, f.a.gged City. More than once he had said resolutely that, on the morrow, or at the worst the next day, he would go--but in the event he had not gone. In the last week of August he had proceeded to the length of sending his niece and nephew Northward, and shutting up the house in Ovington Square, and betaking himself to the Savoy Hotel. This had appeared at the time to be almost equivalent to his getting away himself,--to be at least a first stage in the progress of his own journey. But at the hotel he had stuck fast,--and now, on the tenth of September, was no nearer the moors and the deer-forest than he had been a month before.

A novel sense of loneliness,--of the fatuity of present existence,--weighed grievously upon him. The ladies of Grafton Street had left town upon a comprehensive itinerary of visits which included the Malvern country, and a ducal castle in Shrops.h.i.+re, and a place in Westmoreland. There was nothing very definite about the date of their coming to him in Scotland. The lady who had consented to marry him had, somehow, omitted to promise that she would write to him. An arrangement existed, instead, by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond, and to fix between themselves the details of the visit to Morays.h.i.+re.

Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement.

He was conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and there was nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive love-letters seem unnatural. The absence of moons.h.i.+ne, at least during this preliminary season, had been quite taken for granted between them, and he did not complain even to himself. There was even a kind of proud satisfaction for him in the thought that, though he had all but completed the purchase of the n.o.ble Pellesley estate for Edith Cressage, he had never yet kissed her. The reserve he imposed upon himself gave him a certain aristocratic fineness in his own eyes. It was the means by which he could feel himself to be most nearly her equal. But he remained very lonely in London, none the less.

It is true that a great deal of society was continually offered to him, and even thrust upon him. In the popular phrase, London was empty, but there seemed to be more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont Thorpe' s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre or card or river parties. He clung sullenly to his rule of going nowhere, but it was not so simple a matter to evade the civilities and importunities of those who were stopping at the hotel, or who came there to waylay him at the entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant. He could not always refuse to sit down at tables when attractively-dressed and vivacious women made room for him, or to linger over cigars and wine with their husbands and escorts later on.

An incessant and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups of interested people who were rarely at the pains to dissemble their aims. He formed a manner for the reception of these advances, compounded of joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality, which n.o.body, to his face at least, resented. If women winced under his mocking rudenesses of speech and smile, if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of his refusal to let them inside his guard, they sedulously kept it from him. The consciousness that everybody was afraid of him,--that everybody would kneel to him, and meekly take insult and ignominy from him, if only hope remained to them of getting something out of him,--hardened like a crust upon his mind.

It was impossible to get a sense of companions.h.i.+p from people who cringed to him, and swallowed his affronts and cackled at his jokes with equal docility. Sometimes he had a pa.s.sing amus.e.m.e.nt in the rough pleasantries and cruelties which they drew from him. There were two or three bright Jewish women, more gayly clever and impudent, perhaps, than beautiful, with whom he found it genuine fun to talk, and concerning whom he was perpetually conceiving projects which could not have been discussed with their husbands, and as perpetually doing nothing to test their feasibility. But these diversions were in their essence unsubstantial. There was not even the semblance of a real friends.h.i.+p among them,--and loneliness became an increasing burden.

His sister at the old book-shop exasperated him nowadays to a degree which often provoked within him the resolution to have done with her.

He had a score of projects for her betterment, each capable of as many variations and eager adaptations to suit her fancy, but to them all and sundry she opposed a barrier of stupidly pa.s.sive negation. There was nothing she wanted done for her. She would not exchange the work she had been brought up in for a life of idleness. She did not want, and would not know what to do with, a bigger shop than she had. An augmentation of her capital would be of no use, because there was no room in the crowded little shop for a larger stock than it contained. She was entirely satisfied with the dingy home overhead, and declined to think even of moving elsewhere. Over and over again she met his propositions with a saying which he could recall having particularly hated on their father's lips,--"It's ill teaching an old dog new tricks."

"You ought to have them taught you with a stick," he had told her roundly, on the last occasion.

She had merely shrugged her gaunt shoulders at him. "You think you can bully everybody and make them crawl to you,--but there's no good your trying it on with me," she had told him, and he had pushed his way out of the shop almost stamping his feet. It was clear to him at that moment that he would never darken her door again.

