IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the last possible moment did not take him by surprise.
He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty.
This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the general upheaval in the routine of his life.
From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to him.
They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown.
Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring.
The over-long, thin, tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence; the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way, misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-glass.
The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.
His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his own clerks had not known him at first.
There was in this an inspiring implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived his youth.
The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing all earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he had had during the day in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and embroidered braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors, toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the gratified tradesmen to give him the best of everything--this delight had been distinctively boyish.
He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could have risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected upon the contents of his portmanteaus.
To apprehend their full value one must have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful advantage--that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could be without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and mostly unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to appreciate to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.
It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and his evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume for shooting harassed his mind.
He had brought along with him, for this eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and leather, much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic country. At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had packed it, to be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject had soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's investigations and purchases.
He had reached the point now of hoping that it would rain bitterly on the morrow.
It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in this matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in readiness on the arrival of his host.
As it was, he could not even tell the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now less than two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of intercepting his friend at the front of the station;then halted, and went back, upon the recollection that while he was going out one way, Plowden might come in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now, became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere beyond the barrier provoked within him an impulse to tearful profanity.
Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken young man came up, touched his hat, and asked:
"Will you kindly show me which is your luggage, sir?"Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the glaringly new bags--and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.
"It's all right; my man will look out for your things,"said the latter, as they shook hands. "We will go and get our places."The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet.
