General Kervick was by habit a punctual
man, and Thorpe found him hovering, carefully gloved
and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the luncheon-room
when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few
minutes of the appointed hour when they thus met and
went in together. They were fortunate enough
to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently
removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.
By tacit agreement, the General ordered
the luncheon, speaking French to the waiter throughout.
Divested of his imposing great-coat, he was seen to
be a gentleman of meagre flesh as well as of small
stature. He had the Roman nose, narrow forehead,
bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth and chin of a
soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits
of the Duke of Wellington. His face and neck
were of a dull reddish tint, which seemed at first
sight uniformly distributed: one saw afterward
that it approached pallor at the veined temples, and
ripened into purple in minute patches on the cheeks
and the tip of the pointed nose. Against this
flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair and small, neatly-waxed
moustache were very white indeed. It was a thin,
lined, care-worn face, withal, which in repose, and
particularly in profile, produced an effect of dignified
and philosophical melancholy. The General’s
over-prominent light blue eyes upon occasion marred
this effect, however, by glances of a bold, harsh
character, which seemed to disclose unpleasant depths
below the correct surface. His manner with the
waiters was abrupt and sharp, but undoubtedly they
served him very well much better, in truth,
than Thorpe had ever seen them serve anybody before.
Thorpe observed his guest a good deal
during the repast, and formed numerous conclusions
about him. He ate with palpable relish of every
dish, and he emptied his glass as promptly as his host
could fill it. There was hardly a word of explanation
as to the purpose of their meeting, until the coffee
was brought, and they pushed back their chairs, crossed
their legs, and lighted cigars.
“I was lucky to catch you with
my wire, at such short notice,” Thorpe said
then. “I sent two, you know to
your chambers and your club. Which of them found
you?”
“Chambers,” said the General.
“I rarely dress till luncheon time. I read
in bed. There’s really nothing else to do.
Idleness is the curse of my life.”
“I’ve been wondering if
you’d like a little occupation of
a well-paid sort,” said Thorpe slowly.
He realized that it was high time to invent some pretext
for his hurried summons of the General.
“My dear sir,” responded
the other, “I should like anything that had
money in it. And I should very much like occupation,
too if it were, of course, something that
was was suitable to me.”
“Yes,” said Thorpe, meditatively.
“I’ve something in my mind not
at all definite yet in fact, I don’t
think I can even outline it to you yet. But I’m
sure it will suit you that is, if I decide
to go on with it and there ought to be
seven or eight hundred a year for you in it for
life, mind you.”
The General’s gaze, fastened
strenuously upon Thorpe, shook a little. “That
will suit me very well,” he declared, with feeling.
“Whatever I can do for it” he
let the sentence end itself with a significant gesture.
“I thought so,” commented
the other, trifling with the spoon in his cup.
“But I want you to be open with me. I’m
interested in you, and I want to be of use to you.
All that I’ve said, I can do for you. But
first, I’m curious to know everything that you
can tell me about your circumstances. I’m
right in assuming, I suppose, that you’re that
you’re not any too well-fixed.”
The General helped himself to another
little glass of brandy. His mood seemed to absorb
the spirit of the liqueur. “Fixed!”
he repeated with a peevish snap in his tone.
“I’m not ‘fixed’ at all, as
you call it. Good God, sir! They no more
care what becomes of me than they do about their old
gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position and
everything and they round on me like like
cuckoos.” His pale, bulging eyes lifted
their passionless veil for an instant as he spoke,
and flashed with the predatory fierceness of a hawk.
Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom
“they” might mean. The temper visibly
rising in the old man’s mind was what he had
hoped for. He proceeded with an informed caution.
“Don’t be annoyed if I touch upon family
matters,” he said. “It’s a part
of what I must know, in order to help you. I
believe you’re a widower, aren’t you, General?”
