“Then when shall I see you?”—began the other, and halted suddenly with a new thought in his glance. “But what are you doing Saturday?” he asked, in a brisker tone. “It's a dies non here. Come down with me to-morrow evening, to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday, and drive about on Sunday, if you like—and there we can talk at our leisure. Yes, that is what you must do. I have a gun for you. Shall we say, then—Charing Cross at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will dine at home.”
The elder man pondered his answer—frowning at the problem before him with visible anxiety. “I'm afraid I'd better not come—it's very good of you all the same.”
“Nonsense,” retorted the other. “My mother will be very glad indeed to see you. There is no one else there—unless, perhaps, my sister has some friend down. We shall make a purely family party.”
Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. “All right. Charing Cross, 5:15,” he said then, with the grave brevity of one who announces a momentous decision.
He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments after his companion had gone. Then, going to a closet at the end of the room, he brought forth his coat and hat; something prompted him to hold them up, and scrutinize them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused, playing in his beard.
The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. He made his way out, and downstairs to the street. It was a rainy, windy October night, sloppy underfoot, dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a cabman, motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening rubber cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, “Strand!” as he clambered into the hansom.
CHAPTER II
“LOUISA, the long and short of it is this,” said Thorpe, half an hour later: “you never did believe in me, as a sister should do.”
He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate. Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man. Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this portrait—which somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the walls of which he was dimly conscious—small, faded, old prints about Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out of the mists of his childhood.
Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights, in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he was a boy?
“I know you always say that,” replied Louisa, impassively.
She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice or intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair, drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large, capable hands on her knees.
“I believed in you as much as you'd let me,” she went on, indifferently, almost wearily. “But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did or didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London—but elsewhere you might or you might not—how could I tell? And moreover, I don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something very different from the boy Joel that left the shop—it must be twenty years ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell me.”
“But my point is,” pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously intent glance, “you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'”
She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless point.
“No—I don't remember ever having said that to myself,” she admitted, listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke with more animation: “You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof over my head—to keep the little business from disappearing altogether. It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the invalid husband to support for between three and four years—a dead weight on me every week—and then the children to look after, to clothe and educate.”
At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. “Don't think I'm ungrateful”—she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile—“but I almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't be able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of life—and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what will become of them.”
The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt moustache.
“But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over,” he persisted, doggedly—“and I told you there'd be more where that came from, and that I stood to pull off the great event—even then, now, you didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking about, did you?”
She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. “For heaven's sake, Joel,” she said, sharply—“you become a bore with that stupid nonsense. I want to be patient with you—I do indeed sympathize with you in your misfortunes—you know that well enough—but you're very tiresome with that eternal harping on what I believed and what I didn't believe. Now, are you going to stop to supper or not?—because if you are I must send the maid out. And there's another thing—would it be of any help to you to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have Alfred's room as well as not—till Christmas, at least.”
“Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel till I'd settled my bill,” suggested Thorpe tentatively, in a muffled voice.
The practical woman reflected for an instant. “I was thinking,” she confessed then, “that it might be cheaper to leave your things there, and buy what little you want—I don't imagine, from what I've seen, that your wardrobe is so very valuable—but no, I suppose the bill ought to be paid. Perhaps it can be managed; how much will it be?”
Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over to her chair.
