T. Tembarom Part 45

"What price Lady Mallowe!" said the son. "I'll bet a sovereign she began it."

"She did," remarked Palliser; "but I think one may leave Mr. Temple Barholm safely to Lady Joan." Mr. Grantham laughed as one who knew something of Lady Joan.

"There's an Americanism which I didn't learn from him," Palliser added, "and I remembered it when he was talking her over. It's this: when you dispose of a person finally and forever, you 'wipe up the earth with him.' Lady Joan will 'wipe up the earth' with your new neighbor."

There was a little shout of laughter. "Wipe up the earth" was entirely new to everybody, though even the country in England was at this time by no means wholly ignorant of American slang.

This led to so many other things both mirth-provoking and serious, even sometimes very serious indeed, that the entire evening at Detchworth was filled with talk of Temple Barholm. Very naturally the talk did not end by confining itself to one household. In due time Captain Palliser's little sketches were known in divers places, and it became a habit to discuss what had happened, and what might possibly happen in the future. There were those who went to the length of calling on the new man because they wanted to see him face to face.

People heard new things every few days, but no one realized that it was vaguely through Palliser that there developed a general idea that, crude and self-revealing as he was, there lurked behind the outward candor of the intruder a hint of over-sharpness of the American kind.

There seemed no necessity for him to lay schemes beyond those he had betrayed in his inquiries about "ladies," but somehow it became a fixed idea that he was capable of doing shady things if at any time the temptation arose. That was really what his boyish casualness meant. That in truth was Palliser's final secret conclusion. And he wanted very much to find out why exactly little old Miss Temple Barholm had been taken up. If the man wanted introductions, he could have contrived to pick up a smart and enterprising unprofessional chaperon in London who would have done for him what Miss Temple Barholm would never presume to attempt. And yet he seemed to have chosen her deliberately. He had set her literally at the head of his house. And Palliser, having heard a vague rumor that he had actually settled a decent income upon her, had made adroit inquiries and found it was true.

It was. To arrange the matter had been one of his reasons for going to see Mr. Palford during their stay in London.

"I wanted to fix you--fix you safe," he said when he told Miss Alicia about it. "I guess no one can take it away from you, whatever old thing happens."

"What could happen, dear Mr. Temple Barholm?" said Miss Alicia in the midst of tears of grat.i.tude and tremulous joy. "You are so young and strong and--everything! Don't even speak of such a thing in jest. What could happen?"

"Anything can happen," he answered, "just anything. Happening's the one thing you can't bet on. If I was betting, I'd put my money on the thing I was sure couldn't happen. Look at this Temple Barholm song and dance! Look at T. T. as he was half strangling in the blizzard up at Harlem and thanking his stars little Munsberg didn't kick him out of his confectionery store less than a year ago! So long as I'm all right, you're all right. But I wanted you fixed, anyhow."

He paused and looked at her questioningly for a moment. He wanted to say something and he was not sure he ought. His reverence for her little finenesses and reserves increased instead of wearing away. He was always finding out new things about her.

"Say," he broke forth almost impetuously after his hesitation, "I wish you wouldn't call me Mr. Temple Barholm."

"D-do you?" she fluttered. "But what could I call you?"

"Well," he answered, reddening a shade or so, "I'd give a house and lot if you could just call me Tem."

"But it would sound so unbecoming, so familiar," she protested.

"That's just what I'm asking for," he said--"some one to be familiar with. I'm the familiar kind. That's what's the matter with me. I'd be familiar with Pearson, but he wouldn't let me. I'd frighten him half to death. He'd think that he wasn't doing his duty and earning his wages, and that somehow he'd get fired some day without a character."

He drew nearer to her and coaxed.

"Couldn't you do it?" he asked almost as though he were asking a favor of a girl. "Just Tem? I believe that would come easier to you than T.

T. I get fonder and fonder of you every day, Miss Alicia, honest Injun. And I'd be so grateful to you if you'd just be that unbecomingly familiar."

He looked honestly in earnest; and if he grew fonder and fonder of her, she without doubt had, in the face of everything, given her whole heart to him.

"Might I call you Temple -- to begin with?" she asked. "It touches me so to think of your asking me. I will begin at once. Thank you -- Temple," with a faint gasp. "I might try the other a little later."

It was only a few evenings later that he told her about the flats in Harlem. He had sent to New York for a large bundle of newspapers, and when he opened them he read aloud an advertis.e.m.e.nt, and showed her a picture of a large building given up entirely to "flats."

He had realized from the first that New York life had a singular attraction for her. The unrelieved dullness of her life -- those few years of youth in which she had stifled vague longings for the joys experienced by other girls; the years of middle age spent in the dreary effort to be "submissive to the will of G.o.d," which, honestly translated, signified submission to the exactions and domestic tyrannies of "dear papa" and others like him -- had left her with her capacities for pleasure as freshly sensitive as a child's. The smallest change in the routine of existence thrilled her with excitement. Tembarom's casual references to his strenuous boyhood caused her eyes to widen with eagerness to hear more. Having seen this, he found keen delight in telling her stories of New York life -- stories of himself or of other lads who had been his companions. She would drop her work and gaze at him almost with bated breath. He was an excellent raconteur when he talked of the things he knew well. He had an unconscious habit of springing from his seat and acting his scenes as he depicted them, laughing and using street-boy phrasing:

"It's just like a tale," Miss Alicia would breathe, enraptured as he jumped from one story to another. "It's exactly like a wonderful tale."

