The neighborhood of Temple Barholm was not, upon the whole, a brilliant
one. Indeed, it had been frankly designated by the casual guest as dull.
The country was beautiful enough, and several rather large estates lay
within reach of one another, but their owners were neither very rich nor
especially notable personages. They were of extremely good old blood,
and were of established respectability. None of them, however, was given
to entertaining house parties made up of the smart and dazzlingly sinful
world of fashion said by moralists to be composed entirely of young and
mature beauties, male and female, capable of supplying at any moment
enlivening detail for the divorce court--glittering beings whose
wardrobes were astonishing and whose conversations were composed wholly
of brilliant paradox and sparkling repartee.
Most of the residents took their sober season in London, the men of the
family returning gladly to their pheasants, the women not regretfully to
their gardens and tennis, because their successes in town had not been
particularly delirious. The guests who came to them were generally
as respectable and law-abiding as themselves, and introduced no
iconoclastic diversions. For the greater portion of the year, in fact,
diners out were of the neighborhood and met the neighborhood, and were
reduced to discussing neighborhood topics, which was not, on the whole,
a fevered joy. The Duke of Stone was, perhaps, the one man who might
have furnished topics. Privately it was believed, and in part known,
that he at least had had a brilliant, if not wholly unreprehensible,
past. He might have introduced enlivening elements from London, even
from Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Rome; but the sobering influence of
years of rheumatic gout and a not entirely sufficing income prevented
activities, and his opinions of his social surroundings were vaguely
guessed to be those of a not too lenient critic.
“I do not know anything technical or scientific about ditch-water,” he
had expressed himself in the bosom of his family. “I never analyzed it,
but analyzers, I gather, consider it dull. If anything could be duller
than ditch-water, I should say it was Stone Hover and its surrounding
neighborhood.” He had also remarked at another time: “If our society
could be enriched by some of the characters who form the house parties
and seem, in fact, integral parts of all country society in modern
problem or even unproblem novels, how happy one might be, how edified
and amused! A wicked lady or so of high, or extremely low, rank, of
immense beauty and corruscating brilliancy; a lovely creature, male or
female, whom she is bent upon undoing--”
“Dear papa!” protested Lady Celia.
“Reproach me, dearest. Reproach me as severely as you please. It
inspires me. It makes me feel like a wicked, dangerous man, and I have
not felt like one for many years. Such persons as I describe form the
charm of existence, I assure you. A ruthless adventuress with any kind
of good looks would be the making of us. Several of them, of different
types, a handsome villain, and a few victims unknowing of their fate,
would cause life to flow by like a peaceful stream.”
Lady Edith laughed an unseemly little laugh--unseemly, since filial
regret at paternal obliquity should have restrained it.
“Papa, you are quite horrible,” she said. “You ought not to make your
few daughters laugh at improper things.”
“I would make my daughters laugh at anything so long as I must doom them
to Stone Hover--and Lady Pevensy and Mrs. Stoughton and the rector, if
one may mention names,” he answered. “To see you laugh revives me by
reminding me that once I was considered a witty person--quite so. Some
centuries ago, however; about the time when things were being rebuilt
after the flood.”
In such circumstances it cannot be found amazing that a situation such
as Temple Barholm presented should provide rich food for conversation,
supposition, argument, and humorous comment.
T. Tembarom himself, after the duke had established him, furnished an
unlimited source of interest. His household became a perennial fount of
quiet discussion. Lady Mallowe and her daughter were the members of it
who met with the most attention. They appeared to have become members of
it rather than visitors. Her ladyship had plainly elected to extend her
stay even beyond the period to which a fond relative might feel entitled
to hospitality. She had been known to extend visits before with great
cleverness, but this one assumed an established aspect. She was not
going away, the neighborhood decided, until she had achieved that which
she had come to accomplish. The present unconventional atmosphere of the
place naturally supported her. And how probable it seemed, taking into
consideration Captain Palliser's story, that Mr. Temple Barholm wished
her to stay. Lady Joan would be obliged to stay also, if her mother
intended that she should. But the poor American--there were some
expressions of sympathy, though the situation was greatly added to by
the feature--the poor American was being treated by Lady Joan as only
she could treat a man. It was worth inviting the whole party to dinner
or tea or lunch merely to see the two together. The manner in which
she managed to ignore him and be scathing to him without apparently
infringing a law of civility, and the number of laws she sometimes chose
to sweep aside when it was her mood to do so, were extraordinary. If
she had not been a beauty, with a sort of mystic charm for the male
creature, surely he would have broken his chains. But he did not. What
was he going to do in the end? What was she going to do? What was
Lady Mallowe going to do if there was no end at all? He was not as
unhappy-looking a lover as one might have expected, they said. He
kept up his spirits wonderfully. Perhaps she was not always as icily
indifferent to him as she chose to appear in public. Temple Barholm was
a great estate, and Sir Moses Monaldini had been mentioned by rumor. Of
course there would be something rather strange and tragic in it if she
came to Temple Barholm as its mistress in such singular circumstances.
But he certainly did not look depressed or discouraged. So they talked
it over as they looked on.
“How they gossip! How delightfully they gossip!” said the duke. “But it
is such a perfect subject. They have never been so enthralled before.
Dear young man! how grateful we ought to be for him!”
One of the most discussed features of the case was the duke's own
cultivation of the central figure. There was an actual oddity about
it. He drove from Stone Hover to Temple Barholm repeatedly. He invited
Tembarom to the castle and had long talks with him--long, comfortable
talks in secluded, delightful rooms or under great trees on a lawn.
He wanted to hear anecdotes of his past, to draw him on to giving his
points of view. When he spoke of him to his daughters, he called him “T.
Tembarom,” but the slight derision of his earlier tone modified itself.
“That delightful young man will shortly become my closest intimate,” he
said. “He not only keeps up my spirits, but he opens up vistas. Vistas
after a man's seventy-second birthday! At times I could clasp him to my
breast.”
“I like him first rate,” Tembarom said to Miss Alicia. “I liked him the
minute he got up laughing like an old sport when he fell out of the pony
carriage.”
As he became more intimate with him, he liked him still better. Obscured
though it was by airy, elderly persiflage, he began to come upon a
background of stability and points of view wholly to be relied on in
his new acquaintance. It had evolved itself out of long and varied
experience, with the aid of brilliant mentality. The old peer's reasons
were always logical. He laughed at most things, but at a few he did not
laugh at all. After several of the long conversations Tembarom began
to say to himself that this seemed like a man you need not be afraid to
talk things over with--things you didn't want to speak of to everybody.
“Seems to me,” he said thoughtfully to Miss Alicia, “he's an old fellow
you could tie to. I've got on to one thing when I've listened to him: he
talks all he wants to and laughs a lot, but he never gives himself away.
He wouldn't give another fellow away either if he said he wouldn't. He
knows how not to.”
There was an afternoon on which during a drive they took together the
duke was enlightened as to several points which had given him cause for
reflection, among others the story beloved of Captain Palliser and his
audiences.
“I guess you've known a good many women,” T. Tembarom remarked on this
occasion after a few minutes of thought. “Living all over the world as
you've done, you'd be likely to come across a whole raft of them one
time and another.”
“A whole raft of them, one time and another,” agreed the duke. “Yes.”
“You've liked them, haven't you?”
“Immensely. Sometimes a trifle disastrously. Find me a more absolutely
interesting object in the universe than a woman--any woman--and I will
devote the remainder of my declining years to the study of it,” answered
his grace.
He said it with a decision which made T. Tembarom turn to look at him,
and after his look decide to proceed.
“Have you ever known a bit of a slim thing”--he made an odd embracing
gesture with his arm--“the size that you could pick up with one hand
and set on your knee as if she was a child”--the duke remained still,
knowing this was only the beginning and pricking up his ears as he took
a rapid kaleidoscopic view of all the “Ladies” in the neighborhood, and
as hastily waved them aside--“a bit of a thing that some way seems to
mean it all to you--and moves the world?” The conclusion was one which
brought the incongruous touch of maturity into his face.
“Not one of the `Ladies,”' the duke was mentally summing the matter up.
“Certainly not Lady Joan, after all. Not, I think, even the young person
in the department store.”
He leaned back in his corner the better to inspect his companion
directly.
“You have, I see,” he replied quietly. “Once I myself did.” (He had
cried out, “Ah! Heloise!” though he had laughed at himself when he
seemed facing his ridiculous tragedy.)
“Yes,” confessed T. Tembarom. “I met her at the boarding-house where I
lived. Her father was a Lancashire man and an inventor. I guess you've
heard of him; his name is Joseph Hutchinson.”
The whole country had heard of him; more countries, indeed, than one
had heard. He was the man who was going to make his fortune in America
because T. Tembarom had stood by him in his extremity. He would make a
fortune in America and another in England and possibly several others
on the Continent. He had learned to read in the village school, and the
girl was his daughter.
