"Newcastle-on-Tyne, September 12. Our friend died at Edinboro this morning. See you at hotel this evening.--Kervick."What Thorpe felt at first was that his two daughters had shrunk from him with swift, terrible aversion: they vanished, along with every phase of the bright vision, under a pall of unearthly blackness. He stood in the centre of a chill solitude, staring stupidly at the coarse, soft paper.
The premonition, then, had justified itself! Something had told him that the telegram was an evil thing.
A vaguely superstitious consciousness of being in the presence of Fate laid hold upon him. His great day of triumph had its blood-stain. A victim had been needful--and to that end poor simple, silly old Tavender was a dead man.
Thorpe could see him,--an embarrassing cadaver eyed by strangers who did not know what to do with it,--fatuous even in death.
A sudden rage at Kervick flamed up. He clearly had played the fool--clumsily over-plying the simpleton with drink till he had killed him. The shadow of murder indubitably hung over the thing. And then--the crass witlessness of telegraphing! Already, doubtless, the police of Edinborough were talking over the wires with Scotland Yard.
A reference to a death in Edinborough, in a telegram from Newcastle--it was incredible that this should escape the eye of the authorities. Any minute might bring a detective through that door there--following into the Board Room with his implacable scent the clue of blood.
Thorpe's fancy pictured this detective as a momentarily actual presence--tall, lean, cold-eyed, mysteriously calm and fatally wise, the omniscient terror of the magazine short-stories.
He turned faint and sick under a spasm of fright.
The menace of enquiry became something more than a threat: he felt it, like the grip of a constable upon his arm.
Everything would be mercilessly unravelled. The telegram of the idiot Kervick would bring the police down upon him like a pack of beagles. The beliefs and surmises of the idiot Gafferson would furnish them with the key to everything. He would have his letter from Tavender to show to the detectives--and the Government's smart lawyers would ferret out the rest. The death of Tavender--they could hardly make him responsible for that;but it was the dramatic feature of this death which would inspire them all to dig up everything about the fraud.
It was this same sensational added element of the death, too, which would count with a jury. They were always gross, sentimental fools, these juries. They would mix up the death and the deal in Rubber Consols, and in their fat-headed confusion would say "Penal Servitude--fourteen years."Or no, it was the Judge who fixed that. But the Judges were fools, too; they were too conceited, too puffed up with vanity, to take the trouble to understand.
He groaned aloud in a nightmare of helplessness.
The sound of his own voice, moaning in his ears, had a magical effect upon him. He lifted his head, gazed about him, and then flushed deeply. His nerveless cowardice had all at once become unbelievable to himself.
With a shamed frown he straightened himself, and stood thus for a long minute, engrossed in the definite task of chasing these phantoms from his mind.
Once a manly front was displayed to them, they slunk away with miraculous facility. He poured out some brandy, and sipped it neat, and laughed scornfully, defiantly, aloud.
He had over half a million--with power and force and courage enough to do with it what he liked. He had fought luck undauntedly, unwearyingly, during all those years when his hands were empty. Was he to tremble and turn tail now, when his hands were full, when he was armoured and weaponed at every point? He was amazed and hurt, and still more enraged, at that fit of girlish weakness which had possessed him.
He could have beaten himself with stripes for it.
But it could never happen again--never, never!
He told himself that with proud, resolute reiteration, as he got his hat and stick, and put in his pockets one or two papers from the desk, and then glanced about the Board Room for what was, most likely, the last time.
Here he had won his great victory over Fate, here he had put his enemies under his feet, and if innocent simpletons had wandered into the company of these foes, it mattered not a whit to him that they also had been crushed.
Figuratively, he turned his back upon them now; he left them, slain and trampled, in the Board Room behind him.
They no longer concerned him.
Figuratively, too, as he walked with firmness to the door, he stepped over the body of old Tavender, upon the threshold, and bestowed upon it a downward mental glance, and passed on.
By the time he reached the street, the memory of Tavender had become the merest shred of a myth. As he strode on, it seemed to him that his daughters came again, and took his hands, and moved lovingly beside him--lovingly and still more admiringly than before.
