The Market-Place | Page 8

CHAPTER II
"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe, half an hour
later: "you never did believe in me, as a sister should do."
He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering
gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only
the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.
Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this
portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon him of
responsibility for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other
pictures on the walls of which he was dimly conscious--small, faded,
old prints about Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to
be coming back to him out of the mists of his childhood.
Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with
quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The

peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained
like snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting
at the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the
same rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake
nights, in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise,
when he was a boy?
"I know you always say that," replied Louisa, impassively.
She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice or
intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair,
drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest
brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of
figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large,
capable hands on her knees.
"I believed in you as much as you'd let me," she went on, indifferently,
almost wearily. "But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did or
didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What
had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world
you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know
whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it
was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London--but
elsewhere you might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover,
I don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something
very different from the boy Joel that left the shop--it must be twenty
years ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell
me."
"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
intent glance, "you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to
succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'"
She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued
failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless
point.

"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself," she admitted,
listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she
spoke with more animation: "You don't seem to understand, Joel, that
what was very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were
always talking about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of
sometime, at a stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the
idea of your life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been
to keep a roof over my head--to keep the little business from
disappearing altogether. It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last
few years, with the big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small
traders. I had the invalid husband to support for between three and four
years--a dead weight on me every week--and then the children to look
after, to clothe and educate."
At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. "Don't think
I'm ungrateful"--she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile--"but I
almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What
it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't be
able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of
life--and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what
will become of them."
The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam
in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
moustache.
"But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago,