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 the earlier part of the
century; 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 passed 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, Lancashire 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 sunshine and hear Italian voices and vowels, figure to yourself
your friend trundling through damp, lead-colored Lancashire lanes
and being addressed in the Lancashire 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 assists 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 passed
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.
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.
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“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--principally 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
passed 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.
That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary
flavor. No man or woman of his own class 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 brass
before an’ wants to chuck it away for brag’s sake.” 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 assumption 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.”
“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 nor severe with her.
“Eh, I’d ’a’ loiked to ha’ heared 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 into
the 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 into the owd Dibdens’ cottage, an’ sits down betwixt ’em
as they sit one each side o’ the foire, an’ he tells ’em they’ve got
to cheer him up a bit becos he’s got naught to do. An’ he shows ’em
the 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 assumed 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. The only man he had ever encountered who had become a
sort of millionaire between one day and another had been an appalling
Yorkshire 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 had 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 whatnot, who was supposed to be “not quoite reet i’ the 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.
If he had only made a secret of him, the whole thing would have
been complete. There was of course in the situation a discouraging
suggestion that Temple Barholm _might_ turn out to be merely the
ordinary noble character bestowing boons.
“I will burn a little candle to the Virgin and offer up prayers that
he may _not_. That sort of thing would have no _cachet_ whatever, and
would only depress me,” thought his still sufficiently sinful grace.
“When, Braddle, do you think I shall be able to take a drive again?” he
asked his nurse.
Braddle was not prepared to say upon her own responsibility, but the
doctor would tell him when he came in that afternoon.
“I feel astonishingly well, considering the sharpness of the attack,”
her patient said. “Our little talk has quite stimulated me. When I go
out,”--there was a gleam in the eye he raised to hers,--“I am going to
call at Temple Barholm.”
“I knew tha would,” she commented with maternal familiarity. “I dunnot
believe tha could keep away.”
A few weeks later there were some warm days, and his grace chose to
go out in his pony-carriage. If he was not in some way amused, he
found himself whirling, with rheumatic gout and seventy years, among
recollections of vivid pictures better hung in galleries with closed
doors. It was always possible to stop the pony-chaise by roadsides
where solitary men sat by piles of stone, which they broke at leisure
with hammers as though they were cracking nuts. He had spent many an
agreeable half-hour in talk with a road-mender who could be led into
conversation and was left elated by an extra shilling. As in years long
past he had sat under chestnut-trees in the Apennines and shared the
black bread and sour wine of a peasant, so in these days he frequently
would have been glad to sit under a hedge and eat bread and cheese
with a good fellow who did not know him and whose summing up of the
domestic habits and needs of “the workin’-mon” or the amiabilities or
degeneracies of the gentry would be expressed, figuratively speaking,
in thoughts and words of one syllable. He did not, it might be told,
desire to enter into conversation with his humble fellow-man from
altruistic motives. He did it because there was always a chance more
or less that he would be amused. He might hear of little tragedies or
comedies; he much preferred the comedies. Blest with a neatly cynical
sense of humor, he knew he had always been an entirely selfish man and
that he was entirely selfish still, and was not revoltingly fretful and
domineering only because he was constitutionally unirritable.
He was, however, amiably obstinate, and was accustomed to getting
his own way in most things. On this day of his outing he insisted on
driving himself in the face of arguments to the contrary. He was so
fixed in his intention that his daughters and Mrs. Braddle were obliged
to admit themselves overpowered.
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he protested when they besought him to allow
himself to be driven by a groom. “The pony does not need driving. He
doesn’t go when he is driven. He frequently lies down and puts his
cheek on his hand and goes to sleep, and I am obliged to wait until he
wakes up.”
“But, Papa dear,” Lady Edith said, “your poor hands are not very
strong. And he might run away and kill you. Please do be reasonable!”
“My dear girl,” he answered, “if he runs, I shall run after him and
kill him when I catch him. George,” he called to the groom holding the
plump pony’s head, “tell her ladyship what this little beast’s name is.”
“The Indolent Apprentice, your Grace,” the groom answered, touching his
hat and suppressing a grin.
“I called him that a month ago,” said the duke. “Hogarth would have
depicted all sorts of evil ends for him. Three weeks since, I could
have outrun him myself. Let George follow me on a horse if you like,
but he must keep out of my sight. Half a mile behind will do.”
He got into the phaëton, concealing his twinges with determination, and
drove down the avenue with a fine air, sitting very erect and smiling.
Indoor existence had become unendurable, and the spring was filling the
woods.
“I love the spring,” he murmured to himself. “I am sentimental about
it. I love sentimentality--in myself, when I am quite alone. If I had
been a writing person, I should have made verses every year in April
and sent them to magazines--and they would have been returned to me.”
The Indolent Apprentice was, it is true, fat, though comely, and he was
also entirely deserving of his name. Like his grace of Stone, however,
he had seen other and livelier days, and now and then he was beset by
recollections. He had once stepped fast, as well as with a spirited
gait. During his master’s indisposition he had stood in his loose box
and professed such harmlessness that he had not been annoyed by being
taken out for exercise as regularly as he might have been. He did not
intend, when he was taken out, to emulate the Industrious Apprentice by
hastening his pace unduly and raising false hopes for the future, but
he sniffed in the air the moist green of leafage and damp moss, massed
with yellow primroses cuddling in it as though for warmth, and he liked
the feel of the road under a pony’s feet.
Therefore, when he found himself out in the world again, he shook his
head now and then and even tossed it.
“You feel it, too, do you?” said the duke. “I won’t remind you of your
years.”
The drive from Stone Hover to the village of Temple Barholm was an easy
one, of many charms of leaf-arched lanes and grass-edged road. The duke
had always had a partiality for it, and he took it this morning.
The groom was a young man of three and twenty, and he felt the spring
also. The horse he rode was a handsome animal, and he himself was not
devoid of a healthy young man’s good looks. He knew his belted livery
was becoming to him, and when on horseback he prided himself on what he
considered an almost military bearing. Sarah Hibson, Farmer Hibson’s
dimple-chinned and saucy-eyed daughter, had been “carryin’ on a good
bit” with a soldier who was a smart, well-set-up, impudent fellow, and
it was the manifest duty of any other young fellow who had considered
himself to be “walking out with her” to look after his charge. His
grace had been most particular about George’s keeping far enough behind
him; and as half a mile had been mentioned as near enough, certainly
one was absolved from the necessity of keeping in sight. Why should not
one turn into the lane which ended at Hibson’s farm-yard, drop into the
dairy, and “have it out wi’ Sarah”?
Dimpled chins and saucy eyes, and bare, dimpled arms, and hands patting
butter while heads are tossed in coquettishly alluring defiance, made
even “having it out” an attractive and memory-obscuring process.
Sarah was a plump and sparkling imp of prettiness, and knew the power
of every sly glance and every dimple and every golden freckle she
possessed. George did not know it so well, and in ten minutes had lost
his head and entirely forgotten even the half-mile behind.
He was lover-like, he was masterful, he brought the spring with him;
he “carried on,” as Sarah put it, until he had actually outdistanced
the soldier, and had her in his arms, kissing her as she laughed and
prettily struggled.
“Shame o’ tha face! Shame o’ tha face, George!” she scolded and dimpled
and blushed. “Wilt tha be done now? Wilt tha be done? I’ll call mother.”
And at that very moment mother came without being called, running, red
of face, heavy-footed, and panting, with her cap all on one side.
“The duke’s run away! The duke’s run away!” she shouted. “Jo seed him.
Pony got freetened at summat--what art doin’ here, George Bind? Get o’
thy horse an’ gallop! If he’s killed, tha ’rt a ruined man.”
* * * * *
There was an odd turn of chance in it, the duke thought afterward.
Though friskier than usual, the Indolent Apprentice had behaved
perfectly well until they neared the gates of Temple Barholm, which
chanced to be open because a cart had just passed through. And it was
not the cart’s fault, for the Indolent Apprentice regarded it with
friendly interest. It happened, however, that, perhaps being absorbed
in the cart, which might have been drawn by a friend or even a distant
relative, the Indolent Apprentice was horribly startled by a large
rabbit which leaped out of the hedge almost under his nose, and, worse
still, was followed the next instant by another rabbit even larger and
more sudden and unexpected in its movements. The Indolent Apprentice
snorted, pawed, whirled, dashed through the open gateway,--the duke’s
hands were even less strong than his daughter had thought,--and
galloped, head in air, and bit between teeth, up the avenue, the low
carriage rocking from side to side.
“Damn! Damn!” cried the duke, rocking also. “Oh, damn! I shall be
killed in a runaway perambulator!”
And ridiculous as it was, things surged through his brain, and once,
though he laughed at himself bitterly afterward, he gasped, “Ah,
Heloïse!” as he almost whirled over a jagged tree-stump; gallop and
gallop and gallop, off the road and through trees, and back again on
to the sward, and gallop and gallop and jerk and jolt and jerk, and he
was nearing the house, and a long-legged young man ran down the steps,
pushing aside footmen, and was ahead of the drunken little beast of a
pony, and caught him just as the phaëton overturned and shot his grace
safely, though not comfortably, in a heap upon the grass.
It was of course no trifle of a shock, but its victim’s sensations
gave him strong reason to hope, as he rolled over, that no bones were
broken. The servants were on the spot almost at once, and took the
pony’s head.
The young man helped the duke to his feet and dusted him with masterly
dexterity. He did not know he was dusting a duke, and he would not have
cared if he had.
“Hello,” he said, “you’re not hurt. I can see that. Thank the Lord! I
don’t believe you’ve got a scratch.”
His grace felt a shade shaky, and he was slightly pale, but he smiled
in a way which had been celebrated forty years earlier, and the charm
of which had survived even rheumatic gout.
“Thank you. I’m not hurt in the least. I am the Duke of Stone. This
isn’t really a call. It isn’t my custom to arrive in this way. May I
address you as my preserver, Mr. Temple Barholm?”
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