This large apartment was no longer called the Board Room by anybody. By tacit processes, it had become Mr. Thorpe's room. Not even the titular Chairman of the Company, the renowned and eminent Lord Chaldon, ex-Ambassador and ex-Viceroy, entered this chamber now with any assumption of proprietorship in it. No hint of a recollection that there were such things as the Company and the Board, or that he was nominally the head of both, expressed itself in his Lordship's demeanour as he advanced, his hand a little extended.
The noble Chairman was white of beard and hair, and extremely courteous of manner—a small, carefully-clad, gracious old gentleman, whose mild pink countenance had, with years of anxiety about ways and means, disposed itself in lines which produced a chronic expression of solicitude. A nervous affection of the eyelids lent to this look, at intervals, a beseeching quality which embarrassed the beholder. All men had liked him, and spoken well of him throughout his long and hard-worked career. Thorpe was very fond of him indeed, and put a respectful cordiality into his grasp of the proffered hand. Then he looked, with a certain thinly-veiled bluntness of enquiry, past the Marquis to his companion.
“You were very kind to give me the appointment,” said Lord Chaldon, with a little purring gloss of affability upon the earnestness of his tone. “I wish very much to introduce to you my friend, my old friend I may say, Monsieur Alexandre Fromentin. We slept together under the same tent, in the Persian country beyond Bagdad—oh, it must have been quite forty years ago. We were youngsters looking to win our first spurs then—I in my line, he in his. And often since we have renewed that old friendship—at many different places—India, and Constantinople, and Egypt. I wish heartily to commend him to your—your kindness.”
Thorpe had perfunctorily shaken hands with the stranger—a tall, slender, sharp-faced, clean-shaven, narrow-shouldered man, who by these accounts of his years ought not to have such excessively black hair. He bowed in a foreign fashion, and uttered some words which Thorpe, though he recognized them as English in intent, failed to follow. The voice was that of an elderly man, and at a second glance there were plenty of proofs that he might have been older than the Marquis, out there in Persia, forty years ago. But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their hair, and he offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the table toward his desk, with a certain reserve of manner. Seating himself in the revolving chair at the desk itself, he put the tips of his fingers together, and looked this gentleman with the Continental name and experience in the face.
“Is there something you wish me to do?” he asked, passively facilitating the opening of conversation.
“Ah, my God! 'Something'!”—repeated the other, with a fluttering gesture of his hands over his thin, pointed knees—“everything, Mr. Thorpe!”
“That's a tolerably large order, isn't it?” Thorpe asked, calmly, moving a slow, inscrutable glance from one to the other of his callers.
“I could ask for nothing that would be a greater personal favour—and kindness”—Lord Chaldon interposed. His tone bore the stress of sincerity.
“That means a great deal to me, as you know, my Lord,” replied Thorpe, “but I don't in the least understand—what is it that your friend wants?”
“Only that I shall not be buried in a bankrupt's grave,” the suppliant answered, with a kind of embittered eagerness of utterance. “That I shall not see disgraced the honoured name that my father and his father bequeathed to my care!”