“EDITH will be down in a very few moments,” Miss Madden assured 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 assimilated 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 passed 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?”
Upon reflection he shook his head. “I don\'t recall one on the spur of the minute,” he confessed. “Not the kind, I mean, that you read about in books. But I\'ve seen plenty where the couple got along together in a good, easy, comfortable sort of way, without a notion of any sort of unpleasantness. It\'s people who marry too young who do most of the fighting, I imagine. After people have got to a sensible age, and know what they want and what they can get along without, why then there\'s no reason for any trouble. We don\'t start out with any school-boy and school-girl moonshine.”
“Oh, there\'s a good deal to be said for the moonshine,” she interrupted him, as she sank upon the sofa.
“Why certainly,” he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her. “The more there is of it, the better—if it comes naturally, and people know enough to understand that it is moonshine, and isn\'t the be-all and end-all of everything.”
“There\'s a lover for you!” Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision mingled in her laugh.
“Don\'t you worry about me,” he told her. “I\'m a good enough lover, all right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don\'t precisely see what——”
“What business it is of mine?” she finished the sentence for him. “You\'re entirely right. As you say, IF she\'s satisfied, no one else has anything to do with it.”
“But have you got any right to assume that she isn\'t satisfied?” he asked her with swift directness—“or any reason for supposing it?”
Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the whimsical smile she gave him. “None whatever,” she said—and on the instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
Thorpe\'s vision was flooded with the perception of his rare fortune as he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to it new forces in his eyes—forces which dazzled and troubled his glance. The thought that this exquisite being—this ineffable compound of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness—belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder a gaze which he felt to be overtly dimmed and embarrassed.
“I have kept you waiting,” she murmured.
The soft sound of her voice came to his ears as from a distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror\'s self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and led her toward the sofa. Halting, he bowed with an exaggerated genuflection and flourish of his free hand to Miss Madden, the while he flashed at her a glance at once of challenge and of deprecation. Through the sensitized contact of the other hand, he felt that the woman he held bowed also, and in his own spirit of confused defiance and entreaty. The laugh he gave then seemed to dispel the awkwardness which had momentarily hung over the mocking salutation.
Miss Madden laughed too. “Oh, I surrender,” she said. “You drag congratulations from me.”
Some quality in the tone of this ungracious speech had the effect of putting the party at its ease. Lady Cressage seated herself beside her friend on the sofa, and gently, abstractedly, patted one of her hands. Thorpe remained on his feet, looking down at the pair with satisfied cheerfulness. He tool, a slip of paper from his pocket, to support a statement he was making.
“I\'m forever telling you what a strain the City is on a man in my position,” he said—“and today I had the curiosity to keep an account of what happened. Here it is. I had thirty callers. Of those, how many do you suppose came to see me on my own business? Just eight. That is to say, their errands were about investments of mine, but most of them managed to get in some word about axes of their own to grind. All the rest made no pretence at all of thinking about anybody but themselves. I\'ve classified them, one by one, here.
“First, there were six men who wanted me to take shares of one sort or another, and I had to more or less listen to what they tried to make out their companies were like. They were none of them any good. Eight different fellows came to me with schemes that haven\'t reached the company stage. One had a scheme for getting possession of a nigger republic in the West Indies by raising a loan, and then repudiating all the previous loans. Another wanted me to buy a paper for him, in which he was to support all my enterprises. Another wanted to start a bank—I apparently to find the money, and he the brains. One chap wanted me to finance a theatrical syndicate—he had a bag full of photographs of an actress all eyes and teeth and hair,—and another chap had a scheme all worked out for getting a concession from Spain for one of the Caroline Islands, and putting up a factory there for making porpoise-hide leather.
“Then there were three inventors—let\'s see, here they are—one with a coiled wire spring for scissors inside a pocket-knife, and one with a bottle, the whole top of which unscrews instead of having a cork or stopper, and one with an electrical fish-line, a fine wire inside the silk, you know, which connects with some battery when a fish bites, and rings a bell, and throws out hooks in various directions, and does all sorts of things.
“Well then, there was a man who wanted me to take the chairmanship of a company, and one who wanted me to guarantee an overdraft at his bank, and two who wanted to borrow money on stock, and one parson-fellow who tried to stick me for a subscription to some Home or other he said he had for children in the country. He was the worst bounder of the lot.
“Well, there\'s twenty-seven people—and twenty of them strangers to me, and not worth a penny to me, and all trying to get money out of me. Isn\'t that a dog\'s life for one?”
“I don\'t know,” said Miss Madden, contemplatively. “A lady may have twice that number of callers in an afternoon—quite as great strangers to all intents and purposes—and not even have the satisfaction of discovering that they had any object whatever in calling. At least your people had some motive: the grey matter in their brain was working. And besides, one of them might have had something to say which you would value. I don\'t think that ever happens among a lady\'s callers; does it, Edith?”
Edith smiled, pleasantly and yet a little wistfully, but said nothing.
“At any rate,” Thorpe went on, with a kind of purpose gathering in his eyes, “none of those fellows cost me anything, except in time. But then I had three callers, almost in a bunch, and one of them took out of me thirty thousand pounds, and another fifteen thousand pounds, and the third—an utter stranger he was—he got an absolute gratuity of ten thousand pounds, besides my consent to a sale which, if I had refused it, would have stood me in perhaps forty or fifty thousand pounds more. You ladies may thank your stars you don\'t have that kind of callers!”
The sound of these figures in the air brought a constrained look to the faces of the women. Seemingly they confronted a subject which was not to their liking. The American, however, after a moment\'s pause, took it up in an indifferent manner.
“You speak of an \'absolute gratuity.\' I know nothing of London City methods—but isn\'t ten thousand pounds a gratuity on a rather large scale?”
Thorpe hesitated briefly, then smiled, and, with slow deliberation, drew up a chair and seated himself before them. “Perhaps I don\'t mind telling you about it,” he began, and paused again. “I had a letter in my mail this morning,” he went on at last, giving a sentimental significance to both tone and glance—“a letter which changed everything in the world for me, and made me the proudest and happiest man above ground. And I put that letter in my pocket, right here on the left side—and it\'s there now, for that matter”—he put his hand to his breast, as if under the impulse to verify his words by the production of the missive, and then stopped and flushed.
The ladies, watching him, seemed by their eyes to condone the mawkishness of the demonstration which had tempted him. There was indeed a kind of approving interest in their joint regard, which he had not experienced before.
“I had it in my pocket,” he resumed, with an accession of mellow emotion in his voice, “and none of the callers ever got my thoughts very far from that letter. And one of these was an old man—a French banker who must be seventy years old, but dyes his hair a kind of purple black—and it seems that his nephew had got the firm into a terrible kind of scrape, selling 2,000 of my shares when he hadn\'t got them to sell and couldn\'t get them—and the old man came to beg me to let him out at present market figures. He got Lord Chaldon—he\'s my Chairman, you know—to bring him, and introduce him as his friend, and plead for him—but I don\'t think all that, by itself, would have budged me an atom. But then the old man told how he was just able to scrape together money enough to buy the shares he needed, at the ruling price, and he happened to mention that his niece\'s marriage portion would have to be sacrificed. Well, then, do you know, that letter in my pocket said something to me....And—well, that\'s the story. T............