“Yes,” replied the duke.
“I don't know whether the one you knew had that quiet little way of
seeing right straight into a thing, and making you see it, too,” said
Tembarom.
“She had,” answered the duke, and an odd expression wavered in his
eyes because he was looking backward across forty years which seemed a
hundred.
“That's what I meant by moving the world,” T. Tembarom went on. “You
know she's RIGHT, and you've got to do what she says, if you love her.”
“And you always do,” said the duke--“always and forever. There are very
few. They are the elect.”
T. Tembarom took it gravely.
“I said to her once that there wasn't more than one of her in the world
because there couldn't be enough to make two of that kind. I wasn't
joshing either; I meant it. It's her quiet little voice and her quiet,
babyfied eyes that get you where you can't move. And it's something
else you don't know anything about. It's her never doing anything for
herself, but just doing it because it's the right thing for you.”
The duke's chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across
the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was. The one he
remembered had been another man's wife, a little angel brought up in a
convent by white-souled nuns, passed over by her people to an elderly
vaurien of great magnificence, and she had sent the strong, laughing,
impassioned young English peer away before it was too late, and with
the young, young eyes of her looking upward at him in that way which saw
“straight into a thing” and with that quiet little voice. So long ago!
So long ago!
“Ah! Heloise!” he sighed unconsciously.
“What did you say?” asked T. Tembarom. The duke came back.
“I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty,” he answered.
“It was not yesterday nor even the day before. The one I knew died when
she was twenty-four.”
“Died!” said Tembarom. “Good Lord!” He dropped his head and even changed
color. “A fellow can't get on to a thing like that. It seems as if it
couldn't happen. Suppose--” he caught his breath hard and then pulled
himself up--“Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I've
proved what I said--just proved it, and done every single thing she told
me to do.”
“I am sure you have,” the duke said.
“It's because of that I began to say this.” Tembarom spoke hurriedly
that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought. “You're a man, and
I'm a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you're a man, too. I was
crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn't.”
The duke's eyes lighted anew.
“She had her reasons,” he said.
“She laid 'em out as if she'd been my mother instead of a little
red-headed angel that you wanted to snatch up and crush up to you so she
couldn't breathe. She didn't waste a word. She just told me what I was
up against. She'd lived in the village with her grandmother, and she
knew. She said I'd got to come and find out for myself what no one else
could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I'd see--beauties
that were different from anything I'd ever seen before. And it was up to
me to see all of them--the best of them.”
“Ladies?” interjected the duke gently.
“Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like those
in the Ladies' Pictorial. The kind of girls, she said, that would make
her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!” he exclaimed, suddenly
growing hot. “I've seen the whole lot of them; I've done my darndest to
get next, and there's not one--” he stopped short. “Why should any of
them look at me, anyhow?” he added suddenly.
“That was not her point,” remarked the duke. “She wanted you to look
at them, and you have looked.” T. Tembarom's eagerness was inspiring to
behold.
“I have, haven't I?” he cried. “That was what I wanted to ask you. I've
done as she said. I haven't shirked a thing. I've followed them around
when I knew they hadn't any use on earth for me. Some of them have
handed me the lemon pretty straight. Why shouldn't they? But I don't
believe she knew how tough it might be for a fellow sometimes.”
“No, she did not,” the duke said. “Also she probably did not know that
in ancient days of chivalry ladies sent forth their knights to bear
buffeting for their sakes in proof of fealty. Rise up, Sir Knight!” This
last phrase of course T. Tembarom did not know the poetic significance
of.
To his hearer Palliser's story became an amusing thing, read in the
light of this most delicious frankness. It was Palliser himself who
played the fool, and not T. Tembarom, who had simply known what he
wanted, and had, with businesslike directness, applied himself to
finding a method of obtaining it. The young women he gave his time to
must be “Ladies” because Miss Hutchinson had required it from him. The
female flower of the noble houses had been passed in review before
him to practise upon, so to speak. The handsomer they were, the more
dangerously charming, the better Miss Hutchinson would be pleased. And
he had been regarded as a presumptuous aspirant. It was a situation for
a comedy. But the “Ladies” would not enjoy it if they were told. It was
also not the Duke of Stone who would tell them. They could not in
the least understand the subtlety of the comedy in which they had
unconsciously taken part. Ann Hutchinson's grandmother curtsied to them
in her stiff old way when they passed. Ann Hutchinson had gone to the
village school and been presented with prizes for needlework and good
behavior. But what a girl she must be, the slim bit of a thing with a
red head! What a clear-headed and firm little person!