The other, after a quick upward glance,
shook his head resentfully. “Mrs. Kervick
lives in Italy with her son-in-law and
her daughter. He is a man of property and
also, apparently, a man of remarkable credulity and
patience.” He paused, to scan his companion’s
face. “They divide him between them,”
he said then, from clenched teeth “and
I mind you I made the match!
He was a young fellow that I found and I
brought him home and introduced him and
I haven’t so much as an Italian postage-stamp
to show for it. But what interest can you possibly
take in all this?” The unamiable glance of his
eyes was on the instant surcharged with suspicion.
“How many daughters have you?”
Thorpe ventured the enquiry with inward doubts as
to its sagacity.
“Three,” answered the
General, briefly. It was evident that he was also
busy thinking.
“I ask because I met one of
them in the country over Sunday,” Thorpe decided
to explain.
The old soldier’s eyes asked
many questions in the moment of silence. “Which
one Edith? that is, Lady Cressage?”
he enquired. “Of course it would
have been her.”
Thorpe nodded. “She made
a tremendous impression upon me,” he observed,
watching the father with intentness as he let the slow
words fall.
“Well she might,” the
other replied, simply. “She’s supposed
to be the most beautiful woman in England.”
“Well I guess she
is,” Thorpe assented, while the two men eyed
each other.
“Is the third sister unmarried?”
it occurred to him to ask. The tone of the question
revealed its perfunctory character.
“Oh Beatrice she’s
of no importance,” the father replied. “She
goes in for writing, and all that she’s
not a beauty, you know she lives with an
old lady in Scotland. The oldest daughter Blanche she
has some good looks of her own, but she’s a
cat. And so you met Edith! May I ask where
it was?”
“At Hadlow House Lord Plowden’s
place, you know.”
The General’s surprise at the
announcement was undoubted. “At Plowden’s!”
he repeated, and added, as if half to himself, “I
thought that was all over with, long ago.”
“I wish you’d tell me
about it,” said Thorpe, daringly. “I’ve
made it plain to you, haven’t I? I’m
going to look out for you. And I want you to
post me up, here, on some of the things that I don’t
understand. You remember that it was Plowden
who introduced you to me, don’t you? It
was through him that you got on the Board. Well,
certain things that I’ve seen lead me to suppose
that he did that in order to please your daughter.
Did you understand it that way?”
“It’s quite likely, in
one sense,” returned the General. He spoke
with much deliberation now, weighing all his words.
“He may have thought it would please her; he
may not have known how little my poor affairs concerned
her.”
“Well, then,” pursued
Thorpe, argumentatively, “he had an object in
pleasing her. Let me ask the question did
he want to marry her?”
“Most men want to marry her,”
was the father’s non-committal response.
His moustache lifted itself in the semblance of a smile,
but the blue eyes above remained coldly vigilant.
“Well I guess that’s
so too,” Thorpe remarked. He made a fleeting
mental note that there was something about the General
which impelled him to think and talk more like an
American than ever. “But was he specially
affected that way?”
“I think,” said Kervick,
judicially, “I think it was understood that
if he had been free to marry a penniless wife, he would
have wished to marry her.”
“Do you know,” Thorpe
began again, with a kind of diffident hesitation “do
you happen to have formed an idea supposing
that had been the case would she have accepted
him?” “Ah, there you have me,” replied
the other. “Who can tell what women will
accept, and what they will refuse? My daughter
refused Lord Lingfield and he is an Under-Secretary,
and will be Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister, and
a rich man. After that, what are you to say?”
“You speak of her as penniless,”
Thorpe remarked, with a casual air.
“Six hundred a year,”
the father answered. “We could have rubbed
along after a fashion on it, if she had had any notions
at all of taking my advice. I’m a man of
the world, and I could have managed her affairs for
her to her advantage, but she insisted upon going off
by herself. She showed not the slightest consideration
for me but then I am accustomed to that.”
Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the
old gentleman read in this an encouragement to expand
his grievances.
