Roden's Corner Part 39

She looked at him still with a smile, which he did not understand. And, like many men, he allowed his vanity to explain things which his comprehension failed to elucidate.

"Well," he said, after a moment's hesitation, "will you marry me?

There!"

"No, Mr. Roden, I will not," she answered promptly; and then suddenly her eyes flashed, at some recollection, perhaps--at some thought connected with her happy past contrasted with this sordid, ign.o.ble present.

"You!" she cried. "Marry you!"

"Why," he asked, with a bitter little laugh, "what is there wrong with me?"

"I do not know what there is wrong with you. And I am not interested to inquire. But, so far as I am concerned, there is nothing right."

A woman's answer after all, and one of those reasons which are no reasons, and yet rule the world.

Roden looked at her, completely puzzled. In a flash of thought he recalled Dorothy's warning, and her incomprehensible foresight.

"Then," he said, lapsing in his self-forgetfulness into the terse language of his everyday life and thought, "what on earth have you been driving at all along?"

"I have been driving at Herr von Holzen and the Malgamite scheme. I have been helping Tony Cornish," she answered.

So Percy Roden quitted the house at the corner of Park Straat a wiser man, and perhaps he left a wiser woman in it.

"My dear," said Mrs. Vansittart to Marguerite Wade, long afterwards, when a sort of friendship had sprung up and ripened between them--"my dear, never let a man ask you to marry him unless you mean to say yes.

It will do neither of you any good."

And Marguerite, who never allowed another the last word, gave a shrewd little nod before she answered--"I always say no--before they ask me."

CHAPTER x.x.x.

ON THE QUEEN'S Ca.n.a.l.

"There's not a crime--But takes its proper change still out in crime If once rung on the counter of this world."

Cornish went back to The Hague immediately after Lord Ferriby's funeral because it has been decreed that for all men, this large world shall sooner or later narrow down to one city, perhaps, or one village, or a single house. For a man's life is always centred round a memory or a hope, and neither of those requires much s.p.a.ce wherein to live. Tony Cornish's world had narrowed to the Villa des Dunes on the sandhills of Scheveningen, and his mind's eye was always turned in that direction.

His one thought at this time was to protect Dorothy--to keep, if possible, the name she bore from harm and ill-fame. Each day that pa.s.sed meant death to the malgamite workers. He could not delay. He dared not hurry. He wrote again to Percy Roden from London, amid the hurried preparations for the funeral, and begged him to sever his connection with Von Holzen.

"You will not have time," he wrote, "to answer this before I leave for The Hague. I shall stay on the Toornoifeld as usual, and hope to arrive about nine o'clock to-morrow evening. I shall leave the hotel about a quarter-past nine and walk down the right-hand bank of the Koninginne Gracht, and should like to meet you by the ca.n.a.l, where we can have a talk. I have many reasons to submit to your consideration why it will be expedient for you to come over to my side in this difference now, which I cannot well set down on paper. And remember that between men of the world, such as I suppose we may take ourselves to be, there is no question of one of us judging the other. Let me beg of you to consider your position in regard to the Malgamite scheme--and meet me to-morrow night between the Malie Veld and the Achter Weg about half-past nine. I cannot see you at the works, and it would be better for you not to come to my hotel."

The letter was addressed to the Villa des Dunes, where Roden received it the next morning. Dorothy saw it, and guessed from whom it was, though she hardly knew her lover's writing. He had adhered firmly to his resolution to keep himself in the background until he had finished the work he had undertaken. He had not written to her; had scarcely seen her. Roden read the letter, and put it in his pocket without a word. It had touched his vanity. He had had few dealings with men of the standing and position of Cornish, and here was this peer's nephew and peer's grandson appealing to him as to a friend, cla.s.sing him together with himself as a man of the world. No man has so little discretion as a vain man. It is almost impossible for him to keep silence when speech will make for his glorification. Roden arrived at the works well pleased with himself, and found Von Holzen in their little office, put out, ill at ease, domineering. It was unfortunate, if you will. Percy Roden was always ready to perceive his own ill-fortune, and looked back later to this as one of his most untoward hours. Life, however, should surely consist of seizing the fortunate and fighting through the ill moments--else why should men have heart and nerve?

In such humours as they found themselves it did not take long for these two men to discover a question upon which to differ. It was a mere matter of detail connected with the money at that time pa.s.sing through their hands.

"Of course," said Roden, in the course of a useless and trivial dispute--"of course you think you know best, but you know nothing of finance--remember that. Everybody knows that it is I who have run that part of the business. Ask old Wade, or White--or Cornish."

The argument had, in truth, been rather one-sided. For Roden had done all the talking, while Von Holzen looked at him with a quiet eye and a silent contempt that made him talk all the more. Von Holzen did not answer now, though his eye lighted at the mention of Cornish's name. He merely looked at Roden with a smile, which conveyed as clearly as words Von Holzen's suggestion that none of the three men named would be prepared to give Roden a very good character. "I had a letter, by the way, from Cornish this morning," said Roden, lapsing into his grander manner, which Von Holzen knew how to turn to account.

