AUGUST wore itself out in parched tedium, and a September began which seemed even more unbearable in town,--and still Thorpe did not get away from London.
So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance, and the receipt of innumerable letters from a restless and fussy steward whom he had not yet seen, went as evidence, he knew himself to be the tenant in possession of a great shooting in Morayshire. He had several photographs of what was called the lodge, but looked like something between a mansion and a baronial castle, on the mantel of the Board Room.
The reflection that this sumptuous residence had been his for a month, and that it daily stood waiting for him, furnished and swept and provisioned for his coming, did nothing to help the passing of time in the hot, fagged City. More than once he had said resolutely that, on the morrow, or at the worst the next day, he would go--but in the event he had not gone. In the last week of August he had proceeded to the length of sending his niece and nephew Northward, and shutting up the house in Ovington Square, and betaking himself to the Savoy Hotel.
This had appeared at the time to be almost equivalent to his getting away himself,--to be at least a first stage in the progress of his own journey. But at the hotel he had stuck fast,--and now, on the tenth of September, was no nearer the moors and the deer-forest than he had been a month before.
A novel sense of loneliness,--of the fatuity of present existence,--weighed grievously upon him. The ladies of Grafton Street had left town upon a comprehensive itinerary of visits which included the Malvern country, and a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in Westmoreland.
There was nothing very definite about the date of their coming to him in Scotland. The lady who had consented to marry him had, somehow, omitted to promise that she would write to him. An arrangement existed, instead, by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond, and to fix between themselves the details of the visit to Morayshire.
Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement. He was conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and there was nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive love-letters seem unnatural. The absence of moonshine, at least during this preliminary season, had been quite taken for granted between them, and he did not complain even to himself. There was even a kind of proud satisfaction for him in the thought that, though he had all but completed the purchase of the noble Pellesley estate for Edith Cressage, he had never yet kissed her.
The reserve he imposed upon himself gave him a certain aristocratic fineness in his own eyes. It was the means by which he could feel himself to be most nearly her equal.
But he remained very lonely in London, none the less.
It is true that a great deal of society was continually offered to him, and even thrust upon him. In the popular phrase, London was empty, but there seemed to be more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont Thorpe' s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre or card or river parties. He clung sullenly to his rule of going nowhere, but it was not so simple a matter to evade the civilities and importunities of those who were stopping at the hotel, or who came there to waylay him at the entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant.
He could not always refuse to sit down at tables when attractively-dressed and vivacious women made room for him, or to linger over cigars and wine with their husbands and escorts later on.
An incessant and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups of interested people who were rarely at the pains to dissemble their aims.
He formed a manner for the reception of these advances, compounded of joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality, which nobody, to his face at least, resented. If women winced under his mocking rudenesses of speech and smile, if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of his refusal to let them inside his guard, they sedulously kept it from him. The consciousness that everybody was afraid of him,--that everybody would kneel to him, and meekly take insult and ignominy from him, if only hope remained to them of getting something out of him,--hardened like a crust upon his mind.
It was impossible to get a sense of companionship from people who cringed to him, and swallowed his affronts and cackled at his jokes with equal docility. Sometimes he had a passing amusement in the rough pleasantries and cruelties which they drew from him. There were two or three bright Jewish women, more gayly clever and impudent, perhaps, than beautiful, with whom he found it genuine fun to talk, and concerning whom he was perpetually conceiving projects which could not have been discussed with their husbands, and as perpetually doing nothing to test their feasibility.
But these diversions were in their essence unsubstantial.
There was not even the semblance of a real friendship among them,--and loneliness became an increasing burden.
His sister at the old book-shop exasperated him nowadays to a degree which often provoked within him the resolution to have done with her. He had a score of projects for her betterment, each capable of as many variations and eager adaptations to suit her fancy, but to them all and sundry she opposed a barrier of stupidly passive negation. There was nothing she wanted done for her. She would not exchange the work she had been brought up in for a life of idleness.
She did not want, and would not know what to do with, a bigger shop than she had. An augmentation of her capital would be of no use, because there was no room in the crowded little shop for a larger stock than it contained.
She was entirely satisfied with the dingy home overhead, and declined to think even of moving elsewhere.
