The Market-Place Part 31

"People I have about me have to be of some use. They require to have heads on their shoulders. Why--just think what you've done. I don't mean so much about your letting Tavender slip through your fingers--although that was about the worst I ever heard of. But here in this room, at that desk there, you allowed me to bounce you into writing and signing a paper which you ought to have had your hand cut off rather than write, much less sign. You come here trying to work the most difficult and dangerous kind of a bluff,--knowing all the while that the witness you depended entirely upon had disappeared, you hadn't the remotest idea where,--and you actually let me lead you into giving me your signature to your own declaration that you are blackmailing me! Thinking it all over--you know--I can't see that you would be of much help to me in the City."

Lord Plowden joined perforce in the laughter with which the big man enjoyed his own pleasantry. His mirth had some superficial signs of shamefacedness, but it was hopeful underneath. "The City!" he echoed, with meaning. "That's the curse of it. What do I know about the City?

What business have I in the City? As you said, I'm the amateur. A strong man like you can make me seem any kind of a ridiculous fool he likes, with the turn of his hand. I see that right enough. But what am I to do?

I have to make a shot at something. I'm so rotten poor!"

Thorpe had retired again behind the barrier of dull-eyed abstraction. He seemed not to have heard this appealing explanation.

The other preserved silence in turn, and even made a pretence of looking at some pamphlets on the table, as a token of his boundless deference to the master's mood.

"I don't know. I'll see," the big man muttered at last, doubtfully.

Lord Plowden felt warranted in taking an optimistic view of these vague words. "It's awfully good of you"--he began, lamely, and then paused.

"I wonder,"--he took up a new thought with a more solicitous tone,--"I wonder if you would mind returning to me that idiotic paper I signed."

Thorpe shook his head. "Not just now, at any rate," he said, still musingly. With his head bowed, he took a few restless steps.

"But you are going to--to help me!" the other remarked, with an air of confidence. He had taken up his hat, in response to the tacit warning of his companion's manner.

Thorpe looked at him curiously, and hesitated over his answer. It was a surprising and almost unaccountable conclusion for the interview to have reached. He was in some vague way ashamed of himself, but he was explicitly and contemptuously ashamed for Plowden, and the impulse to say so was strong within him. This handsome young gentleman of t.i.tle ought not to be escaping with this restored buoyancy of mien, and this complacency of spirit. He had deserved to be punished with a heavy hand, and here he was blithely making certain of new benefits instead.

"I don't know--I'll see," Thorpe moodily repeated--and there was no more to be said.

CHAPTER XXI

IN the noon hour of the following day was enacted the brief final scene in the drama of the "Rubber Consols corner."

For long weeks, Mr. Stormont Thorpe had given much thought to this approaching climax of his great adventure--looking forward to it both as the crowning event of his life, and as the dawn of a new existence in some novel, enchanted world. It was to bring his triumph, and even more, his release. It was at once to crown him as a hero and chieftain among City men, and transfigure him into a being for whom all City things were an abomination. In his waking hours, the conflict between these aims did not specially force itself upon his attention: he mused upon, and spun fancies about, either one indifferently, and they seemed not at all irreconcilable. But his dreams were full of warfare,--wearily saturated with strife, and endless endeavour to do things which could not be done, and panic-stricken terrors before the shadow of shapeless calamities,--until he dreaded to go to sleep. Then he discovered that an extra two gla.s.ses of whiskey-and-water would solve that particular difficulty, and send him into prompt, leaden slumber--but the early mornings remained as torturing as ever. In the twilight he awoke oppressed and sick at heart with gloom--and then dozed at intervals through fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was decently possible to get up.

Then, indeed, the big cold sponge on his head and spine scattered these foolish troubles like chaff, and restored to him his citizenship among the realities. He dressed with returning equanimity, and was almost cheerful by the time he thrust his razor into the hot water. Yet increasingly he was conscious of the wear and strain of it all, and increasingly the date, September twelfth, loomed before him with a portentous individuality of its own.

This day grew to mean so much more to him than had all the other days of the dead years together that he woke in the darkness of its opening hours, and did not get satisfactorily to sleep again. His vigil, however, was for the once free from grief. He drowsily awaited the morning in vague mental comfort; he had recurring haphazard indolent glimpses of a protecting fact standing guard just outside the portals of consciousness--the fact that the great day was here. He rose early, breakfasted well, and walked by the Embankment to the City, where at ten he had a few words with Semple, and afterward caused himself to be denied to ordinary callers. He paced up and down the Board Room for the better part of the ensuing two hours, luxuriating in the general sense of satisfaction in the proximity of the climax, rather than pretending to himself that he was thinking out its details. He had provided in his plans of the day for a visit from Messrs. Rostocker and Aronson, which should const.i.tute the dramatic finale of the "corner," and he looked forward to this meeting with a certain eagerness of expectation. Yet even here he thought broadly of the scene as a whole, and asked himself no questions about words and phrases. It seemed to be taken for granted in his mind that the scene itself would be theatrically impressive, even spectacular.

In the event, this long-awaited culmination proved to be disappointingly flat and commonplace. It was over before Thorpe had said any considerable proportion of the things he saw afterward that he had intended to say. The two men came as he had expected they would--and they bought their way out of the tragic "corner" at precisely the price he had nominated in his mind. But hardly anything else went as he had dimly prefigured it.

