"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 shining 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 shirts 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.

Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken young man came up, touched his hat, and asked: "Will you kindly show me which is your luggage, sir?"

Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the glaringly new bags--and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.

"It's all right; my man will look out for your things," said the latter, as they shook hands. "We will go and get our places."

The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. A lean, elderly man in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled obsequiously before them down the platform, opened to them a first-cla.s.s compartment with a low bow and a deprecatory wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door upon them. "The engine will be the other way, my Lord, after you leave Cannon Street," he remarked through the open window, with earnest deference.

"Are there any of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?"

Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook his head at the second.

The elderly man at this, with still another bow, flapped out a green flag which he had been holding furled behind his back, and extended it at arm's length. The train began slowly to move. Mr. Thorpe reflected to himself that the peerage was by no means so played-out an inst.i.tution as some people imagined.

"Ho-ho!" the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed his hat into the rack above his head. "We shall both be the better for some pure air.

London quite does me up. And you--you've been sticking at it months on end, haven't you? You look rather f.a.gged--or at all events you did yesterday. You've smartened yourself so--without your beard--that I can't say I'd notice it to-day. But I take it every sensible person is glad to get away from London."

"Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put my nose outside London since I landed here." Thorpe rose as he spoke, to deposit his hat also in the rack. He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's was an ordinary low black bowler. "I can tell you, I SHALL be glad of the change. I would have bought the tickets," he went on, giving words at random to the thought which he found fixed on the surface of his mind, "if I'd only known what our station was."

Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss the subject.

He took a cigar case from his pocket, and offered it to Thorpe.

"It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether," he said, as they lighted their cigars. "I was up late last night--turned out late this morning, been late all day, somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock for the life of me. Your statement to me last night--you know it rather upset me."

The other smiled. "Well, I guess I know something about that feeling myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today like a hen with her head cut off. But it's fun, though, aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every once in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course it means a thousand times more to me than it does to you."

The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern of Cannon Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro on the platform, and a number of them shook the handle of the locked door. There was an effect of curses in the sound of their remarks which came through the closed window. Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.

"Ah, that's where you mistake," said Plowden, contemplating the mouthful of smoke he slowly blew forth. "My dear man, you can't imagine anybody to whom it would mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those fellows have a key. They're an awful bore on this train. I almost never go by it, for that reason. Ah, thank G.o.d we're off!--But as I was saying, this thing makes a greater difference to me than you can think of. I couldn't sleep last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me so. I take it you--you have never had much money before; that is, you know from experience what poverty is?"

Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.

"Well--but you"--the other began, and then paused. "What I mean is,"

he resumed, "you were never, at any rate, responsible to anybody but yourself. If you had only a sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for that matter, you could accommodate yourself to the requirements of the situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy it any more than I should--but at least it was open to you to do it, without attracting much attention. But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine. You see, there is no way in which I can earn a penny. I had to leave the Army when I was twenty-three--the other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it was impossible for me to drag along with a t.i.tle and an empty pocket. I daresay that I ought to have stuck to it, because it isn't nearly so bad now, but twelve years ago it was too cruel for any youngster who had any pride about him--and, of course, my father having made rather a name in the Army, that made it so much harder for me. And after that, what was there? Of course, the bar and medicine and engineering and those things were out of the question, in those days at least. The Church?--that was more so still. I had a try at politics--but you need money there as much as anywhere else--money or big family connections. I voted in practically every division for four years, and I made the rottenest speeches you ever heard of at Primrose League meetings in small places, and after all that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took in depreciated rupees. When I tried to talk about something at home, they practically laughed in my face. I had no leverage upon them whatever. They didn't care in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home. Their majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty to one. So that door was shut in my face. I've never been inside the House since--except once to show it to an American lady last summer--but when I do go again I rather fancy"--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome head significantly--"I rather fancy I shall turn up on the other side."

"I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics," interposed Thorpe.

Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left London Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions, and leant back comfortably. "Of course there was the City," he went on, speaking diagonally across to his companion, between leisurely intervals of absorption in his cigar. "There have been some directors' fees, no doubt, and once or twice I've come very near to what promised to be a big thing--but I never quite pulled it off. Really, without capital what can one do?--I'm curious to know--did you bring much ready money with you to England?"

"Between six and seven thousand pounds."

"And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you got left?"

Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question, but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. "Oh, less than a hundred," he said, and laughed aloud.

Plowden also laughed. "By George, that's fine!" he cried. "It's splendid. There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know.

Something told me it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was that that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you were a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of courage is so rare! When a man has it, he can stand the world on its head." "But I was plumb scared, all the while, myself," Thorpe protested, genially. "Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots."