You'll be interested in her--because a few years ago she was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in London.
She married a shocking bounder--he would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he was drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse.
Oh! by the way!" he started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face--"it didn't in the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick.
How did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?"Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. "Why, you introduced me to him yourself, didn't you?" he asked, slowly.
Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it over in his mind. "By George! I think you're right," he said. "I'd quite forgotten it.
Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he can get. He was bothering her about money--that was it, I remember now--but what an idiot I was to forget it.
But what I was saying--there's no one else but my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty or thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army. If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the party.
I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance.
If you've finished your cigarette"--he threw his own into the grate, and rose as he spoke--"we may as well be moving along. By the way," he concluded, as they walked toward the door, "I've an idea that we won't say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister, you know."Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a new footing of assured equality.
He knew now the exact measure of everything.
The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows and eyelashes--had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano.
His thoughts were concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted, motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him, whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent smile that he could command.
He reasoned it out that Plowden must have said something pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own merits--and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small, white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.
He had not been as much at home with the others.
The Honourable Balder, of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all a busy Rubber King.
He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner life of the household.
He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability.
Then he had spoken his few words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did--but to him, really it did not matter what she felt.
A year ago--why, yes, even a fortnight ago--the golden rumour of millions would have shone round her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference with which he considered her.
The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano. Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's hand.