Mr. Rostocker was a yellow-haired man, and Mr. Aronson was as dark as a Moor, and no physical resemblance of features or form suggested itself to the comparing eye, yet Thorpe even now, when they stood brusquely silent before him, with their carefully-brushed hats pulled down over their eyes, stuck to it in his own mind that it was hard to tell them apart. To the end, there was something impersonal in his feeling toward them. They, for their part, coldly abstained from exhibiting a sign of feeling about him, good, bad, or indifferent.

It was the man with the fair hair and little curly flaxen beard who spoke: "How do you do! I understand that we can buy eight thousand five hundred Rubber Consols from you at 'twenty-three.'"

"No--twenty-five," replied Thorpe.

The dark man spoke: "The jobbers' price is twenty-three."

"To carry over--yes," Thorpe answered. "But to buy it is twenty-five."

The two sons of the race which invented mental arithmetic exchanged an alert glance, and looked at the floor for an engrossed instant.

"I don't mind telling you," Thorpe interposed upon their silence, "I put on that extra two pounds because you got up that story about applying to the Stock Exchange Committee on a charge of fraud."

"We didn't get up any story," said Rostocker, curtly.

"You tried to plant it on us," Aronson declared.

"One of your own Directors put it about. I thought it was a fake at the time."

This view of the episode took Thorpe by surprise. As it seemed, in pa.s.sing, to involve a compliment to his own strategic powers, he accepted it without comment. "Well--it is twenty-five, anyway," he told them, with firmness.

"Twenty-four," suggested Aronson, after another momentary pause.

"Not a shilling less than twenty-five," Thorpe insisted, with quiet doggedness.

"We can always pay our creditors and let you whistle," Rostocker reminded him, laconically.

"You can do anything you like," was the reply, "except buy Rubber Consols under twenty-five. It doesn't matter a fig to me whether you go bankrupt or not. It would suit me as well to have you two 'hammered' as to take your money." Upon the spur of a sudden thought he drew out his watch. "In just two minutes' time to a tick, the price will be thirty."

"Let's be 'hammered' then!" said Aronson to his companion, with simulated impulsiveness.

Rostocker was the older and stronger man, and when at last he spoke it was with the decision of one in authority. "It is your game," he said, with grave imperturbability. "Eight thousand five hundred at twenty-five. Will you deliver at the Credit Lyonnais in half an hour?"

Thorpe nodded, impa.s.sively. Then a roving idea of genial impertinence brought a gleam to his eye. "If you should happen to want more Rubber Consols at any time," he said, with a tentative chuckle, "I could probably let you have them at a reduced price."

The two received the pleasantry without a smile, but to Thorpe's astonishment one of them seemed to discern something in it beside banter. It was Rostocker who said: "Perhaps we may make a deal with you," and apparently meant it.

They went out at this, ignoring ceremony upon their exit as stolidly as they had done upon their entrance, and a moment later Thorpe called in the Secretary, and despatched a messenger to bring Semple from Capel Court. The formalities of this final transfer of shares had been dictated to the former, and he had gone off on the business, before the Broker arrived.

Thorpe stood waiting near the door, and held out his hand with a dramatically significant gesture when the little Scotchman entered. "Put her there!" he exclaimed heartily, with an exuberant reversion to the slang of remote transatlantic bonhomie.

"Yeh've done it, then!" said Semple, his sharp face softening with pleasure at the news. "Yeh've pulled it off at twenty-three!"

The other's big countenance yielded itself to a boyish grin.

"Twenty-FIVE!" he said, and laughed aloud. "After you left this morning, it kind o' occurred to me that I'd raise it a couple of pounds. I found I was madder about those pieces in the newspapers than I thought I was, and so I took an extra seventeen thousand pounds on that account."

"G.o.d above!" Semple e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with a satisfaction through which signs of an earlier fright were visible. "It was touch-and-go if you didn't lose it all by doing that! You risked everything, man!"

Thorpe ponderously shrugged his shoulders. "Well--I did it, anyhow, and it came off," was his comment. Then, straightening himself, he drew a long, long breath, and beamed down at the little man. "Think of it! G.o.d!

It's actually all over! And NOW perhaps we won't have a drink! h.e.l.l!

Let's send out for some champagne!" His finger was hovering over the bell, when the Broker's dissuading voice arrested it. "No, no!" Semple urged. "I wouldn't touch it. It's no fit drink for the daytime--and it's a scandal in an office. Your clerks will aye blab it about hither and yon, and nothing harms a man's reputation more in the City."

"Oh, to h.e.l.l with the City!" cried Thorpe, joyously. "I'm never going to set foot in it again. Think of that! I mean it!"

None the less, he abandoned the idea of sending out for wine, and contented himself with the resources of the cabinet instead. After some friendly pressure, Semple consented to join him in a brandy-and-soda, though he continued to protest between sips that at such an hour it was an indecent practice.

"It's the ruin of many a strong man," he moralized, looking rather pointedly at Thorpe over his gla.s.s. "It's the princ.i.p.al danger that besets the verra successful man. He's too busily occupied to take exercise, and he's too anxious and worried to get his proper sleep--but he can always drink! In one sense, I'm not sorry to think that you're leaving the City."

"Oh, it never hurts me," Thorpe said, indifferently accepting the direction of the homily. "I'm as strong as an ox. But all the same, I shall be better in every way for getting out of this hole. Thank G.o.d, I can get off to Scotland tomorrow. But I say, Semple, what's the matter with your visiting me at my place there? I'll give you the greatest shooting and fishing you ever heard of."