His insistence upon his obligation was suddenly almost tearful. Thorpe thought hard as he replied: “Oh—that's all right. I'm very glad indeed to have helped you along. And so you came over for the Rubber Consols people, eh? Well—that's good. Seen 'em yet? You haven't told me when you landed.”
“Came up from Southampton this morning. My brother-in-law was down there to meet me. We came up to London together.” “Your brother-in-law,” observed Thorpe, meditatively. Some shadowy, remote impression of having forgotten something troubled his mind for an instant. “Is your brother-in-law in the rubber business?”
“Extraor'nary thing,” explained Tavender, beamingly, “he don't know no more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon. I asked him today—but he couldn't tell me anything about the business—what it was I'd been sent for, or anything.”
“But he—he knew you'd been sent for,” Thorpe commented upon brief reflection.
“Why, he sent the second cable himself——”
“What second cable?”
“Why it was the next day,—or maybe it was sent that same night, and not delivered till morning,—I got another cable, this time from my brother-in-law, telling me to cable him what ship I sailed on and when. So of course he knew all about it—but now he says he don't. He's a curious sort of fellow, anyway.”
“But how is he mixed up in it?” demanded Thorpe, impatiently.
“Well, as nearly as I can figure it out, he works for one of the men that's at the head of this rubber company. It appears that he happened to show this man—he's a man of title, by the way—a letter I wrote to him last spring, when I got back to Mexico—and so in that way this man, when he wanted me to come over, just told Gafferson to cable to me.”
“Gafferson,” Thorpe repeated, very slowly, and with almost an effect of listlessness. He was conscious of no surprise; it was as if he had divined all along the sinister shadows of Lord Plowden and Lord Plowden's gardener, lurking in the obscurity behind this egregious old ass of a Tavender.