The necessary business in London having been transacted, Tembarom went
north to take possession of the home of his forefathers. It had rained
for two days before he left London, and it rained steadily all the way
to Lancashire, and was raining steadily when he reached Temple
Barholm. He had never seen such rain before. It was the quiet, unmoved
persistence of it which amazed him. As he sat in the railroad carriage
and watched the slanting lines of its unabating downpour, he felt that
Mr. Palford must inevitably make some remark upon it. But Mr. Palford
continued to read his newspapers undisturbedly, as though the condition
of atmosphere surrounding him were entirely accustomed and natural. It
was of course necessary and proper that he should accompany his client
to his destination, but the circumstances of the case made the whole
situation quite abnormal. Throughout the centuries each Temple Barholm
had succeeded to his estate in a natural and conventional manner. He had
either been welcomed or resented by his neighbors, his tenants, and his
family, and proper and fitting ceremonies had been observed. But here
was an heir whom nobody knew, whose very existence nobody had even
suspected, a young man who had been an outcast in the streets of the
huge American city of which lurid descriptions are given. Even in
New York he could have produced no circle other than Mrs. Bowse's
boarding-house and the objects of interest to the up-town page, so
he brought no one with him; for Strangeways seemed to have been
mysteriously disposed of after their arrival in London.
Never had Palford & Grimby on their hands a client who seemed so
entirely alone. What, Mr. Palford asked himself, would he do in the
enormity of Temple Barholm, which always struck one as being a place
almost without limit. But that, after all, was neither here nor there.
There he was. You cannot undertake to provide a man with relatives if he
has none, or with acquaintances if people do not want to know him. His
past having been so extraordinary, the neighborhood would naturally be
rather shy of him. At first, through mere force of custom and respect
for an old name, punctilious, if somewhat alarmed, politeness would be
shown by most people; but after the first calls all would depend upon
how much people could stand of the man himself.
The aspect of the country on a wet winter's day was not enlivening. The
leafless and dripping hedges looked like bundles of sticks; the huge
trees, which in June would be majestic bowers of greenery, now held
out great skeleton arms, which seemed to menace both earth and sky.
Heavy-faced laborers tramped along muddy lanes; cottages with soaked
bits of dead gardens looked like hovels; big, melancholy cart-horses,
dragging jolting carts along the country roads, hung their heads as they
splashed through the mire.
As Tembarom had known few persons who had ever been out of America, he
had not heard that England was beautiful, and he saw nothing which led
him to suspect its charms. London had impressed him as gloomy, dirty,
and behind the times despite its pretensions; the country struck him as
“the limit.” Hully gee! was he going to be expected to spend his life in
this! Should he be obliged to spend his life in it. He'd find that out
pretty quick, and then, if there was no hard-and-fast law against it,
him for little old New York again, if he had to give up the whole
thing and live on ten per. If he had been a certain kind of youth, his
discontent would have got the better of him, and he might have talked a
good deal to Mr. Palford and said many disparaging things.
“But the man was born here,” he reflected. “I guess he doesn't know
anything else, and thinks it's all right. I've heard of English fellows
who didn't like New York. He looks like that kind.”
He had supplied himself with newspapers and tried to read them. Their
contents were as unexciting as the rain-sodden landscape. There were no
head-lines likely to arrest any man's attention. There was a lot about
Parliament and the Court, and one of them had a column or two about
what lords and ladies were doing, a sort of English up-town or down-town
page.
He knew the stuff, but there was no snap in it, and there were no
photographs or descriptions of dresses. Galton would have turned it
down. He could never have made good if he had done no better than that.
He grinned to himself when he read that the king had taken a drive and
that a baby prince had the measles.
“I wonder what they'd think of the Sunday Earth,” he mentally inquired.
He would have been much at sea if he had discovered what they
really would have thought of it. They passed through smoke-vomiting
manufacturing towns, where he saw many legs seemingly bearing about
umbrellas, but few entire people; they whizzed smoothly past drenched
suburbs, wet woodlands, and endless-looking brown moors, covered with
dead bracken and bare and prickly gorse. He thought these last great
desolate stretches worse than all the rest.
But the railroad carriage was luxuriously upholstered and comfortable,
though one could not walk about and stretch his legs. In the afternoon,
Mr. Palford ordered in tea, and plainly expected him to drink two cups
and eat thin bread and butter. He felt inclined to laugh, though the tea
was all right, and so was the bread and butter, and he did not fail his
companion in any respect. The inclination to laugh was aroused by the
thought of what Jim Bowles and Julius would say if they could see old T.
T. with nothing to do at 4:30 but put in cream and sugar, as though he
were at a tea-party on Fifth Avenue.
But, gee! this rain did give him the Willies. If he was going to be
sorry for himself, he might begin right now. But he wasn't. He was going
to see this thing through.