“In my position,” he continued,
helping himself to still another tiny glass, “I
naturally say very little. It is not my form to
make complaints and advertise my misfortunes.
I daresay it’s a fault. I know it kept
me back in India while ever so many whipper-snappers
were promoted over my head because I was
of the proud and silent sort. It was a mistake,
but it was my nature. I might have put by a comfortable
provision for my old age, in those days, if I had been
willing to push my claims, and worry the Staff into
giving me what was my due. But that I declined
to do and when I was retired, there was
nothing for me but the ration of bread and salt which
they serve out to the old soldier who has been too
modest. I served my Queen, sir, for forty years and
I should be ashamed to tell you the allowance she
makes me in my old age. But I do not complain.
My mouth is closed. I am an English gentleman
and one of Her Majesty’s soldiers. That’s
enough said, eh? Do you follow me? And about
my family affairs, I’m not likely to talk to
the first comer, eh? But to you I say it frankly they’ve
behaved badly, damned badly, sir.
“Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy,
at the cost of her son-in-law. He has large
estates in one of the healthiest and most beautiful
parts; he has a palace, and more money than he knows
what to do with but it seems that he’s
not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very
well but that doesn’t enter into
anyone’s calculations. No! let the worn-out
old soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb! That’s
the spirit of woman-kind. And my daughter Edith does
she care what becomes of me? Listen to me I
secured for her the very greatest marriage in England.
She would have been Duchess of Glastonbury today if
her husband had not played the fool and drowned himself.”
“What’s that you say?” put in Thorpe,
swiftly.
“It was as good as suicide,”
insisted the General, with doggedness. His face
had become a deeper red. “They didn’t
hit it off together, and he left in a huff, and went
yachting with his father, who was his own sailing-master and,
as might be expected, they were both drowned.
The title would have gone to her son but
no, of course, she had no son and so it
passed to a stranger an outsider that had
been an usher in a school, or something of that sort.
You can fancy what a blow this was to me. Instead
of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless
widow thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh?
And then, to cap all, she takes her six hundred a
year and goes off by herself, and gives me the cold
shoulder completely. What is it Shakespeare says?
’How sharper than a serpent’s teeth’ ”
Thorpe brought his fist down upon
the table with an emphasis which abruptly broke the
quotation in half. He had been frowning moodily
at his guest for some minutes, relighting his cigar
more than once meanwhile. He had made a mental
calculation of what the old man had had to drink,
and had reassured himself as to his condition.
His garrulity might have an alcoholic basis, but his
wits were clear enough. It was time to take a
new line with him.
“I don’t want to hear
you abuse your daughter,” he admonished him now,
with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance.
“Damn it all, why shouldn’t she go off
by herself, and take care of her own money her own
way? It’s little enough, God knows, for
such a lady as she is. Why should you expect
her to support you out of it? No sit
still! Listen to me!” he stretched
out his hand, and laid it with restraining heaviness
upon the General’s arm “you
don’t want to have any row with me. You
can’t afford it. Just think that over to
yourself you can’t afford it.”
Major-General Kervick’s prominent
blue eyes had bulged forth in rage till their appearance
had disconcerted the other’s gaze. They
remained still too much in the foreground, as it were,
and the angry scarlets and violets of the cheeks beneath
them carried an unabated threat of apoplexy but
their owner, after a moment’s silence, made a
sign with his stiff white brows that the crisis was
over. “You must remember that that
I have a father’s feelings,” he gasped
then, huskily.
Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance
which was not wholly affected. He had learned
what he wanted to know about this veteran. If
he had the fierce meannesses of a famished old dog,
he had also a dog’s awe of a stick. It
was almost too easy to terrorize him.
“Oh, I make allowances for all
that,” Thorpe began, vaguely. “But
it’s important that you should understand me.
I’m this sort of a man: whatever I set
out to do, and put my strength into it, that I do!
