The sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to his ears. Often he ascended to the drawing-room to hear Julia play--and more often still, with all the doors open, he enjoyed the mellowed murmur of her music here at his ease in the big chair. But tonight he had no joy in the noise. more than once, as he slouched restlessly round the room, the notion of asking her to stop suggested itself, but he forbore to put it into action. Once he busied himself for a time in kneeling before his safe, and scrutinizing in detail the papers in one of the bundles it contained.
At last--it was after ten o'clock, and the music above had ceased--the welcome sounds of cab-wheels without, and then of the door-bell, came to dispel his fidgeting suspense.
On the instant he straightened himself, and his face rearranged its expression. He fastened upon the door of the room the controlled, calm glance of one who is easily confident about what is to happen.
"Quaker-looking" was not an inapt phrase for the person whom the maid ushered into the room through this door.
He was a small, thin, elderly man, bowed of figure and shuffling in gait. His coat and large, low-crowned hat, though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an indefinable sense of some theological standard, or pretence to such a standard.
His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books.
Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not altogether unclerical in their suggestion.
A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the electric light of the strange, warm apartment--a helpless, worn old creature, inured through long years to bleak adverse winds, hoping now for nothing better in this world than present shelter.
"How do you do, Mr. Thorpe," he said, after a moment, with nervous formality. "This is unexpectedly kind of you, sir.""Why--not at all!" said Thorpe, shaking him cordially by the hand. "What have we got houses for, but to put up our old friends? And how are you, anyway? You've brought your belongings, have you? That's right!" He glanced into the hall, to make sure that they were being taken upstairs, and then closed the door. "I suppose you've dined.
Take off your hat and coat! Make yourself at home.
That's it--take the big chair, there--so! And now let's have a look at you. Well, Tavender, my man, you haven't grown any younger. But I suppose none of us do.
And what'll you have to drink? I take plain water in mine, but there's soda if you prefer it. And which shall it be--Irish or Scotch?"Mr. Tavender's countenance revealed the extremity of his surprise and confusion at the warmth of this welcome.
It apparently awed him as well, for though he shrank into a corner of the huge chair, he painstakingly abstained from resting his head against its back. Uncovered, this head gained a certain dignity of effect from the fashion in which the thin, iron-grey hair, parted in the middle, fell away from the full, intellectual temples, and curled in meek locks upon his collar. A vague resemblance to the type of Wesley--or was it Froebel?--might have hinted itself to the observer's mind.
Thorpe's thoughts, however, were not upon types.
"Well"--he said, from the opposite chair, in his roundest, heartiest voice, when the other had with diffidence suffered himself to be served, and had deferentially lighted on one side the big cigar pressed upon him--"Well--and how's the world been using you?""Not very handsomely, Mr. Thorpe," the other responded, in a hushed, constrained tone.
"Oh, chuck the Misters!" Thorpe bade him. "Aren't we old pals, man? You're plain Tavender, and I'm plain Thorpe.""You're very kind," murmured Tavender, still abashed.
For some minutes he continued to reply dolefully, and with a kind of shamefaced reluctance, to the questions piled upon him. He was in evil luck: nothing had gone well with him; it had been with the greatest difficulty that he had scraped together enough to get back to London on the chance of obtaining some expert commission;practically he possessed nothing in the world beyond the clothes on his back, and the contents of two old carpet-bags--these admissions, by degrees, were wormed from him.
"But have you parted with the concession, then, that you bought from me?" Thorpe suddenly asked him. "Help yourself to some more whiskey!"Tavender sighed as he tipped the decanter. "It isn't any good," he answered, sadly. "The Government repudiates it--that is, the Central Government at Mexico. Of course, I never blamed you. I bought it with my eyes open, and you sold it in perfect good faith. I never doubted that at all. But it's not worth the paper it's written on--that's certain. It's that that busted me--that, and some other things.""Well--well!" said Thorpe, blankly. His astonishment was obviously genuine, and for a little it kept him silent, while he pondered the novel aspects of the situation thus disclosed. Then his eyes brightened, as a new path outlined itself.
"I suppose you've got the papers?--the concession and my transfer to you and all that?" he asked, casually.
"Oh, yes," replied Tavender. He added, with a gleam of returning self-command--"That's all I have got.""Let's see--what was it you paid me?--Three thousand eight hundred pounds, wasn't it?"Tavender made a calculation in mental arithmetic.
"Yes, something like that. Just under nineteen thousand dollars, "he said.