The train had been continuing its smooth whir through fields, wooded
lands, and queer, dead-and-alive little villages for some time before it
drew up at last at a small station. Bereft by the season of its garden
bloom and green creepers, it looked a bare and uninviting little place.
On the two benches against the wall of the platform a number of women
sat huddled together in the dampness. Several of them held children in
their laps and all stared very hard, nudging one another as he descended
from the train. A number of rustics stood about the platform, giving it
a somewhat crowded air. It struck Tembarom that, for an out-of-the-way
place, there seemed to be a good many travelers, and he wondered if
they could all be going away. He did not know that they were the curious
element among such as lived in the immediate neighborhood of the station
and had come out merely to see him on his first appearance. Several of
them touched their hats as he went by, and he supposed they knew Palford
and were saluting him. Each of them was curious, but no one was in
a particularly welcoming mood. There was, indeed, no reason for
anticipating enthusiasm. It was, however, but human nature that the
bucolic mind should bestir itself a little in the desire to obtain a
view of a Temple Barholm who had earned his living by blacking boots and
selling newspapers, unknowing that he was “one o' th' gentry.”
When he stepped from his first-class carriage, Tembarom found himself
confronted by a very straight, clean-faced, and well-built young man,
who wore a long, fawn-colored livery coat with claret facings and silver
buttons. He touched his cockaded hat, and at once took up the Gladstone
bags. Tembarom knew that he was a footman because he had seen something
like him outside restaurants, theaters, and shops in New York, but he
was not sure whether he ought to touch his own hat or not. He slightly
lifted it from his head to show there was no ill feeling, and then
followed him and Mr. Palford to the carriage waiting for them. It was a
severe but sumptuous equipage, and the coachman was as well dressed
and well built as the footman. Tembarom took his place in it with many
mental reservations.
“What are the illustrations on the doors?” he inquired.
“The Temple Barholm coat of arms,” Mr. Palford answered. “The people
at the station are your tenants. Members of the family of the stout man
with the broad hat have lived as yeoman farmers on your land for three
hundred years.”
They went on their way, with more rain, more rain, more dripping hedges,
more soaked fields, and more bare, huge-armed trees. CLOP, CLOP, CLOP,
sounded the horses' hoofs along the road, and from his corner of the
carriage Mr. Palford tried to make polite conversation. Faces peered out
of the windows of the cottages, sometimes a whole family group of faces,
all crowded together, eager to look, from the mother with a baby in her
arms to the old man or woman, plainly grandfather or grandmother--sharp,
childishly round, or bleared old eyes, all excited and anxious to catch
glimpses.
“They are very curious to see you,” said Mr. Palford. “Those two
laborers are touching their hats to you. It will be as well to recognize
their salute.”
At a number of the cottage doors the group stood upon the threshold and
touched foreheads or curtsied. Tembarom saluted again and again, and
more than once his friendly grin showed itself. It made him feel queer
to drive along, turning from side to side to acknowledge obeisances, as
he had seen a well-known military hero acknowledge them as he drove down
Broadway.
The chief street of the village of Temple Barholm wandered almost within
hailing distance of the great entrance to the park. The gates were
supported by massive pillars, on which crouched huge stone griffins.
Tembarom felt that they stared savagely over his head as he was driven
toward them as for inspection, and in disdainful silence allowed to
pass between them as they stood on guard, apparently with the haughtiest
mental reservations.
The park through which the long avenue rolled concealed its beauty to
the unaccustomed eye, showing only more bare trees and sodden stretches
of brown grass. The house itself, as it loomed up out of the thickening
rain-mist, appalled Tembarom by its size and gloomily gray massiveness.
Before it was spread a broad terrace of stone, guarded by more griffins
of even more disdainful aspect than those watching over the gates. The
stone noses held themselves rigidly in the air as the reporter of the
up-town society page passed with Mr. Palford up a flight of steps broad
enough to make him feel as though he were going to church. Footmen with
powdered heads received him at the carriage door, seemed to assist him
to move, to put one foot before the other for him, to stand in rows as
though they were a military guard ready to take him into custody.
Then he was inside, standing in an enormous hall filled with furnishings
such as he had never seen or heard of before. Carved oak, suits of
armor, stone urns, portraits, another flight of church steps mounting
upward to surrounding galleries, stained-glass windows, tigers' and
lions' heads, horns of tremendous size, strange and beautiful weapons,
suggested to him that the dream he had been living in for weeks had
never before been so much a dream. He had walked about as in a vision,
but among familiar surroundings. Mrs. Bowse's boarders and his hall
bedroom had helped him to retain some hold over actual existence. But
here the reverently saluting villagers staring at him through windows
as though he were General Grant, the huge, stone entrance, the drive
of what seemed to be ten miles through the park, the gloomy mass of
architecture looming up, the regiment of liveried men-servants, with
respectfully lowered but excitedly curious eyes, the dark and solemn
richness inclosing and claiming him--all this created an atmosphere
wholly unreal. As he had not known books, its parallel had not been
suggested to him by literature. He had literally not heard that such
things existed. Selling newspapers and giving every moment to the
struggle for life or living, one did not come within the range of
splendors. He had indeed awakened in that other world of which he had
spoken. And though he had heard that there was another world, he had had
neither time nor opportunity to make mental pictures of it. His life so
far had expressed itself in another language of figures. The fact that
he had in his veins the blood of the Norman lords and Saxon kings may or
may not have had something to do with the fact that he was not abashed,
but bewildered. The same factor may or may not have aided him to
preserve a certain stoic, outward composure. Who knows what remote
influences express themselves in common acts of modern common life?
