He moved forward slowly toward the head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house, and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident.
The men when they came back would find him there.
But ah! they would know that they had not left him there;they would have seen him outside, no doubt, after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key could be left in the unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had rashly entered, and been overcome by the vapours.
He approached the man silently, his brain arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.
Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was to be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his wife talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of conversation. Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole household into confusion. And its effect upon his wife!--the progress of his thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the shock such a catastrophe might involve to her--or at the best, of the gross unpleasantness she would find in it--flashed over his mind, and then yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this meant to him.
It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant.
A profoundly tender desire for her happiness was in complete possession. Already the notion of doing anything to wound or grieve her appeared incredible to him.
"Well, Gafferson," he heard himself saying, in one of the more reserved tones of his patriarchal manner.
He had halted close to the inattentive man, and stood looking down upon him. His glance was at once tolerant and watchful.
Gafferson slowly rose from his slouching posture, surveyed the other while his faculties in leisurely fashion worked out the problem of recognition, aud then raised his finger to his cap-brim. "Good-evening, sir,"he said.
This gesture of deference was eloquently convincing.
Thorpe, after an instant's alert scrutiny, smiled upon him.
"I was glad to hear that you had come to us," he said with benevolent affability. "We shall expect great things of a man of your reputation.""It'll be a fair comfort, sir," the other replied, "to be in a place where what one does is appreciated.
What use is it to succeed in hybridizing a Hippeastrum procera with a Pancratium Amancaes, after over six hundred attempts in ten years, and then spend three years a-hand-nursing the seedlings, and then your master won't take enough interest in the thing to pay your fare up to London to the exhibition with 'em? That's what 'ud break any man's heart.""Quite true," Thorpe assented, with patrician kindliness.
"You need fear nothing of that sort here, Gafferson. We give you a free hand. Whatever you want, you have only to let us know. And you can't do things too well to please us.""Thank you, sir," said Gafferson, and really, as Thorpe thought about it, the interview seemed at an end.
The master turned upon his heel, with a brief, oblique nod over his shoulder, and made his way out into the open air. Here, as he walked, he drew a succession of long consolatory breaths. It was almost as if he had emerged from the lethal presence of the fumigator itself.
He took the largest cigar from his case, lighted it, and sighed smoke-laden new relief as he strolled back toward the terrace.
But a few minutes before he had been struggling helplessly in the coils of an evil nightmare.
These terrors seemed infinitely far behind him now.
He gave an indifferent parting glance backward at them, as one might over his after-breakfast cigar at the confused alarms of an early awakening hours before.
There was nothing worth remembering--only the shapeless and foolish burden of a bad dream.
The assurance rose within him that he was not to have any more such trouble. With a singular clearness of mental vision he perceived that the part of him which brought bad dreams had been sloughed off, like a serpent's skin.
There had been two Thorpes, and one of them--the Thorpe who had always been willing to profit by knavery, and at last in a splendid coup as a master thief had stolen nearly a million, and would have shrunk not at all from adding murder to the rest, to protect that plunder--this vicious Thorpe had gone away altogether. There was no longer a place for him in life; he would never be seen again by mortal eye....There remained only the good Thorpe, the pleasant, well-intentioned opulent gentleman;the excellent citizen; the beneficent master, to whom, even Gafferson like the others, touched a respectful forelock.
It passed in the procession of his reverie as a kind of triumph of virtue that the good Thorpe retained the fortune which the bad Thorpe had stolen. It was in all senses a fortunate fact, because now it would be put to worthy uses.
Considering that he had but dimly drifted about heretofore on the outskirts of the altruistic impulse, it was surprisingly plain to him now that he intended to be a philanthropist.
Even as he mentioned the word to himself, the possibilities suggested by it expanded in his thoughts. His old dormant, formless lust for power stirred again in his pulses.
What other phase of power carried with it such rewards, such gratitudes, such humble subservience on all sides as far as the eye could reach--as that exercised by the intelligently munificent philanthropist?
