T. Tembarom Part 49

Joan herself knew that he was trying to please her, and she was asking herself how long he would have the courage and presumption to keep it up. He could scarcely be enjoying it.

He was not enjoying it, but he kept it up. He wanted to be friends with her for more reasons than one. No one had ever remained long at enmity with him. He had "got over" a good many people in the course of his career, as he had "got over" Joseph Hutchinson. This had always been accomplished because he presented no surface at which arrows could be thrown. She was the hardest proposition he had ever come up against, he was thinking; but if he didn't let himself be fool enough to break loose and get mad, she'd not hate him so much after a while.

She would begin to understand that it wasn't his fault; then perhaps he could get her to make friends. In fact, if she had been able to read his thoughts, there is no certainty as to how far her temper might have carried her. But she could see him only as a sharp-faced, common American of the shop-boy cla.s.s, sitting at the head of Jem Temple Barholm's table, in his chair.

As they pa.s.sed through the hall to go to the drawing-room after the meal was over, she saw a neat, pale young man speaking to Burrill and heard a few of his rather anxiously uttered words.

"The orders were that he was always to be told when Mr. Strangeways was like this, under all circ.u.mstances. I can't quiet him, Mr.

Burrill. He says he must see him at once."

Burrill walked back stiffly to the dining-room.

"It won't trouble HIM much to be disturbed at his wine," he muttered before going. "He doesn't know hock from port."

When the message was delivered to him, Tembarom excused himself with simple lack of ceremony.

"I 'll be back directly," he said to Palliser. "Those are good cigars." And he left the room without going into the matter further.

Palliser took one of the good cigars, and in taking it exchanged a glance with Burrill which distantly conveyed the suggestion that perhaps he had better remain for a moment or so. Captain Palliser's knowledge of interesting detail was obtained "by chance here and there," he sometimes explained, but it was always obtained with a light and casual air.

"I am not sure," he remarked as he took the light Burrill held for him and touched the end of his cigar--"I am not quite sure that I know exactly who Mr. Strangeways is."

"He's the gentleman, sir, that Mr. Temple Barholm brought over from New York," replied Burrill with a stolidity clearly expressive of distaste.

"Indeed, from New York! Why doesn't one see him?"

"He's not in a condition to see people, sir," said Burrill, and Palliser's slightly lifted eyebrow seeming to express a good deal, he added a sentence, "He's not all there, sir."

"From New York, and not all there. What seems to be the matter?"

Palliser asked quietly. "Odd idea to bring a lunatic all the way from America. There must be asylums there."

"Us servants have orders to keep out of the way," Burrill said with sterner stolidity. "He's so nervous that the sight of strangers does him harm. I may say that questions are not encouraged."

"Then I must not ask any more," said Captain Palliser. "I did not know I was edging on to a mystery."

"I wasn't aware that I was myself, sir," Burrill remarked, "until I asked something quite ordinary of Pearson, who is Mr. Temple Barholm's valet, and it was not what he said, but what he didn't, that showed me where I stood."

"A mystery is an interesting thing to have in a house," said Captain Palliser without enthusiasm. He smoked his cigar as though he was enjoying its aroma, and even from his first remark he had managed not to seem to be really quite addressing himself to Burrill. He was certainly not talking to him in the ordinary way; his air was rather that of a gentleman overhearing casual remarks in which he was only vaguely interested. Before Burrill left the room, however, and he left it under the impression that he had said no more than civility demanded, Captain Palliser had reached the point of being able to deduce a number of things from what he, like Pearson, had not said.

CHAPTER XXIII

The man who in all England was most deeply submerged in deadly boredom was, the old Duke of Stone said with wearied finality, himself. He had been a sinful young man of finished taste in 1820; he had cultivated these tastes, which were for literature and art and divers other things, in the most richly alluring foreign capitals until finding himself becoming an equally sinful and finished elderly man, he had decided to marry. After the birth of her four daughters, his wife had died and left them on his hands. Developing at that time a tendency to rheumatic gout and a daily increasing realization of the fact that the resources of a poor dukedom may be hopelessly depleted by an expensive youth pa.s.sed brilliantly in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, when it was endurable, he found it expedient to give up what he considered the necessities of life and to face existence in the country in England.

