IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be so brief a journey.
In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however, upon this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the idea that any other railway could be half so bad.
The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the newcomer.
He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.
But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost too short. The conversation interested him not at all;if he had ever known the Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit from which he was returning.
When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform, superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags.
He turned it over and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.
Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small, huddled rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.
The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the personification of business--without an ounce of distracting superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it.
There was more than a touch of what the rustic calls "ginger"in his hair and closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid skin. His eyes--notably direct, confident eyes--were of a grey which had in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close, and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.
He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting.
"Well?" he asked, impassively.
"Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?" asked Thorpe in turn.
"I want a talk with you."
For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two, he remarked, "Go ahead till we're stopped,"and seated himself on the corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig. Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.
"I've worked out the whole scheme," he began, as if introducing the product of many sleepless nights' cogitations.
"I'm going to leave England almost immediately--go on the Continent and loaf about--I've never seen the Continent."Semple regarded him in silence. "Well?" he observed at last.
"You see the idea, don't you?" Thorpe demanded.
The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. "Go on,"he said.
"But the idea is everything," protested the other.
"We've been thinking of beginning the campaign straight away--but the true game now is to lie low--silent as the grave.
I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else--and so there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me, d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of course, and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show, but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general impression that I've gone to pieces.
Now d'ye see?"
"It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,"commented Semple.
