"The undertaking referred to in the two documents of even date, signed respectively by Lord Plowden and Stormont Thorpe, is to the effect that at some hour between eleven A.M. and three P.M. of September 12th, instant, Lord Plowden shall produce before a special meeting of the Committee of the Stock Exchange, the person of one Jerome P. Tavender, to explain to said Committee his share in the blackmailing scheme of which Lord Plowden, over his own signature, has furnished documentary evidence."The nobleman continued to look down at the paper, after the power to hold it without shaking had left his hand.
There came into his face, mingling with and vitiating its rich natural hues of health, a kind of grey shadow.
It was as if clay was revealing itself beneath faded paint.
He did not lift his eyes.
Thorpe had been prepared to hail this consummation of his trick with boisterous and scornful mirth.
Even while the victim was deciphering the fatal paper, he had restrained with impatience the desire to burst out into bitter laughter. But now there was something in the aspect of Plowden's collapse which seemed to forbid triumphant derision. He was taking his blow so like a gentleman,--ashen-pale and quivering, but clinging to a high-bred dignity of silence,--that the impulse to exhibit equally good manners possessed Thorpe upon the instant.
"Well--you see how little business you've got, setting yourself to buck against a grown-up man."He offered the observation in the tone of the school-teacher, affectedly philosophical but secretly jubilant, who harangues a defeated and humiliated urchin upon his folly.
"Oh, chuck it!" growled Lord Plowden, staring still at the calamitous paper.
Thorpe accepted in good part the intimation that silence was after all most decorous. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and tipping back his chair, surveyed the discomfited Viscount impassively.
He forbore even to smile.
"So this swine of a Tavender came straight to you!"Lord Plowden had found words at last. As he spoke, he lifted his face, and made a show of looking the other in the eye.
"Oh, there are a hundred things in your own game, even, that you haven't an inkling of," Thorpe told him, lightly. "I've been watching every move you've made, seeing further ahead in your own game than you did.
Why, it was too easy! It was like playing draughts with a girl. I knew you would come today, for example.
I told the people out there that I expected you.""Yes-s," said the other, with rueful bewilderment.
"You seem to have been rather on the spot--I confess.""On the spot? All over the place!" Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his chair, and put more animation into his voice.
"It's the mistake you people make!" he declared oracularly.
"You think that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em, and make for himself a big fortune--and still be a fool! You imagine that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked by amateurs like yourself. It's too ridiculous!"The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun to spread through Plowden's consciousness.
It was almost more surprising to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed himself to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept back into his glance. He breathed more easily.
"You are right!" he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of fervid conviction to the tone of his words.
The big brute's pride in his own brains and power was still his weakest point. "You are right! I did play the fool.
And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first man in London to recognize the immense forces in you.
I said to you at the very outset, 'You are going to go far.
You are going to be a great man.' You remember that, don't you?"Thorpe nodded. "Yes--I remember it."
The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket, and extracted a match. "Do you mind?"he asked, and scarcely waiting for a token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand.
The two men watched it curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate, without a word.
This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it became almost affable.
He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.
"It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me, "he said, in an altered, harsh tone, "but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old bum of a Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and he's a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and spend your money,--money Igave you, by the way,--in bringing Tavender over here.
You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using him against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for a still bigger profit.
You see it's all at my fingers' ends."
Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent.
"Well then--Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've set out to fight one of the smartest and strongest men in England, and I've got to keep every atom of wits about me, and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every point of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it!