It is not imperative that one should enter into detail. There was much, and it covered years during which his four daughters grew up and he "grew down," as he called it. If his temper had originally been a bad one, it would doubtless have become unbearable; as he had been born an amiable person, he merely sank into the boredom which threatens extinction. His girls bored him, his neighbors bored him, Stone Hover bored him, Lancas.h.i.+re bored him, England had always bored him except at abnormal moments.

"I read a great deal, I walk when I can," this he wrote once to a friend in Rome. "When I am too stiff with rheumatic gout, I drive myself about in a pony chaise and feel like an aunt in a Bath chair. I have so far escaped the actual chair itself. It perpetually rains here, I may mention, so I don't get out often. You who gallop on white roads in the suns.h.i.+ne and hear Italian voices and vowels, figure to yourself your friend trundling through damp, lead-colored Lancas.h.i.+re lanes and being addressed in the Lancas.h.i.+re dialect. But so am I driven by necessity that I listen to it gratefully. I want to hear village news from villagers. I have become a gossip. It is a wonderful thing to be a gossip. It a.s.sists one to get through one's declining years. Do not wait so long as I did before becoming one. Begin in your roseate middle age."

An attack of gout more severe than usual had confined him to his room for some time after the arrival of the new owner of Temple Barholm. He had, in fact, been so far indisposed that a week or two had pa.s.sed before he had heard of him. His favorite nurse had been chosen by him, because she was a comfortable village woman whom he had taught to lay aside her proper awe and talk to him about her own affairs and her neighbors when he was in the mood to listen. She spoke the broadest possible dialect,--he liked dialect, having learned much in his youth from mellow-eyed Neapolitan and Tuscan girls,--and she had never been near a hospital, but had been trained by the bedsides of her children and neighbors.

"If I were a writing person, she would become literature, impinging upon Miss Mitford's tales of 'Our Village,' Miss Austen's varieties, and the young Bronte woman's 'Wuthering Heights.' Mon Dieu! what a resource it would be to be a writing person!" he wrote to the Roman friend.

To his daughters he said:

"She brings back my tenderest youth. When she pokes the fire in the twilight and lumbers about the room, making me comfortable, I lie in my bed and watch the flames dancing on the ceiling and feel as if I were six and had the measles. She tucks me in, my dears--she tucks me in, I a.s.sure you. Sometimes I feel it quite possible that she will bend over and kiss me."

She had tucked him in luxuriously in his arm-chair by the fire on the first day of his convalescence, and as she gave him his tray, with his beef tea and toast, he saw that she contained anecdotal information of interest which tactful encouragement would cause to flow.

"Now that I am well enough to be entertained, Braddle," he said, "tell me what has been happening."

"A graidely lot, yore Grace," she answered; "but not so much i' Stone Hover as i' Temple Barholm. He's coom!"

Then the duke vaguely recalled rumors he had heard sometime before his indisposition.

"The new Mr. Temple Barholm? He's an American, isn't he? The lost heir who had to be sought for high and low-- princ.i.p.ally low, I understand."

The beef tea was excellently savory, the fire was warm, and relief from two weeks of pain left a sort of Nirvana of peace. Rarely had the duke pa.s.sed a more delightfully entertaining morning. There was a richness in the Temple Barholm situation, as described in detail by Mrs. Braddle, which filled him with delight. His regret that he was not a writing person intensified itself. Americans had not appeared upon the horizon in Miss Mitford's time, or in Miss Austen's, or in the Brontes' the type not having entirely detached itself from that of the red Indian. It struck him, however, that Miss Austen might have done the best work with this affair if she had survived beyond her period. Her finely demure and sly sense of humor would have seen and seized upon its opportunities. Stark moorland life had not encouraged humor in the Brontes, and village patronage had not roused in Miss Mitford a sense of ironic contrasts. Yes, Jane Austen would have done it best.

That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary flavor. No man or woman of his own cla.s.s could have given such a recounting, or revealed so many facets of this jewel of entertainment.

He and those like him could have seen the thing only from their own amused, outraged, bewildered, or cynically disgusted point of view.

