"Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual form with guinea-pigs.""Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,"Thorpe asserted, warmly. "He's really a splendid fellow--with his little oddities, like the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place? I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and it's kept up as if they had fifty thousand a year.
Do you happen to know what his real income is supposed to be?"Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly with the palm of his hand.
"I asked," Thorpe went on, "because he had so much to say about his poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form.
God! how I knocked the pheasants!" A clerk showed his head at the door, with a meaning gesture. "I must go now,"said Semple, briskly, and led the way out to another room.
He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the brief injunction, "Don't go away without seeing me."It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket.
He had been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab, and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the "Court" section of a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two messages.
They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square country--and the other looked for him at his club.
Both begged him to lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.
There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway, and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop of his family.
In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy to his eye than ever.
It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of different planets.
Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the doorway bore still its century-old legend, "Thorpe, Bookseller."He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers.
Thorpe wondered if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young fool. No--no. That could not be.
Boys were different in his day--and especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those days there still were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.
Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men. The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as the Plowdens.
A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small open space at the end.
His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a high desk.
She did not look up.
"Well--I visited his Lordship all right." He announced his presence thus genially.
"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked, turning to him, after a pause, her emotionless, plain face.
"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity.
"You should have seen the way they took to me.