I kill every pheasant I fire at; Plowden will tell
you that! It’s a way I have. To those
that help me, and are loyal to me, I’m the best
friend in the world. To those that get in my
way, or try to trip me up, I’m the devil just
plain devil. Now then you’re
getting three hundred a year from my Company, that
is to say from me, simply to oblige my friend Plowden.
You don’t do anything to earn this money; you’re
of no earthly use on the Board. If I chose, I
could put you off at the end of the year as easily
as I can blow out this match. But I propose not
only to keep you on, but to make you independent.
Why do I do that? You should ask yourself that
question. It can’t be on account of anything
you can do for the Company. What else then?
Why, first and foremost, because you are the father
of your daughter.”
“Let me tell you the kind of
man I am,” said the General, inflating his chest,
and speaking with solemnity.
“Oh, I know the kind of man
you are,” Thorpe interrupted him, coolly.
“I want to talk now.”
“It was merely,” Kervick
ventured, in an injured tone, “that I can be
as loyal as any man alive to a true friend.”
“Well, I’ll be the true
friend, then,” said Thorpe, with impatient finality.
“And now this is what I want to say. I’m
going to be a very rich man. You’re not
to say so to anybody, mind you, until the thing speaks
for itself. We’re keeping dark for a few
months, d’ye see? lying low.
Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well
now, I wouldn’t give a damn to be rich, unless
I did with my money the things that I wanted to do,
and got the things with it that I wanted to get.
Whatever takes my fancy, that’s what I’ll
do.”
He paused for a moment, mentally to
scrutinize a brand-new project which seemed, by some
surreptitious agency, to have already taken his fancy.
It was a curious project; there were attractive things
about it, and objections to it suggested themselves
as well.
“I may decide,” he began
speaking again, still revolving this hypothetical
scheme in his thoughts “I may want
to well, here’s what occurs to me
as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter,
d’ye see? and it seems a low-down sort of thing
to me that she should be so poor. Well, then I
might say to you, here’s two thousand a year,
say, made over to you in your name, on the understanding
that you turn over half of it, say, to her. She
could take it from you, of course, as her father.
You could say you made it out of the Company.
Of course it might happen, later on, that I might
like to have a gentle hint dropped to her, d’ye
see, as to where it really came from. Mind, I
don’t say this is what is going to be done.
It merely occurred to me.”
After waiting for a moment for some
comment, he added a second thought: “You’d
have to set about making friends with her, you know.
In any case, you’d better begin at that at once.”
The General remained buried in reflection.
He lighted a cigarette, and poured out for himself
still another petit verre. His pursed lips
and knitted brows were eloquent of intense mental
activity.
“Well, do you see any objections
to it?” demanded Thorpe, at last.
“I do not quite see the reasons
for it,” answered the other, slowly. “What
would you gain by it?”
“How do you mean gain?”
put in the other, with peremptory intolerance of tone.
General Kervick spread his hands in
a quick little gesture. These hands were withered,
but remarkably well-kept. “I suppose one
doesn’t do something for nothing,” he
said. “I see what I would gain, and what
she would gain, but I confess I don’t see what
advantage you would get out of it.”
“No-o, I daresay you don’t,”
assented Thorpe, with sneering serenity. “But
what does that matter? You admit that you see
what you would gain. That’s enough, isn’t
it?”
The older man’s veined temples
twitched for an instant. He straightened himself
in his chair, and looked hard at his companion.
There was a glistening of moisture about his staring
eyes.
“It surely isn’t necessary among
gentlemen” he began, cautiously picking
his phrases “to have quite so much
that’s unpleasant, is it?”
“No you’re
right I didn’t mean to be so rough,”
Thorpe declared, with spontaneous contrition.
Upon the instant, however, he perceived the danger
that advantage might be taken of his softness.
“I’m a plain-spoken man,” he went
on, with a hardening voice, “and people must
take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance,
that I intended to be of service to you and
that that ought to interest you.”