"Ah--bah!" he exclaimed sceptically. And that lurking vanity of the inferior to lessen his own inferiority did the rest.

"If you don't believe me, there you are," said Roden, throwing the letter upon the table--not ill-pleased, in the heat of the moment, to show that he was a more important person than his companion seemed to think.

Von Holzen read the letter slowly and thoughtfully. The fact that it was evidently intended for Roden's private eye did not seem to affect one or the other of these two men, who had travelled, with difficulty, along the road to fortune, only reaching their bourn at last with a light stock of scruples and a shattered code of honour. Then he folded it, and handed it back. He was not likely to forget a word of it.

"I suppose you will go," he said. "It will be interesting to hear what he has to say. That letter is a confession of weakness."

In making which statement Von Holzen showed his own weak point. For, like many clever men, he utterly failed to give to women their place--the leading place--in the world's history, as in the little histories of our daily lives. He never detected Dorothy between every line of Cornish's letter, and thought that it had only been dictated by inability to meet the present situation.

"I cannot very well refuse to go since the fellow asks me," said Roden, grandly. He might as well have displayed his grandeur to a statue. If love is blind, self-love is surely half-witted as well, for it never sees nor understands that the world is fooling it. Roden failed to heed the significant fact that Von Holzen did not even ask him what line of conduct he intended to follow with regard to Cornish, nor seek in his autocratic way to instruct him on that point; but turned instead to other matters and did not again refer to Cornish or the letter he had written.

So the day wore on while Cornish impatiently walked the deck of the steamer, ploughing its way across the North Sea, through showers and thunderstorms and those grey squalls that flit to and fro on the German Ocean. And some tons of malgamite were made, while a manufacturer or two of the grim product laid aside his tools forever, while the money flowed in, and Otto von Holzen thought out his deep silent plans over his vats and tanks and crucibles. And all the while those who write in the book of fate had penned the last decree.

Cornish arrived punctually at The Hague. He drove to the hotel, where he was known, where, indeed, he had never relinquished his room. There was no letter for him--no message from Percy Roden. But Von Holzen had un.o.btrusively noted his arrival at the station from the crowded retreat of the second-cla.s.s waiting-room.

The day had been a very hot one, and from ca.n.a.l and d.y.k.e arose that sedgy odour which comes with the cool of night in all Holland. It is hardly disagreeable, and conveys no sense of unhealthiness.

It seems merely to be the breath of still waters, and, in hot weather, suggests very pleasantly the relief of northern night. The Hague has two dominant smells. In winter, when the ca.n.a.ls are frozen, the reek of burning-peat is on the air and in the summer the odour of slow waters.

Cornish knew them both. He knew everything about this old-world city, where the turning-point of his life had been fixed. It was deserted now. The great houses, the theatre--the show-places--were closed. The Toornoifeld was empty.

The hotel porter, aroused by the advent of the traveller from an after-dinner nap in his little gla.s.s box, spread out his hands with a gesture of surprise.

"The season is over," he said. "We are empty. Why you come to The Hague now?"

Even the sentries at the end of the Korte Voorhout wore a holiday air of laxness, and swung their rifles idly. Cornish noticed that only half of the lamps were lighted.

The banks of the Queen's Ca.n.a.l are heavily shaded by trees, which, indeed, throw out their branches to meet above the weed-sown water.

There is a broad thoroughfare on either side of the ca.n.a.l, though little traffic pa.s.ses that way. These are two of the many streets of The Hague which seem to speak of a bygone day, when Holland played a greater part in the world's history than she does at present, for the houses are bigger than the occupants must need, and the streets are too wide for the traffic pa.s.sing through them. In the middle the ca.n.a.l--a gloomy corridor beneath the trees--creeps noiselessly towards the sea.

Cornish was before the appointed hour, and walked leisurely by the pathway between the trees and the ca.n.a.l. Soon the houses were left behind, and he pa.s.sed the great open s.p.a.ce called the Malie Veld. He had met no one since leaving the guard-house. It was a dark night, with no moon, but the stars were peeping through the riven clouds.

"Unless he stands under a lamp, I shall not see him," he said to himself, and lighted a cigar to indicate his whereabouts to Roden, should he elect to keep the appointment. When he had gone a few paces farther he saw someone coming towards him. There was a lamp halfway between them, and, as he approached the light, Cornish recognized Roden. There was no mistaking the long loose stride.

"I wonder," said Cornish, "if this is going to the end?"

And he went forward to meet the financier.

"I was afraid you would not come," he said, in a voice that was friendly enough, for he was a man of the world, and in that which is called Society (with a capital letter) had rubbed elbows all his life with many who had no better reputation than Percy Roden, and some who deserved a worse.

"Oh, I don't mind coming," answered Roden, "because I did not want to keep you waiting here in the dark. But it is no good, I tell you that at the outset."

"And nothing I can say will alter your decision?"

"Nothing. A man does not get two such chances as this in his lifetime. I am not going to throw this one away for the sake of a sentiment."

"Sentiment hardly describes the case," said Cornish, thoughtfully. "Do you mean to tell me that you do not care about all these deaths--about these poor devils of malgamiters?" And he looked hard at his companion beneath the lamp.