You snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson--Gafferson!--the mud-head of the earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and bring him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My God! You've only got two clear days left to do the whole thing in--and you don't even come up to town to get ready for them! You send Gafferson--and he goes off to see a flower-show--Mother of Moses! think of it! a FLOWER-show!--and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so on, to our hearts' content. Really, it's too easy! You make me tired!"The nobleman offered a wan, appealing shadow of a smile.
"I confess to a certain degree of weariness myself,"he said, humbly.
Thorpe looked at him in his old apathetic, leaden fashion for a little. "I may tell you that if you HAD got hold of Tavender," he decided to tell him, "he shouldn't have been of the faintest use to you. I know what it was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn't understand it when he first told me, but afterwards I saw through it,--and it was merely a maudlin misapprehension of his.
He'd got three or four things all mixed up together.
You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred yards off. What little brain he's got left is soaked in it.
The first time I was ever camping with him, I had to lick him for drinking the methylated spirits we were using with our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!""Evidently," said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, "it was all a most unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake."With inspiration, he made bold to add: "The most amazing thing, though--to my mind--is that you don't seem--what shall I say?--particularly enraged with me about it.""Yes--that surprises me, too," Thorpe meditatively admitted.
"I was entitled to kill you--crush you to jelly.
Any other man I would. But you,--I don't know,--I do funny things with you.""I wish you would give me a drink, now--as one of them,"Plowden ventured to suggest, with uneasy pleasantry.
Thorpe smiled a little as he rose, and heavily moved across the room. He set out upon the big official table in the middle, that mockingly pretentious reminder of a Board which never met, a decanter and two glasses and some recumbent, round-bottomed bottles. He handed one of these last to Plowden, as the latter strolled toward the table.
"You know how to open these, don't you?" he said, languidly.
"Somehow I never could manage it."
The nobleman submissively took the bottle, and picked with awkwardness at its wire and cork, and all at once achieved a premature and not over-successful explosion.
He wiped his dripping cuff in silence, when the tumblers were supplied.
"Well--here's better luck to you next time," Thorpe said, lifting his glass. The audacious irony of his words filled Plowden with an instant purpose.
"What on earth did you round on me in that way for, Thorpe--when I was here last?" He put the question with bravery enough, but at sight of the other's unresponsive face grew suddenly timorous aud explanatory. "No man was ever more astounded in the world than I was. To this day I'm as unable to account for it as a babe unborn.
What conceivable thing had I done to you?"
Thorpe slowly thought of something that had not occurred to him before, and seized upon it with a certain satisfaction.
"That day that you took me shooting," he said, with the tone of one finally exposing a long-nursed grievance, "you stayed in bed for hours after you knew I was up and waiting for you--and when we went out, you had a servant to carry a chair for you, but I--by God!--I had to stand up.""Heavens above!" ejaculated Plowden, in unfeigned amazement.
"These are little things--mere trifles," continued Thorpe, dogmatically, "but with men of my temper and make-up those are just the things that aggravate and rankle and hurt.
Maybe it's foolish, but that's the kind of man I am.
You ought to have had the intelligence to see that--and not let these stupid little things happen to annoy me.
