Upon the terrace, when he was led up the steps, stood a most perfect
little elderly lady in a state of agitation much greater than his own
or his rescuer’s. It was an agitation as perfect in its femininity as
she herself was. It expressed its kind tremors in the fashion which
belongs to the puce silk dress and fine bits of collar and undersleeve
the belated gracefulness of which caused her to present herself to him
rather as a figure cut neatly from a book of the styles he had admired
in his young manhood. It was of course Miss Alicia, who having, with
Tembarom, seen the galloping pony from a window, had followed him when
he darted from the room.
She came forward, looking pale with charming solicitude.
“I do so hope you are not hurt,” she exclaimed. “It really seemed that
only divine Providence could prevent a terrible accident.”
“I am afraid that it was more grotesque than terrible,” he answered a
shade breathlessly.
“Let me make you acquainted with the Duke of Stone, Miss Alicia,”
Tembarom said in the formula of Mrs. Bowse’s boarders on state
occasions of introduction. “Duke, let me make you acquainted, sir, with
my--relation--Miss Alicia Temple Barholm.”
The duke’s bow had a remote suggestion of almost including a kissed
hand in its gallant courtesy. Not, however, that early-Victorian ladies
had been accustomed to the kissing of hands; but at the period when
he had best known the type he had daily bent over white fingers in
Continental capitals.
“A glass of wine,” Miss Alicia implored--“pray let me give you a glass
of wine. I am sure you need it very much.”
He was taken into the library and made to sit in a most comfortable
easy-chair. Miss Alicia fluttered about him with sympathy still
delicately tinged with alarm. How long, how long, it had been since he
had been fluttered over! Nearly forty years. Ladies did not flutter
now, and he remembered that it was no longer the fashion to call them
“ladies.” Only the lower-middle classes spoke of “ladies.” But he found
himself mentally using the word again as he watched Miss Alicia.
He could scarcely remove his eyes from her as he sipped his wine.
She felt his escape “providential,” and murmured such devout little
phrases concerning it that he was almost consoled for the grotesque
inward vision of himself as an aged peer of the realm tumbling out of a
baby-carriage and rolled over on the grass at the feet of a man on whom
later he had meant to make, in proper state, a formal call. She put
her hand to her side, smiling half apologetically.
“My heart beats quite fast yet,” she said. Whereupon a quaintly novel
thing took place, at the sight of which the duke barely escaped opening
his eyes very wide indeed. The American Temple Barholm placed his arm
about her in the most casual and informally accustomed way, and led her
to a chair, and put her in it, so to speak.
“Say,” he announced with affectionate authority, “you sit down right
away. It’s you that needs a glass of wine, and I’m going to give it to
you.”
The relations between the two were evidently on a basis not common in
England even among people who were attached to one another. There was
a spontaneous, every-day air of natural, protective petting about it,
as though the fellow was fond of her in his crude fashion, and meant
to take care of her. He was fond of her, and the duke perceived it
with elation, and also understood. He might be the ordinary bestower
of boons, but the protective curve of his arm included other things.
In the blank dullness of his unaccustomed splendors he had somehow
encountered this fine, delicately preserved little relic of other days,
and had seized on her and made her his own.
“I have not seen anything as delightful as Miss Temple Barholm for many
a year,” the duke said when Miss Alicia was called from the room and
left them together.
“Ain’t she great?” was Tembarom’s reply. “She’s just great.”
“It’s an exquisite survival of type,” said the duke. “She belongs to my
time, not yours,” he added, realizing that “survival of type” might not
clearly convey itself.
“Well, she belongs to mine now,” answered Tembarom. “I wouldn’t lose
her for a farm.”
“Would you mind my writing that down?” said the duke. “I have a fad for
dialects and new phrases.” He hastily scribbled the words in a tablet
that he took from his pocket. “Do you like living in England?” he asked
in course of time.
“I should like it if I’d been born here,” was the answer.
“I see, I see.”
