The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from the perfunctory salute with which he had greeted her on his arrival from foreign parts, six months before--brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain face.
Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted gaze she was bending upon the fireless grate.
Something extraordinary, unaccountable, was in the manner of her brother. She recalled that, in truth, he was more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell what wild, uncanny second nature had not grown up in him under those outlandish tropical skies? He had just told her that his ruin was absolute--overwhelming--yet there had been a covert smile in the recesses of his glance.
Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle from him, there as he stood behind her!
The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain loomed up and possessed her. She flung herself out of the chair, and, wheeling, seized its back and drew it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.
"What"--she began, stammering--"What is the matter, Joel?"He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly at her for a further moment. Then he tossed his head, and laughed abruptly.
"Sit down, old girl," he adjured her. "Try and hold yourself together, now--to hear some different kind of news.
I've been playing it rather low down on you, for a fact.
Instead of my being smashed, it's the other way about."She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp upon the chair-back. Her breathing troubled her as she regarded him, and tried to take in the meaning of his words.
"Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about your Company?" she asked, confusedly.
"No--no--not at all," he replied, now all genial heartiness.
"No--what I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking a rise out of you all the same." He seemed so unaffectedly pleased by his achievement in kindly duplicity that she forced an awkward smile to her lips.
"I don't understand in the least," she said, striving to remember what he had told her. "What you said was that the public had entirely failed to come in--that there weren't enough applications for shares to pay flotation expenses--those were your own words. Of course, I don't pretend to understand these City matters--but it IS the case, isn't it, that if people don't subscribe for the shares of a new company, then the company is a failure?""Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule,"he nodded at her, still beaming.
"Well, then--of course--I don't understand," she owned.
"I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've explained it to you," he said, seating himself, and motioning her to the other chair. "But yes, of course you will.
You're a business woman. You know what figures mean.
And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You remember that I told you----""But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie out before the shops close.""Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked up for that. I'll get something at the hotel before Igo to bed, if I feel like it. But say!"--the thought suddenly struck him--"if you want to come out with me, I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London.
What d'ye say?"
She shook her head. "I shall have some bread and cheese and beer at nine. That's my rule, you know. I don't like to break it. I'm always queer next day if I do.
But now make haste and tell me--you're really not broken then? You have really come out well?"For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height, and spread his bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a triumphant glow.
"Broken?" he echoed her word, with emphasis.
"My dear Louisa, I'm not the sort that gets broken.
I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall break them!"He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender, excitedly telling his story to her.
Sometimes he threw the words over his shoulder;again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the meaning of his speech--and then she found it peculiarly difficult to realize that he was her brother.
Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings in strange lands--and these he had frequently told her about before. Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a new thread.
One after another, these experiences of his, as he related them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and malice had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch Indies, in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled him--everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden consummation.
In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself.
There had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before the Empire fell, in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in British Columbia when the first rumours of rich ore were whispered about--many times when fortune seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had always played him false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the temptation of profitable treason.
