“Stay and dine with me tonight,” Thorpe impulsively suggested, “and we'll go to some Music Hall afterward. There's a knock-about pantomime outfit at the Canterbury—Martinetti I think the name is—that's damned good. You get plenty of laugh, and no tiresome blab to listen to. The older I get, the more I think of people that keep their mouths shut.”
“Aye,” observed Semple again.
CHAPTER XX
IN the Board Room, next day, Thorpe awaited the coming of Lord Plowden with the serene confidence of a prophet who not only knows that he is inspired, but has had an illicit glimpse into the workings of the machinery of events.
He sat motionless at his desk, like a big spider for who time has no meaning. Before him lay two newspapers, folded so as to expose paragraphs heavily indicated by blue pencil-marks. They were not financial journals, and for that reason it was improbable that he would have seen these paragraphs, if the Secretary of the Company had not marked them, and brought them to him. That official had been vastly more fluttered by them than he found it possible to be. In slightly-varying language, these two items embedded in so-called money articles reported the rumour that a charge of fraud had arisen in connection with the Rubber Consols corner, and that sensational disclosures were believed to be impending.
Thorpe looked with a dulled, abstracted eye at these papers, lying on the desk, and especially at the blue pencil-lines upon them, as he pondered many things. Their statement, thus scattered broadcast to the public, seemed at once to introduce a new element into the situation, and to leave it unchanged. That influence of some sort had been exerted to get this story into these papers, it did not occur to him for an instant to doubt. To his view, all things that were put into papers were put there for a purpose—it would express his notion more clearly, perhaps, to say for a price. Of the methods of Fleet Street, he was profoundly ignorant, but his impressions of them were all cynical. Upon reflection, however, it seemed unlikely to him that Lord Plowden had secured the insertion of these rumours. So far as Thorpe could fathom that nobleman's game, its aims would not be served by premature publicity of this kind.
Gradually, the outlines of a more probable combination took shape in his thoughts. There were left in the grip of the “corner” now only two victims,—Rostocker and Aronson. They owed this invidious differentiation to a number of causes: they had been the chief sellers of stock, being between them responsible for the delivery of 8,500 Rubber Consols shares, which they could not get; they were men of larger fortune than the other “shorts,” and therefore could with safety be squeezed longest; what was fortunate for him under the circumstances, they were the two men against whom Thorpe's personal grudge seemed able to maintain itself most easily.
For these reasons, they had already been mulcted in differences to the extent of, in round numbers, 165,000 pounds. On the morrow, the twelfth of September, it was Thorpe's plan to allow them to buy in the shares they needed, at 22 or 23 pounds per share—which would take from them nearly 200,000 pounds more. He had satisfied himself that they could, and would if necessary, pay this enormous ransom for their final escape from the “corner.” Partly because it was not so certain that they could pay more, partly because he was satiated with spoils and tired of the strain of the business, he had decided to permit this escape.
He realized now, however, that they on their side had planned to escape without paying any final ransom at all.