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 belonged
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.
It had been “ladies” who had fluttered and been anxious about a man in
this quite pretty way.
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 put 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.”
“The voice, the phrases, the carriage might survive,-they do in
remote neighborhoods, I suppose--but the dress is quite delightfully
incredible. It is a work of art,” the duke went on. She had seemed too
good to be true. Her clothes, however, had certainly not been dug out of
a wardrobe of forty years ago.
“When I went to talk to the head woman in the shop in Bond Street I
fixed it with 'em hard and fast that she was not to spoil her. They were
to keep her like she was. She's like her little cap, you know, and her
little mantles and tippets. She's like them,” exclaimed Tembarom.
Did he see that? What an odd feature in a man of his sort! And how
thoroughly New Yorkish it was that he should march into a fashionable
shop and see that he got what he wanted and the worth of his money!
There had been no rashness in the hope that the unexplored treasure
might be a rich one. The man's simplicity was an actual complexity. He
had a boyish eye and a grin, but there was a business-like line about
his mouth which was strong enough to have been hard if it had not been
good-natured.
“That was confoundedly clever of you,” his grace commented
heartily--“confoundedly. I should never have had the wit to think of it
myself, or the courage to do it if I had. Shop-women make me shy.”
“Oh, well, I just put it up to them,” Tembarom answered easily.
“I believe,” cautiously translated the duke, “that you mean that you
made them feel that they alone were responsible.”
“Yes, I do,” assented Tembarom, the grin slightly in evidence. “Put it
up to them's the short way of saying it.”
“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 more unique and 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, 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 go 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 spoke 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.”
“I am sure she said it was a wasted opportunity,” suggested his grace.
“Yes, that was what hit her so hard. 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. It was a stately barouche the coachman and footman of
which equally with its big horses seemed to have hastened to an extent
which suggested almost panting breathlessness. It 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 ascended 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 wicked of you, dear! How you have
frightened us!”
“I begged you to be good, dearest,” said Lady Edith, almost in tears.
“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 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, redheaded 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. Lady Celia wasn't, it is true, “a looker,” with her narrow
shoulders and rather long nose, but she had an air of breeding, and the
charming color of which Palliser had spoken, returning to Lady Edith's
cheeks, illuminated her greatly.
They both were very polite and made many agreeably grateful speeches,
but in the eyes of both there lurked a shade of 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. Almost any
other kind of young man suddenly uplifted by strange fortune they might
have known some parallel for, but a newsboy of New York! All the New
Yorkers they had met or heard of had been so rich and grand as to make
them feel themselves, by contrast, mere country paupers, quite shivering
with poverty and huddling for protection in their barely clean rags,
so what was there to go on? But how dreadful not to be quite right,
precisely right, in one's approach--quite familiar enough, and yet not
a shade too familiar, which of course would appear condescending! And be
it said the delicacy of the situation was added to by the fact that they
had heard something of Captain Palliser's extraordinary little story
about his determination to know “ladies.” 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 do 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, er 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 I've been somebody's servant all my life, and mighty glad of
the chance. This is the first time I've been out of a job.”
What nice teeth he had! 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, with her lovely, ferocious eyes and the small,
black head poised on the exquisite long throat, which was on the verge
of becoming a trifle too thin! 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. She
clung so to his “wonderful qualities” because in all the three-volumed
novels of her youth the hero, debarred from early advantages and raised
by the turn of fortune's wheel to splendor, was transformed at once into
a being of the highest accomplishments and the most polished breeding,
and ended in the third volume a creature before whom emperors paled.
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 Earth.”