In courts he had learned to wear a composed countenance when he was
prompted to smile, and he wore one now. He enjoyed the society of T.
Tembarom increasingly every hour. He provided him with every joy.
Their drive was a long one, and they talked a good deal. They talked of
the Hutchinsons, of the invention, of the business “deals” Tembarom
had entered into at the outset, and of their tremendously encouraging
result. It was not mere rumor that Hutchinson would end by being a rich
man. The girl would be an heiress. How complex her position would be!
And being of the elect who unknowingly bear with them the power
that “moves the world,” how would she affect Temple Barholm and its
surrounding neighborhood?
“I wish to God she was here now!” exclaimed Tembarom, suddenly.
It had been an interesting talk, but now and then the duke had wondered
if, as it went on, his companion was as wholly at his ease as was usual
with him. An occasional shade of absorption in his expression, as if
he were thinking of two things at once despite himself, a hint of
restlessness, revealed themselves occasionally. Was there something more
he was speculating on the possibility of saying, something more to tell
or explain? If there was, let him take his time. His audience, at all
events, was possessed of perceptions. This somewhat abrupt exclamation
might open the way.
“That is easily understood, my dear fellow,” replied the duke.
“There's times when you want a little thing like that just to talk
things over with, just to ask, because you--you're dead sure she'd never
lose her head and give herself away without knowing she was doing
it. She could just keep still and let the waves roll over her and
be standing there ready and quiet when the tide had passed. It's the
keeping your mouth shut that's so hard for most people, the not saying a
darned thing, whatever happens, till just the right time.”
“Women cannot often do it,” said the duke. “Very few men can.”
“You're right,” Tembarom answered, and there was a trifle of anxiety in
his tone.
“There's women, just the best kind, that you daren't tell a big thing
to. Not that they'd mean to give it away--perhaps they wouldn't know
when they did it--but they'd feel so anxious they'd get--they'd get--”
“Rattled,” put in the duke, and knew who he was thinking of. He saw Miss
Alicia's delicate, timid face as he spoke.
T. Tembarom laughed.
“That's just it,” he answered. “They wouldn't go back on you for worlds,
but--well, you have to be careful with them.”
“He's got something on his mind,” mentally commented the duke. “He
wonders if he will tell it to me.”
“And there's times when you'd give half you've got to be able to talk a
thing out and put it up to some one else for a while. I could do it with
her. That's why I said I wish to God that she was here.”
“You have learned to know how to keep still,” the duke said. “So have I.
We learned it in different schools, but we have both learned.”
As he was saying the words, he thought he was going to hear something;
when he had finished saying them he knew that he would without a doubt.
T. Tembarom made a quick move in his seat; he lost a shade of color and
cleared his throat as he bent forward, casting a glance at the backs of
the coachman and footman on the high seat above them.
“Can those fellows hear me?” he asked.
“No,” the duke answered; “if you speak as you are speaking now.”
“You are the biggest man about here,” the young man went on. “You stand
for everything that English people care for, and you were born knowing
all the things I don't. I've been carrying a big load for quite a while,
and I guess I'm not big enough to handle it alone, perhaps. Anyhow, I
want to be sure I'm not making fool mistakes. The worst of it is that
I've got to keep still if I'm right, and I've got to keep still if I'm
wrong. I've got to keep still, anyhow.”
“I learned to hold my tongue in places where, if I had not held it, I
might have plunged nations into bloodshed,” the duke said. “Tell me all
you choose.”
As a result of which, by the time their drive had ended and they
returned to Stone Hover, he had told him, and, the duke sat in his
corner of the carriage with an unusual light in his eyes and a flush of
somewhat excited color on his cheek.
“You're a queer fellow, T. Tembarom,” he said when they parted in the
drawing-room after taking tea. “You exhilarate me. You make me laugh. If
I were an emotional person, you would at moments make me cry. There's an
affecting uprightness about you. You're rather a fine fellow too, 'pon
my life.” Putting a waxen, gout-knuckled old hand on his shoulder, and
giving him a friendly push which was half a pat, he added, “You are, by
God!”
And after his guest had left him, the duke stood for some minutes gazing
into the fire with a complicated smile and the air of a man who finds
himself quaintly enriched.
“I have had ambitions in the course of my existence--several of them,”
he said, “but even in over-vaulting moments never have I aspired to such
an altitude as this--to be, as it were, part of a melodrama. One feels
that one scarcely deserves it.”