Yet now, on this afternoon of the tenth, as he lounged with a cigar and a City paper in his apartment at the hotel after luncheon, wondering whether it were too hot to issue forth for a walk to the Park, the irrelevant idea of going round to see his sister kept coming into his mind. He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the paper,--but off it slipped again to the old book-shop, and to that curious, cross-grained figure, its mistress. He abandoned himself to thinking about her--and discovered that a certain unique quality in her challenged his admiration. She was the only absolutely disinterested person he knew--the only creature in the world, apparently, who did not desire to make something out of him. She was not at all well-off,--was indeed rather poor than otherwise,--and here was her only brother a millionaire, and in her dumb way she had a sisterly affection for him, and yet she could not be argued or cajoled into touching a penny of his money. Surely there could be no other woman like her.

Thorpe realized that it was a distinction to have such a sister,--and behind this thought rose obscurely the suggestion that there must be wonderful blood in a race which had produced such a daughter. And for that matter, such a son too! He lifted his head, and looked abstractedly before him, as if he were gazing at some apotheosis of himself in a mirror.

He beheld all at once something concrete and personal, obtruded into the heart of his reverie, the sight of which dimly astounded him. For the moment, with opened lips he stared at it,--then slowly brought himself to comprehend what had happened. An old man had by some oversight of the hotel servants been allowed to enter the room unannounced. He had wandered in noiselessly, and had moved in a purblind fas.h.i.+on to the centre of the apartment. The vagueness of the expression on his face and of his movements hinted at a vacant mind or too much drink,--but Thorpe gave no thought to either hypothesis. The face itself--no--yes--it was the face of old Tavender.

"In the name of G.o.d! What are you doing here?" Thorpe gasped at this extraordinary apparition. Still staring, he began to push back his chair and put his weight upon his feet.

"Well--Thorpe"--the other began, thrusting forward his head to look through his spectacles--"so it is you, after all. I didn't know whether I was going to find you or not. This place has got so many turns and twists to it----"

"But good heavens!" interposed the bewildered Thorpe. He had risen to his feet. He mechanically took the hand which the other had extended to him. "What in h.e.l.l"--he began, and broke off again. The aroma of alcohol on the air caught his sense, and his mind stopped at the perception that Tavender was more or less drunk. He strove to spur it forward, to compel it to encompa.s.s the meanings of this new crisis, but almost in vain.

"Thought I'd look you up," said the old man, buoyantly. "n.o.body in London I'd rather see than you. How are you, anyway?"

"What did you come over for? When did you get here?" Thorpe put the questions automatically. His self-control was returning to him; his capable brain pushed forward now under something like disciplined direction.

"Why I guess I owe it all to you," replied Tavender. Traces of the old Quaker effect which had been so characteristic of him still hung about his garb and mien, but there shone a new a.s.surance on his benignant, rubicund face. Prosperity had visibly liberalized and enheartened him.

He shook Thorpe's hand again. "Yes, sir--it must have been all through you!" he repeated. "I got my cable three weeks ago--'Hasten to London, urgent business, expenses and liberal fee guaranteed, Rubber Consols'--that's what the cable said, that is, the first one and of course you're the man that introduced me to those rubber people. And so don't you see I owe it all to you?"

His insistence upon his obligation was suddenly almost tearful. Thorpe thought hard as he replied: "Oh--that's all right. I'm very glad indeed to have helped you along. And so you came over for the Rubber Consols people, eh? Well--that's good. Seen 'em yet? You haven't told me when you landed."

"Came up from Southampton this morning. My brother-in-law was down there to meet me. We came up to London together." "Your brother-in-law,"

observed Thorpe, meditatively. Some shadowy, remote impression of having forgotten something troubled his mind for an instant. "Is your brother-in-law in the rubber business?"

"Extraor'nary thing," explained Tavender, beamingly, "he don't know no more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon. I asked him today--but he couldn't tell me anything about the business--what it was I'd been sent for, or anything."

"But he--he knew you'd been sent for," Thorpe commented upon brief reflection.

"Why, he sent the second cable himself----"

"What second cable?"

"Why it was the next day,--or maybe it was sent that same night, and not delivered till morning,--I got another cable, this time from my brother-in-law, telling me to cable him what s.h.i.+p I sailed on and when.

So of course he knew all about it--but now he says he don't. He's a curious sort of fellow, anyway."