Part 4 (1/2)
”It's all pretty risky, I should think,” she declared as she rose. ”I should think you'd lie awake more than ever now--now that you've built your hopes so high and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing.”
He smilingly shook his head. ”No, it can no more fail than that gas can fail to burn when you put a light to it. It's all absolute. My half-million is as right as if it were lying to my credit in the Bank of England. Oh, that reminds me,” he went on in a slightly altered tone--”it's d.a.m.ned comical, but I've got to ask you for a little money.
I've only got about seven pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it would give me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. Of course he'd let me have anything I wanted--but, you can see--I don't like to ask him just at the moment.”
She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a wistful gaze. ”You're quite sure, Joel?”--she began--”and you haven't told me--how long will it be before you come into some of this money?”
”Well,”--he in turn paused over his words--”well, I suppose that by next week things will be in such shape that my bank will see I'm good for an overdraft. Oh heavens, yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some ready. But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I tell you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill, paying one hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me have now. Come, old lady: you don't get such interest every day, I'll bet.”
”I don't want any interest from you, Joel,” she replied, simply. ”If you're sure I can have it back before Christmas, I think I can manage thirty pounds. It will do in the morning, I suppose?”
He nodded an amused affirmative. ”Why--you don't imagine, do you,”
he said, ”that all this gold is to rain down, and none of it hit you?
Interest? Why of course you'll get interest--and capital thrown in. What did you suppose?”
”I don't ask anything for myself,” she made answer, with a note of resolution in her voice. ”Of course if you like to do things for the children, it won't be me who'll stand in their light. They've been spoiled for my kind of life as it is.”
”I'll do things for everybody,” he affirmed roundly. ”Let's see--how old is Alfred?”
”He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months older than he is.”
”Gad!” was Thorpe's meditative comment. ”How they shoot up! Why I was thinking she was a little girl.” ”She never will be tall, I'm afraid,”
said the literal mother. ”She favours her father's family. But Alfred is more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer--but of course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them--and they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in the country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age: he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's not a bit fonder of hard work.”
”There's one mighty big difference between us, though,” remarked Thorpe.
”He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old father hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich man.”
”I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,” she replied, with visible apprehension. ”You mustn't encourage him to build too high hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know--and anything might happen to you. And then--you may marry, and have sons of your own.”
He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new to his mind. A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.
”Well,” he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an eye about for his coat and hat. ”I'll be round in the morning--on my way to the City. Good-bye till then.”
CHAPTER IV
IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.
This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the general upheaval in the routine of his life.
From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and s.h.i.+ning hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown.
Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in the mirror, had not been altogether rea.s.suring. The over-long, thin, tawny moustasche which survived the razor a.s.sumed an undue prominence; the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way, misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-gla.s.s. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.
His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his own clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived his youth. The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing all earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he had had during the day in buying new s.h.i.+rts and handkerchiefs and embroidered braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors, toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the gratified tradesmen to give him the best of everything--this delight had been distinctively boyish. He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could have risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected upon the contents of his portmanteaus. To apprehend their full value one must have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful advantage--that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could be without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and mostly unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to appreciate to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.
It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and his evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume for shooting hara.s.sed his mind. He had brought along with him, for this eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and leather, much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic country. At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had packed it, to be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject had soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's investigations and purchases. He had reached the point now of hoping that it would rain bitterly on the morrow.
It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in this matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in readiness on the arrival of his host. As it was, he could not even tell the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now less than two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of intercepting his friend at the front of the station; then halted, and went back, upon the recollection that while he was going out one way, Plowden might come in by the other. The seconds, as they pa.s.sed now, became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere beyond the barrier provoked within him an impulse to tearful profanity.