“On the spot? All over the place!” Thorpe lifted himself slightly in his chair, and put more animation into his voice.
“It's the mistake you people make!” he declared oracularly. “You think that a man can come into the City without a penny, and form great combinations and carry through a great scheme, and wage a fight with the smartest set of scoundrels on the London Stock Exchange and beat 'em, and make for himself a big fortune—and still be a fool! You imagine that a man like that can be played with, and hoodwinked by amateurs like yourself. It's too ridiculous!”
The perception that apparently Thorpe bore little or no malice had begun to spread through Plowden's consciousness. It was almost more surprising to him than the revelation of his failure had been. He accustomed himself to the thought gradually, and as he did so the courage crept back into his glance. He breathed more easily.
“You are right!” he admitted. It cost him nothing to give a maximum of fervid conviction to the tone of his words. The big brute's pride in his own brains and power was still his weakest point. “You are right! I did play the fool. And it was all the more stupid, because I was the first man in London to recognize the immense forces in you. I said to you at the very outset, 'You are going to go far. You are going to be a great man.' You remember that, don't you?”
Thorpe nodded. “Yes—I remember it.”
The nobleman, upon reflection, drew a little silver box from his pocket, and extracted a match. “Do you mind?” he asked, and scarcely waiting for a token of reply, struck a flame upon the sole of his shoe, and applied it to the sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. The two men watched it curl and blacken after it had been tossed in the grate, without a word.
This incident had the effect of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity.
“It was not only a dirty trick that you tried to play me,” he said, in an altered, harsh tone, “but it was a fool-trick. That drunken old bum of a Tavender writes some lunatic nonsense or other to Gafferson, and he's a worse idiot even than Tavender is, and on the strength of what one of these clowns thinks he surmises the other clown means, you go and spend your money,—money I gave you, by the way,—in bringing Tavender over here. You do this on the double chance, we'll say, of using him against me for revenge and profit combined, or of peddling him to me for a still bigger profit. You see it's all at my fingers' ends.”
Lord Plowden nodded an unqualified assent.
“Well then—Tavender arrives. What do you do? Are you at the wharf to meet him? Have you said to yourself: 'I've set out to fight one of the smartest and strongest men in England, and I've got to keep every atom of wits about me, and strain every nerve to the utmost, and watch every point of the game as a tiger watches a snake'? Not a bit of it! You snooze in bed, and you send Gafferson—Gafferson!—the mud-head of the earth! to meet your Tavender, and loaf about with him in London, and bring him down by a slow train to your place in the evening. My God! You've only got two clear days left to do the whole thing in—and you don't even come up to town to get ready for them! You send Gafferson—and he goes off to see a flower-show—Mother of Moses! think of it! a FLOWER-show!—and your Tavender aud I are left to take a stroll together, and talk over old times and arrange about new times, and so on, to our hearts' content. Really, it's too easy! You make me tired!”