“If it had not been for finding Miss Alicia, and that I made a promise
I’d stay for a year, anyhow, I’d have broken loose at the end of the
first week and worked my passage back if I hadn’t had enough in my
clothes to pay for it.” He laughed, but it was not real laughter. There
was a thing behind it. The situation was more edifying than one could
have hoped. “I made a promise, and I’m going to stick it out,” he said.
He was going to stick it out because he had promised to endure for a
year Temple Barholm and an income of seventy thousand pounds! The duke
gazed at him as at a fond dream realized.
“I’ve nothing to do,” Tembarom added.
“Neither have I,” replied the Duke of Stone.
“But you’re used to it, and I’m not. I’m used to working ’steen hours a
day, and dropping into bed as tired as a dog, but ready to sleep like
one and get up rested.”
“I used to play twenty hours a day once,” answered the duke; “but I
didn’t get up rested. That’s probably why I have gout and rheumatism
combined. Tell me how you worked, and I will tell you how I played.”
It was worth while taking this tone with him. It had been worth while
taking it with the chestnut-gathering peasants in the Apennines,
sometimes even with a stone-breaker by an English roadside. And this
one was of a type unique and more distinctive than any other--a
fellow who, with the blood of Saxon kings and Norman nobles in his
veins, had known nothing but the street life of the crudest city in
the world, who spoke a sort of argot, who knew no parallels of the
things which surrounded him in the ancient home he had inherited and
in which he stood apart as a sort of semi-sophisticated savage. The
duke applied himself with grace and finished ability to drawing him
out. The questions he asked were all seemingly those of a man of the
world charmingly interested in the superior knowledge of a foreigner
of varied experience. His method was one which engaged the interest
of Tembarom himself. He did not know that he was not only questioned,
but, so to speak, delicately cross-examined, and that before the end
of the interview the Duke of Stone knew more of him, his past existence
and present sentiments, than even Miss Alicia knew after their long and
intimate evening talks. The duke, however, had the advantage of being
a man and of cherishing vivid recollections of the days of his youth,
which, unlike as it had been to that of Tembarom, furnished a degree of
solid foundation upon which to build conjecture.
“A young man of his age,” his grace reflected astutely, “has always
just fallen out of love, is falling into it, or desires vaguely to do
so. Ten years later there would perhaps be blank spaces, lean years
during which he was not in love at all; but at his particular period
there must be a young woman somewhere. I wonder if she is employed in
one of the department stores he speaks of, and how soon he hopes to
present her to us. His conversation has revealed so far, to use his own
rich simile, ‘neither hide nor hair’ of her.”
On his own part, he was as ready to answer questions as to ask them. In
fact, he led Tembarom on to asking.
“I will tell you how I played” had been meant. He made a human document
of the history he enlarged, he brilliantly diverged, he included,
he made pictures, and found Tembarom’s point of view or lack of it
gave spice and humor to relations he had thought himself tired of. To
tell familiar anecdotes of courts and kings to a man who had never
quite believed that such things were realities, who almost found them
humorous when they were casually spoken of, was edification indeed.
The novel charm lay in the fact that his class in his country did not
include them as possibilities. Peasants in other countries, plowmen,
shopkeepers, laborers in England--all these at least they knew of, and
counted them in as factors in the lives of the rich and great; but this
dear young man!
“What’s a crown like? I’d like to see one. How much do you guess such a
thing would cost--in dollars?”
“Did not Miss Temple Barholm take you to see the regalia in the Tower
of London? I am quite shocked,” said the duke. He was, in fact, a
trifle disappointed. With the puce dress and undersleeves and little
fringes, she ought certainly to have rushed with her pupil to that
seat of historical instruction on their first morning in London,
immediately after breakfasting on toast and bacon and marmalade and
eggs.
“She meant me to go, but somehow it was put off. She almost cried on
our journey home when she suddenly remembered that we’d forgotten it,
after all. She’d never been to London before, and you couldn’t make her
believe she could ever get there again, and she said it was ungrateful
to Providence to waste an opportunity. She’s always mighty anxious to
be grateful to Providence, bless her!”
