The Market-Place Part 25

"No--sit still," Thorpe bade him, and then, with chin settled more determinedly than ever in his cravat, sat eyeing him in a long, dour silence.

Lord Plowden found it impossible to obtain from this ma.s.sive, apathetic visage any clue to the thoughts working behind it. He chanced to recall the time when he had discussed with Thorpe the meaning and values of this inscrutable expression which the latter's countenance could a.s.sume.

It had seemed interesting and even admirable to him then--but then he had not foreseen the possibility that he himself might some day confront its adamantine barrier with a sinking heart. All at once he could bear this implacable sphinx-gaze no longer.

"I'm sure some other day would be better," he urged, with an open overture to propitiation in his tone. "You're not in the mood to be bothered with my affairs today."

"As much today as any other," Thorpe answered him, slowly.

The other sat suddenly upright--and then upon a moment's reflection rose to his feet. "I don't in the least know what to make of all this," he said, with nervous precipitancy. "If I've offended you in any way, say so, and I will apologize at once. But treatment of this sort pa.s.ses my comprehension."

Thorpe in truth did not himself comprehend it much more clearly. Some strange freak of wilfulness impelled him to pursue this unintelligible persecution. "I've said nothing about any offense," he declared, in a hard, deliberate voice. "It is your own word. All the same--I mention the name of a lady--a lady, mind you, whom I met under your own roof--and you strike att.i.tudes and put on airs as if--as if I wasn't good enough!"

"Oh, upon my word, that's all rubbish!" the other broke in. "Nothing could have been further from my thoughts, I a.s.sure you. Quite naturally I was surprised for the moment at a bit of unexpected news--but that was all. I give you my word that was all."

"Very well, then," Thorpe consented grudgingly to mutter.

He continued his sullen scrutiny of the man standing before him, noting how the vivacity of his bearing had deteriorated in these few minutes.

He had cut such a gallant figure when he entered the room, with his sparkling eye and smile, his almost jaunty manner, his superior tailor's plumage--and now he was such a crestfallen and wilted thing! Remembering their last conversation together--remembering indeed how full of liking for this young n.o.bleman he had been when they last met--Thorpe paused to wonder at the fact that he felt no atom of pity for him now. What was his grievance? What had Plowden done to provoke this savage hostility?

Thorpe could not tell. He knew only that unnamed forces dragged him forward to hurt and humiliate his former friend. Obscurely, no doubt, there was something about a woman in it. Plowden had been an admirer of Lady Cressage. There was her father's word for it that if there had been money enough he would have wished to marry her. There had been, as well, the General's hint that if the difficulty of Plowden's poverty were removed, he might still wish to marry her--a hint which Thorpe discovered to be rankling with a sudden new soreness in his mind. Was that why he hated Plowden? No--he said to himself that it was not.

He was going to marry Lady Cressage himself. Her letter, signifying delicately her a.s.sent to his proposal, had come to him that very morning--was in his pocket now. What did he care about the bye-gone aspirations of other would-be suitors? And, as for Plowden, he had not even known of her return to London. Clearly there remained no communications of any sort between them. It was not at all on her account, he a.s.sured himself, that he had turned against Plowden. But what other reason could there be? He observed his visitor's perturbed and dejected mien with a grim kind of satisfaction--but still he could not tell why.

"This is all terribly important to me," the n.o.bleman said, breaking the unpleasant silence. His voice was surcharged with earnestness.

"Apparently you are annoyed with something--what it may be I can't for the life of me make out. All I can say is"--and he broke off with a helpless gesture which seemed to imply that he feared to say anything.

Thorpe put out his lips. "I don't know what you mean," he said, brusquely.

"What I mean"--the other echoed, with bewildered vagueness of glance.

"I'm all at sea. I don't in the least grasp the meaning of anything. You yourself volunteered the declaration that you would do great things for me. 'We are rich men together'--those were your own words. I urged you at the time to go slowly--to consider carefully whether you weren't being too generous. I myself said to you that you were ridiculously exaggerating what you called your obligation to me. It was you who insisted upon presenting me with 100,000 shares."

"Well, they are here ready for you," said Thorpe, with calculated coldness. "You can have them whenever you please. I promised them to you, and set them aside for you. You can take them away with you now, if you like. What are you kicking up this fuss for, then? Upon my word!--you come here and suggest to me that I made promises to you which I've broken!"

Plowden looked hard at him, as he turned over in his mind the purport of these words. "I see what you are doing," he said then. "You turn over to me 100,000 vendor's deferred shares. Thanks! I have already 1,000 of them. I keep them in the same box with my father's Confederate bonds."

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean?" Thorpe broke in with explosive warmth, lifting himself in his chair.

