Don't let there be any further misunderstandings! I apologize for doing you the momentary injustice of suspecting that you were going to play off the vendor's shares on me.
Of course you said it--but it was a joke."
"There seems to be a joke somewhere, sure enough,"said Thorpe, in dryly metallic tones--"but it isn't me who's the joker. I told you you should have 100,000of my 400,000 shares, didn't I? I told you that in so many words. Very well, what more do you want? Here they are for you! I keep my promise to the letter.
But you--you seem to think you're entitled to make a row.
What do you mean by it?"
"Just a little word"--interposed Plowden, with strenuous calmness of utterance--"what you say may be true enough--yes, I admit it is true as far as it goes.
But was that what either of us had in our minds at the time?
You know it wasn't! You had just planned a coup on the Stock Exchange which promised you immense rewards. I helped you to pass a bogus allotment through our Board--without which your coup wouldn't have been worth a farthing.
You were enthusiastically grateful to me then. In the excitement of the moment you promised me a quarter of all you should make. 'WE ARE BOTH RICH MEN!' I remember those very words of yours. They have never been out of my mind.
We discussed the things that we would each do, when we came into this wealth. It was taken for granted in all our talk that your making money meant also my making money.
That was the complete understanding--here in London, and while you were at my house. You know it as well as I do.
And I refuse to suppose that you seriously intend to sit there and pretend that you meant to give me nothing but an armful of waste paper. It would be too monstrous!"Thorpe rapped with his nails on the desk, to point the force of his rejoinder: "How do you account for the fact, my Lord"--he gave his words a chillingly scornful precision of utterance--"that I distinctly mentioned 400,000 vendor's shares of mine, 100,000 of which I promised to turn over to you? Those were the specific terms, were they not? You don't deny it? Then what are you talking about?""I account for it in this way"--said Plowden, after a moment's baffled reflection: "at that time you yourself hadn't grasped the difference between the two classes of shares.
You thought the vendor's shares would play a part in the game. Ah! I see I've hit the mark! That was the way of it!--And now here, Thorpe! Let all that's been said be bye-gones! I don't want any verbal triumph over you.
You don't want to wrong me--and yourself too--by sticking to this quibble about vendor's shares. You intended to be deuced good to me--and what have I done that you should round on me now? I haven't bothered you before.
I came today only because things are particularly rotten, financially, just now. And I don't even want to hold you to a quarter--I leave that entirely to you.
But after all that's been said and done--I put it to you as one man to another--you are morally bound to help me out.""How do you mean?--'all that's been said and done'?"Thorpe asked the question in some confusion of moods.
Perhaps it was the ethical force of Lord Plowden's appeal, perhaps only a recurring sense of his earlier affection for the man--but for the moment he wavered in his purpose.
The peer flushed a little, as he looked at the floor, revolving possible answers to this query. His ear had been quick to seize the note of hesitation in Thorpe's tone.
He strove anxiously to get together considerations which should tip the fluttering balance definitely his way.
"Well," he began slowly, "I hardly know how to put it.