“She regards you as Providence,” remarked the duke, enraptured. With
a touch here and there, the touch of a master, he had gathered the
whole little story of Miss Alicia, and had found it of a whimsical
exquisiteness and humor.
“She’s a lot too good to me,” answered Tembarom. “I guess women as nice
as her are always a lot too good to men. She’s a kind of little old
angel. What makes me mad is to think of the fellows that didn’t get
busy and marry her thirty-five years ago.”
“Were there--er--many of ’em?” the duke inquired.
“Thousands of ’em, though most of ’em never saw her. I suppose you
never saw her then. If you had, you might have done it.”
The duke, sitting with an elbow on each arm of his chair, put the tips
of his fine, gouty fingers together and smiled with a far-reaching
inclusion of possibilities.
“So I might,” he said; “so I might. My loss entirely--my abominable
loss!”
They had reached this point of the argument when the carriage from
Stone Hover arrived. The stately barouche contained Lady Edith and Lady
Celia, both pale, and greatly agitated by the news which had brought
them horrified from Stone Hover without a moment’s delay.
They both descended in haste and swept in such alarmed anxiety up the
terrace steps and through the hall to their father’s side that they had
barely a polite gasp for Miss Alicia and scarcely saw Tembarom at all.
“Dear Papa!” they cried when he revealed himself in his chair in the
library intact and smiling. “How you have frightened us! Where was
George? You must dismiss him at once. Really--really--”
“He was half a mile away, obeying my orders,” said the duke. “A groom
cannot be dismissed for obeying orders. It is the pony who must be
dismissed, to my great regret; or else we must overfeed him until he is
even fatter than he is and cannot run away.”
Were his arms and legs and his ribs and collar-bones and head quite
right? Was he sure that he had not received any internal injury when
he fell out of the pony-carriage? They could scarcely be convinced,
and as they hung over and stroked and patted him, Tembarom stood aside
and watched them with interest. They were the kind of girls he had to
please Ann by “getting next to,” giving himself a chance to fall in
love with them, so that she’d know whether they were his kind or not.
They were nice-looking, and had a way of speaking that sounded rather
swell, but they weren’t ace high to a little slim, red-headed thing
that looked at you like a baby and pulled your heart up into your
throat.
“Don’t poke me any more, dear children. I am quite, quite sound,” he
heard the duke say. “In Mr. Temple Barholm you behold the preserver
of your parent. Filial piety is making you behave with shocking
ingratitude.”
They turned to Tembarom at once with a pretty outburst of apologies
and thanks. They were very polite and made many agreeably grateful
speeches, but in the eyes of both there lurked a shade anxiety which
they hoped to be able to conceal. Their father watched them with a
wicked pleasure. He realized clearly their well-behaved desire to do
and say exactly the right thing and bear themselves in exactly the
right manner, and also their awful uncertainty before an entirely
unknown quantity. Really, if Willocks, the butcher’s boy, had inherited
Temple Barholm, it would have been easier to know where one stood in
the matter of being civil and agreeable to him. First Lady Edith, made
perhaps bold by the suggestion of physical advantage bestowed by the
color, talked to him to the very best of her ability; and when she felt
herself fearfully flagging, Lady Celia took him up and did her very
well-conducted best. Neither she nor her sister were brilliant talkers
at any time, and limited by the absence of any common familiar topic,
effort was necessary. The neighborhood he did not know; London he was
barely aware of; social functions it would be an impertinence to bring
in; games he did not play; sport he had scarcely heard of. You were
confined to America, and if you knew next to nothing of American life,
there you were.
Tembarom saw it all,--he was sharp enough for that,--and his habit
of being jocular and wholly unashamed saved him from the misery of
awkwardness that Willocks would have been sure to have writhed under.
His casual frankness, however, for a moment embarrassed Lady Edith to
the bitterest extremity. When you are trying your utmost to make a
queer person oblivious to the fact that his world is one unknown to
you, it is difficult to know where you stand when he says:
“It’s mighty hard to talk to a man who doesn’t know a thing that
belongs to the kind of world you’ve spent your life in, ain’t it?