As Cassivellaunus observed his surroundings as he followed in captive
chains his conqueror's triumphal car through the streets of Rome, so
the keen-eyed product of New York pavement life “took in” all about
him. Existence had forced upon him the habit of sharp observance. The
fundamental working law of things had expressed itself in the simple
colloquialism, “Keep your eye skinned, and don't give yourself away.” In
what phrases the parallel of this concise advice formulated itself in
55 B.C. no classic has yet exactly informed us, but doubtless something
like it was said in ancient Rome. Tembarom did not give himself away,
and he took rapid, if uncertain, inventory of people and things. He
remarked, for instance, that Palford's manner of speaking to a servant
was totally different from the manner he used in addressing himself. It
was courteous, but remote, as though he spoke across an accepted chasm
to beings of another race. There was no hint of incivility in it,
but also no hint of any possibility that it could occur to the person
addressed to hesitate or resent. It was a subtle thing, and Tembarom
wondered how he did it.
They were shown into a room the walls of which seemed built of books;
the furniture was rich and grave and luxuriously comfortable. A fire
blazed as well as glowed in a fine chimney, and a table near it was set
with a glitter of splendid silver urn and equipage for tea.
“Mrs. Butterworth was afraid you might not have been able to get tea,
sir,” said the man-servant, who did not wear livery, but whose butler's
air of established authority was more impressive than any fawn color and
claret enriched with silver could have encompassed.
Tea again? Perhaps one was obliged to drink it at regular intervals.
Tembarom for a moment did not awaken to the fact that the man was
speaking to him, as the master from whom orders came. He glanced at Mr.
Palford.
“Mr. Temple Barholm had tea after we left Crowly,” Mr. Palford said. “He
will no doubt wish to go to his room at once, Burrill.”
“Yes, sir,” said Burrill, with that note of entire absence of comment
with which Tembarom later became familiar. “Pearson is waiting.”
It was not unnatural to wonder who Pearson was and why he was waiting,
but Tembarom knew he would find out. There was a slight relief on
realizing that tea was not imperative. He and Mr. Palford were led
through the hall again. The carriage had rolled away, and two footmen,
who were talking confidentially together, at once stood at attention.
The staircase was more imposing as one mounted it than it appeared as
one looked at it from below. Its breadth made Tembarom wish to lay
a hand on a balustrade, which seemed a mile away. He had never
particularly wished to touch balustrades before. At the head of the
first flight hung an enormous piece of tapestry, its forest and hunters
and falconers awakening Tembarom's curiosity, as it looked wholly unlike
any picture he had ever seen in a shop-window. There were pictures
everywhere, and none of them looked like chromos. Most of the people in
the portraits were in fancy dress. Rumors of a New York millionaire ball
had given him some vague idea of fancy dress. A lot of them looked like
freaks. He caught glimpses of corridors lighted by curious, high, deep
windows with leaded panes. It struck him that there was no end to the
place, and that there must be rooms enough in it for a hotel.
“The tapestry chamber, of course, Burrill,” he heard Mr. Palford say in
a low tone.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Temple Barholm always used it.”
A few yards farther on a door stood open, revealing an immense room,
rich and gloomy with tapestry-covered walls and dark oak furniture. A
bed which looked to Tembarom incredibly big, with its carved oak canopy
and massive posts, had a presiding personality of its own. It was
mounted by steps, and its hangings and coverlid were of embossed velvet,
time-softened to the perfection of purples and blues. A fire enriched
the color of everything, and did its best to drive the shadows away.
Deep windows opened either into the leafless boughs of close-growing
trees or upon outspread spaces of heavily timbered park, where gaunt,
though magnificent, bare branches menaced and defied. A slim, neat young
man, with a rather pale face and a touch of anxiety in his expression,
came forward at once.
“This is Pearson, who will valet you,” exclaimed Mr. Palford.
“Thank you, sir,” said Pearson in a low, respectful voice. His manner
was correctness itself.
There seemed to Mr. Palford to be really nothing else to say. He wanted,
in fact, to get to his own apartment and have a hot bath and a rest
before dinner.
“Where am I, Burrill?” he inquired as he turned to go down the corridor.
“The crimson room, sir,” answered Burrill, and he closed the door of the
tapestry chamber and shut Tembarom in alone with Pearson.