"There was a man in here asking about you today,"she remarked, in a casual fashion. "Said he was an old friend of yours.""Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now," he observed with beaming indifference. "I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and dances and all that.
One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland.
I told him I couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will write to remind me.
Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous.
But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square--that'll be good enough for me.
By the way--you haven't been out to see us yet.
We're all settled now. You must come at once--why not with me, now?"Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search about for something inside.
"He left a card for you," she said, as she groped among the desk's contents. "I don't know what I did with it.
He wrote something on it."
"Oh, damn him, and his card too," Thorpe protested easily.
"I don't want to see either of them."
"He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He seemed to act as if you'd want to see him--but I didn't know. I didn't tell him your address."Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest, but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up at his sister.
"What was his name?" he asked with abruptness.
"I don't in the least remember," she made answer, holding the desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search.
"He was a little man, five-and-fifty, I should think.
He had long grey hair--a kind of Quaker-looking man.
He said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got back here in England yesterday or the day before.
He said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether you were in England or not!"Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head. "You must find that card!"he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice.
"I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!""Oh, I have a good few other things to do," she reminded him, as she fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk.
"I can put my hand on any one of four thousand books in stock," she mildly boasted over her shoulder, "and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell if a single book is missing--and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever knew to do that.""Oh of course, you're an exception," he admitted, under a sense of justice. "But I wish you'd find the card.""I know where it is," she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand.
"I'd stuck it in the little mirror over the washstand,"she explained.
He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it under the gas-light. "Where is Montague Street?"he asked, with rough directness.
"In Bloomsbury--alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street--I don't know how many others there may be."Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat. "Yes--Bloomsbury," he said hurriedly.
"That would be his form. And you say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts--nothing about the Company, eh?" He looked at his watch as he spoke.
Evidently the presence of this stranger had excited him a good deal.
"No," she assured him, reflectively; "no, I'm sure he didn't. From what he said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere else, for that matter, I should say."Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look. "No--he's a shade off in the upper story,"he told her in a confidential tone. "Still, it's important that I should see him,"--and with only a hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella for a cab.