But don’t you mind me a minute. I’m glad to be talked to anyhow by
people like you. When I don’t catch on. I’ll just ask. No man was ever
electrocuted for not knowing, and that’s just where I am. I don’t know,
and I’m glad to be told. Now, there’s one thing. Burrill said ‘Your
Ladyship’ to you. I heard him. Ought I to say it, or oughtn’t I?”
“Oh, no,” she answered, but somehow without distaste in the momentary
stare he had startled her into; “Burrill is--”
“He’s a servant,” he aided encouragingly. “Well, I’ve never been a
butler, but this is the first time I’ve been out of a job.”
What a queer, candid, unresentful creature! What a good sort of smile!
And how odd that it was he who was putting her more at her ease by the
mere way in which he was saying this almost alarming thing! By the time
he had ended, it was not alarming at all, and she had caught her breath
again.
She was actually sorry when the door opened and Lady Joan Fayre came
in, followed almost immediately by Lady Mallowe and Captain Palliser,
who appeared to have just returned from a walk and heard the news.
Lady Mallowe was most sympathetic. Why not, indeed? The Duke of Stone
was a delightful, cynical creature, and Stone Hover was, despite its
ducal poverty, a desirable place to be invited to, if you could manage
it. Her ladyship’s method of fluttering was not like Miss Alicia’s,
its character being wholly modern; but she fluttered, nevertheless.
The duke, who knew all about her, received her amiabilities with
appreciative smiles, but it was the splendidly handsome, hungry-eyed
young woman with the line between her black brows who engaged his
attention. On the alert, as he always was, for a situation, he detected
one at once when he saw his American address her. She did not address
him, and scarcely deigned a reply when he spoke to her. When he spoke
to others, she conducted herself as though he were not in the room,
so obviously did she choose to ignore his existence. Such a bearing
toward one’s host had indeed the charm of being an interesting novelty.
And what a beauty she was! Then as in a flash he recalled between
one breath and another the quite fiendish episode of poor Jem Temple
Barholm--and she was the girl!
Then he became almost excited in his interest. He saw it all. As he
had himself argued must be the case, this poor fellow was in love. But
it was not with a lady in the New York department stores; it was with
a young woman who would evidently disdain to wipe her feet upon him.
How thrilling! As Lady Mallowe and Palliser and the others chattered,
he watched him, observing his manner. He stood the handsome creature’s
steadily persistent rudeness very well; he made no effort to push
into the talk when she coolly held him out of it. He waited without
external uneasiness or spasmodic smiles. If he could do that despite
the inevitable fact that he must feel his position uncomfortable, he
was possessed of fiber. That alone would make him worth cultivating.
And if there were persons who were to be made uncomfortable, why not
cut in and circumvent the beauty somewhat and give her a trifle of
unease. It was with the light and adroit touch of accustomedness to
all orders of little situations that his grace took the matter in
hand, with a shade, also, of amiable malice. He drew Tembarom adroitly
into the center of things; he knew how to lead him to make easily
the odd, frank remarks which were sufficiently novel to suggest that
he was actually entertaining. He beautifully edged Lady Joan out of
her position. She could not behave ill to him, he was far too old, he
said to himself, leaving out the fact that a Duke of Stone is a too
respectable personage to be quite waved aside.
Tembarom began to enjoy himself a little more. Lady Celia and Lady
Edith began to enjoy themselves a little more also. Lady Mallowe was
filled with admiring delight. Captain Palliser took in the situation,
and asked himself questions about it. On her part, Miss Alicia was
restored to the happiness any lack of appreciation of her “dear boy”
touchingly disturbed. In circumstances such as these he appeared to the
advantage which in a brief period would surely reveal his wonderful
qualities. And how more than charmingly cordial his grace’s manner was
when he left them!
“To-morrow,” he said, “if my daughters do not discover that I have
injured some more than vital organ, I shall call to proffer my thanks
with the most immense formality. I shall get out of the carriage in the
manner customary in respectable neighborhoods, not roll out at your
feet. Afterward you will, I hope, come and dine with us. I am devoured
by a desire to become more familiar with the ‘New York Earth.’”