The General seemed to have digested
his pique. “And what I was trying to say,”
he commented deferentially, “was that I thought
I saw ways of being of service to you. But that
did not seem to interest you at all.”
“How service?”
Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.
“I know my daughter so much
better than you do,” explained the other; “I
know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar
with the whole situation than you can possibly be I
wonder that you won’t listen to my opinion.
I don’t suggest that you should be guided by
it, but I think you should hear it.”
“I think so, too,” Thorpe
declared, readily enough. “What is
your opinion?”
General Kervick sipped daintily at
his glass, and then gave an embarrassed little laugh.
“But I can’t form what you might call an
opinion,” he protested, apologetically, “till
I understand a bit more clearly what it is you propose
to yourself. You mustn’t be annoyed if I
return to that ’still harping on my
daughter,’ you know. If I must ask
the question is it your wish to marry her?”
Thorpe looked blankly at his companion,
as if he were thinking of something else. When
he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness that
the question had been unduly intimate.
“I can’t in the least
be sure that I shall ever marry,” he replied,
thoughtfully. “I may, and I may not.
But starting with that proviso I
suppose I haven’t seen any other woman that I’d
rather think about marrying than than the
lady we’re speaking of. However, you see
it’s all in the air, so far as my plans go.”
“In the air be it,” the
soldier acquiesced, plausibly. “Let us consider
it as if it were in the air a possible contingency.
This is what I would say My ’the
lady we are speaking of’ is by way of being a
difficult lady ’uncertain, coy, and
hard to please’ as Scott says, you know and
it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which
brings her to the surface. She’s been hooked
once, mind, and she has a horror of it. Her husband
was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you know.
I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother
carried it through. But yes about
her I think she is afraid to marry again.
If she does ever consent, it will be because poverty
has broken her nerve. If she is kept on six hundred
a year, she may be starved, so to speak, into taking
a husband. If she had sixteen hundred either
she would never marry at all, or she would be free
to marry some handsome young pauper who caught her
fancy. That would be particularly like her.
You would be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside
losing her for yourself. D’ye follow me?
If you’ll leave it to me, I can find a much better
way than that better for all of us.”
“Hm!” said Thorpe, and
pondered the paternal statement. “I see
what you mean,” he remarked at last. “Yes I
see.”
The General preserved silence for
what seemed a long time, deferring to the reverie
of his host. When finally he offered a diversion,
in the form of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook
himself, and then ponderously rose to his feet.
He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made
his way out without a word.
At the street door, confronting the
waning foliage of the Embankment garden, Kervick was
emboldened to recall to him the fact of his presence.
“Which way are you going?” he asked.
“I don’t know,”
Thorpe answered absently. “I think I
think I’ll take a walk on the Embankment by
myself.”
The General could not repress all
symptoms of uneasiness. “But when am I
to see you again?” he enquired, with an effect
of solicitude that defied control.
“See me?” Thorpe spoke
as if the suggestion took him by surprise.
“There are things to be settled,
are there not?” the other faltered, in distressed
doubt as to the judicious tone to take. “You
spoke, you know, of of some employment
that that would suit me.”
Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed
by an effort to recall his wandering attention.
“Oh yes,” he said, with lethargic vagueness “I
haven’t thought it out yet. I’ll let
you know within the week, probably.”
With the briefest of nods, he turned
and crossed the road. Walking heavily, with rounded
shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat pockets,
he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random.
To the idlers on the garden benches who took note
of him as he passed, he gave the impression of one
struggling with nausea. To his own blurred consciousness,
he could not say which stirred most vehemently within
him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought,
or his bitter self-disgust.
The General, standing with exaggerated
exactness upon the doorstep, had followed with his
bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still
regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events
of the day, after the other had vanished. At
last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of
his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction.
“After all,” he said to himself, “there
are always ways of making a cad feel that he is a
cad, in the presence of a gentleman.”