Mrs. Braddle saw it as the villagers saw it--excited, curious, secretly hopeful of undue lavishness from "a chap as had nivver had bra.s.s before an' wants to chuck it away for brag's sake," or somewhat alarmed at the possible neglecting of customs and privileges by a person ignorant of memorial benefactions. She saw it as the servants saw it--secretly disdainful, outwardly respectful, waiting to discover whether the sacrifice of professional distinction would be balanced by liberties permitted and lavishness of remuneration and largess. She saw it also from her own point of view--that of a respectable cottage dweller whose great-great-grandfather had been born in a black-and- white timbered house in a green lane, and who knew what were "gentry ways" and what nature of being could never even remotely approach the a.s.sumption of them. She had seen Tembarom more than once, and summed him up by no means ill-naturedly.

"He's not such a bad-lookin' chap. He is na short-legged or turn-up- nosed, an' that's summat. He con stride along, an' he looks healthy enow for aw he's thin. A thin chap nivver looks as common as a fat un.

If he wur pudgy, it ud be a lot more agen him."

"I think, perhaps," amiably remarked the duke, sipping his beef tea, "that you had better not call him a `chap,' Braddle. The late Mr.

Temple Barholm was never referred to as a `chap' exactly, was he?"

Mrs. Braddle gave vent to a sort of internal-sounding chuckle. She had not meant to be impertinent, and she knew her charge was aware that she had not, and that he was neither being lofty or severe with her.

"Eh, I'd 'a'loiked to ha' heard somebody do it when he was nigh," she said. "Happen I'd better be moindin' ma P's an' Q's a bit more. But that's what this un is, yore Grace. He's a `chap' out an' out. An'

theer's some as is sayin' he's not a bad sort of a chap either.

There's lots o' funny stories about him i' Temple Barholm village. He goes in to th' cottages now an' then, an' though a fool could see he does na know his place, nor other people's, he's downreet open-handed.

An' he maks foak laugh. He took a lot o' New York papers wi' big pictures in 'em to little Tummas Hibblethwaite. An' wot does tha think he did one rainy day? He walks in to the owd Dibdens' cottage, an'

sits down betwixt 'em as they sit one each side o' th' f're, an' he tells 'em they've got to cheer him up a bit becos he's got nought to do. An' he shows 'em th' picter-papers, too, an' tells 'em about New York, an' he ends up wi' singin' 'em a comic song. They was frightened out o' their wits at first, but somehow he got over 'em, an' made 'em laugh their owd heads nigh off."

Her charge laid his spoon down, and his shrewd, lined face a.s.sumed a new expression of interest.

"Did he! Did he, indeed!" he exclaimed. "Good Lord! what an exhilarating person! I must go and see him. Perhaps he'd make me laugh my `owd head nigh off.' What a sensation! "

There was really immense color in the anecdotes and in the side views accompanying them; the routing out of her obscurity of the isolated, dependent spinster relative, for instance. Delicious! The man was either desperate with loneliness or he was one of the rough-diamond benefactors favored by novelists, in which latter case he would not be so entertaining. Pure self-interest caused the Duke of Stone quite unreservedly to hope that he was anguished by the unaccustomedness of his surroundings, and was ready to pour himself forth to any one who would listen. There would be originality in such a situation, and one could draw forth revelations worth forming an audience to. He himself had thought that the volte-face such circ.u.mstances demanded would surely leave a man staring at things foreign enough to bore him. This, indeed, had been one of his cherished theories; but the only man he had ever encountered who had become a sort of millionaire between one day and another had been an appalling Yorks.h.i.+re man, who had had some extraordinary luck with diamond-mines in South Africa, and he had been simply drunk with exhilaration and the delight of spending money with both hands, while he figuratively slapped on the back persons who six weeks before would have kicked him for doing it.

This man did not appear to be excited. The duke mentally rocked with gleeful appreciation of certain things Mrs. Braddle detailed. She gave, of course, Burrill's version of the brief interview outside the dining-room door when Miss Alicia's status in the household bad been made clear to him. But the duke, being a man endowed with a subtle sense of shades, was wholly enlightened as to the inner meaning of Burrill's master.

"Now, that was good," he said to himself, almost chuckling. "By the Lord! the man might have been a gentleman."

When to all this was added the story of the friend or poor relative, or what not, who was supposed to be "not quoite reet i' th' yed," and was taken care of like a prince, in complete isolation, attended by a valet, visited and cheered up by his benefactor, he felt that a boon had indeed been bestowed upon him. It was a nineteenth century "Mysteries of Udolpho" in embryo, though too greatly diluted by the fact that though the stranger was seen by no one, the new Temple Barholm made no secret of him.