Part 22 (1/2)
”You seem to have hit it off,” the other objected. ”This is as fine a house as I was ever in.”
”With me it's different,” Thorpe replied, carelessly. ”I have the talent for money-making. I'm a man in armour. The 'gators can't bite me, nor yet the rattle-snakes.”
”Yes--men are made up differently,” Tavender a.s.sented, with philosophical gravity. Then he lurched gently in the over-large chair, and fixed an intent gaze upon his host. ”What did you make your money in?” he demanded, not with entire distinctness of enunciation. ”It wasn't rubber, was it?”
Thorpe shook his head. ”There's no money in rubber. I'm entirely in finance--on the Stock Exchange--dealing in differences,” he replied, with a serious face.
The explanation seemed wholly acceptable to Tavender. He mused upon it placidly for a time, with his reverend head pillowed askew against the corner of the chair. Then he let his cigar drop, and closed his eyes.
The master of the house bent forward, and noiselessly helped himself to another gla.s.s of whiskey and water. Then, sinking back again, he eyed his odd guest meditatively as he sipped the drink. He said to himself that in all the miraculous run of luck which the year had brought him, this was the most extraordinary manifestation of the lot. It had been so easy to ignore the existence of this tiresome and fatuous old man, so long as he was in remote Mexico, that he had practically forgotten him.
But he should not soon forget the frightened shock with which he had learned of his presence in London, that afternoon. For a minute or two, there in his sister's book-shop, it had seemed as if he were falling through the air--as if the substantial earth had crumbled away from under him. But then his nerve had returned to him, his resourceful brain had rea.s.serted itself. With ready shrewdness he had gone out, and met the emergency, and made it the servant of his own purposes.
He could be glad now, unreservedly glad, that Tavender had come to London, that things had turned out as they had. In truth, he stood now for the first time on solid ground. When he thought of it, now, the risk he had been running all these months gave him a little sinking of the heart. Upon reflection, the performance of having sold the same property first to Tavender in Mexico and then to the Rubber Consols Company in London might be subject to injurious comment, or worse. The fact that it was not a real property to begin with had no place in his thoughts.
It was a concession--and concessions were immemorially worth what they would fetch. But the other thing might have been so awkward--and now it was all right!
For an hour and more, till the fire burnt itself out and the guest's snoring became too active a nuisance, Thorpe sat lost in this congratulatory reverie. Then he rose, and sharply shaking Tavender into a semblance of consciousness, led him upstairs and put him to bed.
Three days later he personally saw Tavender off at Waterloo station by the steamer-train, en route for Southampton and New York. The old man was in childlike good spirits, looking more ecclesiastical than ever in the new clothes he had been enabled to buy. He visibly purred with content whenever his dim eyes caught sight of the new valise and steamer trunk, which belonged to him, on the busy platform.
”You've been very kind to me, Thorpe,” he said more than once, as they stood together beside the open door of the compartment. ”I was never so hospitably treated before in my life. Your attention to me has been wonderful. I call you a true friend.”
”Oh, that's all right! Glad to do it,” replied the other, lightly. In truth he had not let Tavender stray once out of his sight during those three days. He had dragged him tirelessly about London, showing him the sights from South Kensington Museum to the Tower, shopping with him, resting in old taverns with him, breakfasting, lunching, aud dining with him--in the indefatigable resolution that he should strike up no dangerous gossiping acquaintance with strangers. The task had been tiresome in the extreme--but it had been very well worth while.
”One thing I'm rather sorry about,” Tavender remarked, in apologetic parenthesis--”I ought to have gone down and seen that brother-in-law of mine in Kent. He's been very good to me, and I'm not treating him very well. I wrote to tell him I was coming--but since then I haven't had a minute to myself. However, I can write to him and explain how it happened. And probably I'll be over again sometime.”
”Why, of course,” said Thorpe, absently. The allusion to the brother-in-law in Kent had escaped his notice, so intent was he upon a new congeries of projects taking vague shape in his mind.
”Think of yourself as my man out there,” he said now, slowly, following the clue of his thoughts. ”There may be big things to do. Write to me as often as you can. Tell me everything that's going on. Money will be no object to me--you can have as much as you like--if things turn up out there that are worth taking up. But mind you say nothing about me--or any connection you've ever had with me. You'll get a letter from the Secretary of a Company and the Chairman asking for a report on a certain property, and naming a fee. You simply make a good report--on its merits. You say nothing about anything else--about me, or the history of the concession, or its validity, or anything. I mustn't be alluded to in any way. You quite understand that?”
”Trust me!” said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.
It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched the train draw out of the station.
CHAPTER XVI
THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the City during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant German pine forests.
To the great ma.s.s of City people; this August in question began in a normal enough fas.h.i.+on. To one little group of operators, however, and to the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a ma.s.sacre. Even to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were princ.i.p.als in this fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives.
The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The ”press”
seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing.
The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had been bribed to ignore. It was an a.s.sa.s.sination.
Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds for one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not at all. n.o.body knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the ident.i.ty of these people. Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal columns of the afternoon papers about a ”Rubber King” of the name of Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so many ”kings” that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the popular eye.
City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this ”Rubber King.” He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.
There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom, so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters and touts. They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits of his Rubber corner could fill it. To know such a man, however, could not but be useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin Friars on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other topics.
As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed at by those who did not turn away in cold silence. Of the fourteen men who had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and Semple, all the conspicuous ones belonged to the cla.s.s of ”wreckers,” a cla.s.s which does not endear itself to Capel Court.