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He could hear the lowing of the cattle in the corrals. As Thorpe had said, he had grown up to cattle. Cattle and horses were his life. He was rich now. This was all his. He was growing richer every year, and Thorpe was prophesying the slump, the end. He couldn't believe it, or rather he wouldn't believe it. And he turned with a fierce expression of blind loyalty to his calling.
"How far am I from the river-bank at the bottom of Thorpe Hill?" "A good six miles, sir." "Take my horse and rub him down. Give him a pail of gruel and a quart of oats. I shall want to start again in less than an hour." "Sharp work, sir," answered the ostler. "Your horse seems to have done plenty already." "That is my business," said Sir Reginald, haughtily. He went into the inn.
He had taken up his hat, in response to the tacit warning of his companion's manner. Thorpe looked at him curiously, and hesitated over his answer. It was a surprising and almost unaccountable conclusion for the interview to have reached. He was in some vague way ashamed of himself, but he was explicitly and contemptuously ashamed for Plowden, and the impulse to say so was strong within him.
Thorpe noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab, and bade the driver stop at his bank.
How can a man pay even the interest on his purchase money, supposing he's bought a rubber plantation, when he has to compete with people who've paid no purchase money at all, but just get out as much as they like from the free forest? You must know that that is so." Tavender nodded eloquently. "Oh yes, I know that is so. You can prove it by me." Thorpe grinned a little.
"Well" he said, from the opposite chair, in his roundest, heartiest voice, when the other had with diffidence suffered himself to be served, and had deferentially lighted on one side the big cigar pressed upon him "Well and how's the world been using you?" "Not very handsomely, Mr. Thorpe," the other responded, in a hushed, constrained tone. "Oh, chuck the Misters!" Thorpe bade him.
An arrangement existed, instead, by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond, and to fix between themselves the details of the visit to Morayshire. Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement. He was conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and there was nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive love-letters seem unnatural.
"Sometimes it is necessary to look after the bread and butter," Thorpe reminded her gently, although he knew that was not the real reason at all. "If your firm can't supply it, I can," she answered. "It seems strange that you won't grant my first request of you, merely because of a little money." "It isn't a little money," he objected, catching manlike at the practical question.
The same spectacle repeated itself here, except that Ellis, the dam watcher, was nowhere to be seen. "The dirty whelps," cried Thorpe, "they did a good job!" He thrashed about here and there, and so came across Ellis blindfolded and tied. When released, the dam watcher was unable to give any account of his assailants. "They came up behind me while I was cooking," he said.
Torrens held fast to dining in solitude until he recovered his eyesight, or at least until he had become more dexterous without it. Now, it happened that on this day of all others three attractive events came all at once the Flower Show at Brainley Thorpe, the Sadleigh Races, and a big Agricultural Meeting at King's Grantham, where the County Members were to address constituents.
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