"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what Idon't perhaps quite understand--well, this is it.
You have this place of yours in the country, and preserve game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable living, is poverty to a man in your position.""Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all.
I could never have kept it up. It belongs to my mother.
It was her father's place; it has been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him.
He left three daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest, got the Kentish properties.
Of course Hadlow House will come to me eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to explain to everybody that it's my mother's.
It's my home, and that's enough. It's a dear old place.
I can't tell you how glad I am that you're going to see it.""I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.
"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman went on, sitting upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, "centre round Hadlow.
That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics. He got a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart.
He gave a certain military distinction to the peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the fortune. And then I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General, and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think of a more idiotic box for a man to be in. But now--thanks to you--there comes this prospect of an immense change.
If I have money at my back--at once everything is different with me. People will remember then promptly enough that Iam a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet in India at four hundred a year that they'll offer me, but a Governorship at six thousand--that is, if I wish to leave England at all. And we'll see which set of whips are to have the honour of offering me anything.
But all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment, to realize that things have really come my way. And about that--about the success of the affair--I suppose there can be no question whatever?""Not the slightest," Thorpe assured him. "Rubber Consols can go up to any figure we choose to name."Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped himself after he had given his companion a light.
Then he threw himself back against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. "I'm not going to say another word about myself," he announced, pleasantly.
"I've had more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a moment the reverse of the medal.
You're doing wonderful things for me. I only wish it were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that Ican do for you."
"Oh, that'll be all right," said the other, rather vaguely.
"Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind just what you want to do," Plowden reflected aloud.
"Of course it has come suddenly upon you--just as it has upon me. There are things in plenty that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a long way off.
It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we shall proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands.