"Oh, come now, Thorpe," Plowden retorted, "let's get this talk on an intelligent, common-sense footing." He had regained something of his self-control, and keenly put forward now to help him all his persuasive graces of eye and speech. He seated himself once more. "I'm convinced that you want to be good to me. Of course you do! If I've seemed here for a minute or two to think otherwise, it was because I misunderstood things. Don't let there be any further misunderstandings! I apologize for doing you the momentary injustice of suspecting that you were going to play off the vendor's shares on me. Of course you said it--but it was a joke."

"There seems to be a joke somewhere, sure enough," said Thorpe, in dryly metallic tones--"but it isn't me who's the joker. I told you you should have 100,000 of my 400,000 shares, didn't I? I told you that in so many words. Very well, what more do you want? Here they are for you! I keep my promise to the letter. But you--you seem to think you're ent.i.tled to make a row. What do you mean by it?"

"Just a little word"--interposed Plowden, with strenuous calmness of utterance--"what you say may be true enough--yes, I admit it is true as far as it goes. But was that what either of us had in our minds at the time? You know it wasn't! You had just planned a coup on the Stock Exchange which promised you immense rewards. I helped you to pa.s.s a bogus allotment through our Board--without which your coup wouldn't have been worth a farthing. You were enthusiastically grateful to me then. In the excitement of the moment you promised me a quarter of all you should make. 'WE ARE BOTH RICH MEN!' I remember those very words of yours. They have never been out of my mind. We discussed the things that we would each do, when we came into this wealth. It was taken for granted in all our talk that your making money meant also my making money. That was the complete understanding--here in London, and while you were at my house.

You know it as well as I do. And I refuse to suppose that you seriously intend to sit there and pretend that you meant to give me nothing but an armful of waste paper. It would be too monstrous!"

Thorpe rapped with his nails on the desk, to point the force of his rejoinder: "How do you account for the fact, my Lord"--he gave his words a chillingly scornful precision of utterance--"that I distinctly mentioned 400,000 vendor's shares of mine, 100,000 of which I promised to turn over to you? Those were the specific terms, were they not? You don't deny it? Then what are you talking about?"

"I account for it in this way"--said Plowden, after a moment's baffled reflection: "at that time you yourself hadn't grasped the difference between the two cla.s.ses of shares. You thought the vendor's shares would play a part in the game. Ah! I see I've hit the mark! That was the way of it!--And now here, Thorpe! Let all that's been said be bye-gones! I don't want any verbal triumph over you. You don't want to wrong me--and yourself too--by sticking to this quibble about vendor's shares. You intended to be deuced good to me--and what have I done that you should round on me now? I haven't bothered you before. I came today only because things are particularly rotten, financially, just now. And I don't even want to hold you to a quarter--I leave that entirely to you.

But after all that's been said and done--I put it to you as one man to another--you are morally bound to help me out."

"How do you mean?--'all that's been said and done'?" Thorpe asked the question in some confusion of moods. Perhaps it was the ethical force of Lord Plowden's appeal, perhaps only a recurring sense of his earlier affection for the man--but for the moment he wavered in his purpose.

The peer flushed a little, as he looked at the floor, revolving possible answers to this query. His ear had been quick to seize the note of hesitation in Thorpe's tone. He strove anxiously to get together considerations which should tip the fluttering balance definitely his way.

"Well," he began slowly, "I hardly know how to put it. Of course there was, in the first place, the immense expectation of fortune which you gave me, and which I'm afraid I've more than lived up to. And then, of course, others shared my expectations. It wasn't a thing one could very well keep to oneself. My mother and my sister--especially my sister--they were wonderfully excited about it. You are quite the hero in their eyes. And then--you remember that talk we had, in which you said I could help you--socially, you know. I did it a little, just as a start, but of course there's no end to what could be done. You've been too busy heretofore, but we can begin now whenever you like. I don't mind telling you--I've had some thoughts of a possible marriage for you.

In point of blood and connections it would be such a match as a commoner hasn't made before in my memory--a highly-cultivated and highly-bred young lady of rank--and settlements could be made so that a considerable quant.i.ty of land would eventually come to your son. I needn't tell you that land stands for much more than money, if you happen to set your mind on a baronetcy or a peerage. Of course--I need scarcely say--I mention this marriage only as something which may or may not attract you,--it is quite open to you to prefer another,--but there is hardly anything of that sort in which I and my connections could not be of use to you."

Even more by the tone and inflection of these words than by the phrases themselves, Thorpe divined that he was being offered the hand of the Hon. Winifred Plowden in marriage. He recalled vividly the fact that once the shadow of some such thought had floated through his own brain; there had been a moment--it seemed curiously remote, like a dream-phantom from some previous state of existence--when he had dwelt with personal interest upon her inheritance from long lines of n.o.blemen, and her relation to half the peerage. Then, swiftly, illogically, he disliked the brother of this lady more than ever.

"All that is talking in the air," he said, with abrupt decision. "I see nothing in it. You shall have your vendor's shares, precisely as I promised you. I don't see how you can possibly ask for anything more."

He looked at the other's darkling face for a moment, and then rose with unwieldy deliberation. "If you're so hard up though," he continued, coldly, "I don't mind doing this much for you. I'll exchange the thousand vendor's shares you already hold the ones I gave you to qualify you at the beginning--for ordinary shares. You can sell those for fifteen thousand pounds cash. In fact, I'll buy them of you now. I'll give you a cheque for the amount. Do you want it?"

Lord Plowden, red-faced and frowning, hesitated for a fraction of time.

Then in constrained silence he nodded, and Thorpe, leaning ponderously over the desk, wrote out the cheque. His Lordship took it, folded it up, and put it in his pocket without immediate comment.

"Then this is the end of things, is it?" he asked, after an awkward silence, in a voice he strove in vain to keep from shaking.

"What things?" said the other.

Plowden shrugged his shoulders, framed his lips to utter something which he decided not to say, and at last turned on his heel. "Good day," he called out over his shoulder, and left the room with a flagrant air of hostility.

Thorpe, wandering about the apartment, stopped after a time at the cabinet, and helped himself to a drink. The thing most apparent to him was that of set purpose he had converted a friend into an enemy. Why had he done this? He asked himself the question in varying forms, over his brandy and soda, but no convincing answer came. He had done it because he had felt like doing it. It was impossible to trace motives further than that.

CHAPTER XVIII

"EDITH will be down in a very few moments," Miss Madden a.s.sured Thorpe that evening, when he entered the drawing-room of the house she had taken in Grafton Street.

He looked into her eyes and smiled, as he bowed over the hand she extended to him. His glance expressed with forceful directness his thought: "Ah, then she has told you!"

The complacent consciousness of producing a fine effect in evening-clothes had given to Mr. Stormont Thorpe habitually now a mildness of manner, after the dressing hour, which was lacking to his deportment in the day-time. The conventional attire of ceremony, juggled in the hands of an inspired tailor, had been brought to lend to his ponderous figure a dignity, and even something of a grace, which the man within a.s.similated and made his own. It was an equable and rather amiable Thorpe whom people encountered after nightfall--a gentleman who looked impressive enough to have powerful performances believed of him, yet seemed withal an approachable and easy-going person. Men who saw him at midnight or later spoke of him to their womenkind with a certain significant reserve, in which trained womankind read the suggestion that the "Rubber King" drank a good deal, and was probably not wholly nice in his cups.

This, however, could not be said to render him less interesting in any eyes. There was indeed about it the implication of a generous nature, or at the least of a blind side--and it is not unpleasant to discover these attributes in a new man who has made his half-million, and has, or may have, countless favours to bestow.

It was as if his tongue instead of his eyes had uttered the exclamation--"Ah, then she has told you!"--for Miss Madden took it as having been spoken. "I'm not disposed to pretend that I'm overjoyed about it, you know," she said to him bluntly, as their hands dropped, and they stood facing each other. "If I said I congratulated you, it would be only the emptiest form. And I hate empty forms."

"Why should you think that I won't make a good husband?" Thorpe asked the question with a good-natured if peremptory frankness which came most readily to him in the presence of this American lady, herself so outspoken and masterful.

"I don't know that I specially doubt it," she replied. "I suppose any man has in him the makings of what is called a good husband--if the conditions are sufficiently propitious."

"Well then--what's the matter with the conditions?" he demanded, jocosely.

Miss Madden shrugged her shoulders slightly. Thorpe noted the somewhat luxuriant curves of these splendid shoulders, and the creamy whiteness of the skin, upon which, round the full throat, a chain of diamonds lay as upon satin--and recalled that he had not seen her before in what he phrased to himself as so much low-necked dress. The deep fire-gleam in her broad plaits of hair gave a wonderful brilliancy to this colouring of brow and throat and bosom. He marvelled at himself for discovering only now that she also was beautiful--and then thrilled with pride at the thought that henceforth his life might be pa.s.sed altogether among beautiful women, radiant in gems and costly fabrics, who would smile upon him at his command.

"Oh, I have no wish to be a kill-joy," she protested. "I'm sure I hope all manner of good results from the--the experiment."

"I suppose that's what it comes to," he said, meditatively. "It's all an experiment. Every marriage in the world must be that--neither more nor less."

"With all the experience of the ages against its coming out right." She had turned to move toward a chair, but looked now over her shoulder at him. "Have you ever seen what seemed to you an absolutely happy marriage in your life?"