She learned to know the New York streets when they blazed with heat, when they were hard with frozen snow, when they were sloppy with melting slush or bright with springtime suns.h.i.+ne and spring winds blowing, with pretty women hurrying about in beflowered spring hats and dresses and the exhilaration of the world-old springtime joy. She found herself hurrying with them. She sometimes hung with him and his companions on the railing outside dazzling restaurants where scores of gay people ate rich food in the sight of their boyish ravenousness.

She darted in and out among horses and vehicles to find carriages after the theater or opera, where everybody was dressed dazzlingly and diamonds glittered.

"Oh, how rich everybody must have seemed to you--how cruelly rich, poor little boy!"

"They looked rich, right enough," he answered when she said it. "And there seemed a lot of good things to eat all corralled in a few places. And you wished you could be let loose inside. But I don't know as it seemed cruel. That was the way it was, you know, and you couldn't help it. And there were places where they'd give away some of what was left. I tell you, we were in luck then."

There was some spirit in his telling it all--a spirit which had surely been with him through his hardest days, a spirit of young mirth in rags--which made her feel subconsciously that the whole experience had, after all, been somehow of the nature of life's high adventure.

He had never been ill or heart-sick, and he laughed when he talked of it, as though the remembrance was not a recalling of disaster.

"Clemmin' or no clemmin'. I wish I'd lived the loife tha's lived,"

Tummas Hibblethwaite had said.

Her amazement would indeed have been great if she had been told that she secretly shared his feeling.

"It seems as if somehow you had never been dull," was her method of expressing it.

"Dull! Holy cats! no," he grinned. "There wasn't any time for being anything. You just had to keep going."

She became in time familiar with Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and boarders. She knew Mrs. Peck and Mr. Jakes and the young lady from the notion counter (those wonderful shops!). Julius and Jem and the hall bedroom and the tilted chairs and cloud of smoke she saw so often that she felt at home with them.

"Poor Mrs. Bowse," she said, "must have been a most respectable, motherly, hard-working creature. Really a nice person of her cla.s.s."

She could not quite visualize the "parlor," but it must have been warm and comfortable. And the pianola--a piano which you could play without even knowing your notes--What a clever invention! America seemed full of the most wonderfully clever things.

Tembarom was actually uplifted in soul when he discovered that she laid transparent little plans for leading him into talk about New York. She wanted him to talk about it, and the Lord knows he wanted to talk about himself. He had been afraid at first. She might have hated it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn't understood. But she did. Without quite realizing the fact, she was beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it. Her Somerset vicarage imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the daring wish that sometime she might see it.

But Tembarom's imagination was more athletic.

"Jinks! wouldn't it be fine to take her there! The lark in London wouldn't be ace high to it."

The Hutchinsons were not New Yorkers, but they had been part of the atmosphere of Mrs. Bowse's. Mr. Hutchinson would of course be rather a forward and pus.h.i.+ng man to be obliged to meet, but Little Ann! She did so like Little Ann! And the dear boy did so want, in his heart of hearts, to talk about her at times. She did not know whether, in the circ.u.mstances, she ought to encourage him; but he was so dear, and looked so much dearer when he even said "Little Ann," that she could not help occasionally leading him gently toward the subject.

When he opened the newspapers and found the advertis.e.m.e.nts of the flats, she saw the engaging, half-awkward humorousness come into his eyes.

"Here's one that would do all right," he said--"four rooms and a bath, eleventh floor, thirty-five dollars a month."

He spread the newspaper on the table and rested on his elbow, gazing at it for a few minutes wholly absorbed. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

"There's a plan of the rooms," he said. "Would you like to look at it?

Shall I bring your chair up to the table while we go over it together?"

He brought the chair, and side by side they went over it thoroughly.

To Miss Alicia it had all the interest of a new kind of puzzle. He explained it in every detail. One of his secrets had been that on several days when Galton's manner had made him hopeful he had visited certain flat buildings and gone into their intricacies. He could therefore describe with color their resources--the janitor; the elevator; the dumb-waiters to carry up domestic supplies and carry down ashes and refuse; the refrigerator; the unlimited supply of hot and cold water, the heating plan; the astonis.h.i.+ng little kitchen, with stationary wash-tubs; the telephone, if you could afford it,-- all the conveniences which to Miss Alicia, accustomed to the habits of Rowcroft Vicarage, where you lugged cans of water up-stairs and down if you took a bath or even washed your face; seemed luxuries appertaining only to the rich and great.

"How convenient! How wonderful! Dear me! Dear me!" she said again and again, quite flushed with excitement. "It is like a fairy-story. And it's not big at all, is it?"

"You could get most of it into this," he answered, exulting. "You could get all of it into that big white-and gold parlor."

"The white saloon?"

He showed his teeth.