It was business of serious importance which was to bring Captain
Palliser’s visit to a close. He explained it perfectly to Miss Alicia a
day or so after Lady Mallowe and her daughter left them. He had lately
been most amiable in his manner toward Miss Alicia, and had given
her much valuable information about companies and stocks. He rather
unexpectedly found it imperative that he should go to London and Berlin
to “see people,” dealers in great financial schemes who were deeply
interested in solid business speculations such as his own.
“I suppose he will be very rich some day,” Miss Alicia remarked the
first morning she and T. Tembarom took their breakfast alone together
after his departure. “It would frighten me to think of having as much
money as he seems likely to have quite soon.”
“It would scare me to death,” said Tembarom. She knew he was making a
sort of joke, but she thought the point of it was her tremor at the
thought of great fortune.
“He seemed to think that it would be an excellent thing for you to
invest in--I’m not sure whether it was the India Rubber Tree Company,
or the mahogany-forests, or the copper-mines that have so much gold and
silver mixed in them that it will pay for the expense of the digging,”
she went on.
“I guess it was the whole lot,” put in Tembarom.
“Perhaps it was. They are all going to make everybody so rich that it
is quite bewildering. He is _very clever_ in business matters. And so
kind. He even said that if I really wished it, he might be able to
invest my income for me and actually treble it in a year. But of course
I told him that my income was your generous gift to me, and that it was
far more than sufficient for my needs.”
Tembarom put down his coffee-cup so suddenly to look at her that she
was fearful that she had appeared to do Captain Palliser some vague
injustice.
“I am sure he meant to be most obliging, dear,” she explained. “I was
really quite touched. He said most sympathetically and delicately that
when women were unmarried, and unaccustomed to investment, sometimes a
business man could be of use to them. He forgot”--affectionately--“that
I had you.”
Tembarom regarded her with tender curiosity. She often opened up vistas
for him as he himself opened them for the Duke of Stone.
“If you hadn’t had me, would you have let him treble your income in a
year?” he asked.
Her expression as that of a soft, woodland rabbit or a trusting
spinster dove.
“Well, of course, if one were quite alone in the world and had only a
small income, it _would_ be nice to have it wonderfully added to in
such a short time,” she answered. “But it was his friendly solicitude
which touched me.”
“If the time ever comes when you haven’t got me,” said Tembarom,
buttering his toast, “just you make a dead sure thing of it that you
don’t let any solicitous business gentleman treble your income in a
year.”
“Temple,” gasped Miss Alicia, “you--you surely cannot mean that you do
not think Captain Palliser is--sincere!”
Tembarom laughed outright his most hilarious and comforting laugh.
“Sincere?” he said. “He’s sincere down to the ground--in what he’s
reaching after; but he’s not going to treble your income or mine. If he
ever makes that offer again, you just tell him I’m interested, and that
I’ll talk it over with him.”
Their breakfast was at an end, and he got up, laughing again, as he
came to her end of the table, and put his arm round her shoulders in
the unconventional young caress she adored him for.
“It’s nice to be by ourselves again for a while,” he said. “Let us go
for a walk together. Put on the little bonnet and dress that are the
color of a mouse. Those little duds just get me. You look so pretty in
them.”
The sixteen-year-old blush ran up to the roots of her gray
side-ringlets. Just imagine his remembering the color of her dress and
bonnet, and thinking that anything could make her look pretty! She was
overwhelmed with innocent and grateful confusion. There really was no
one else in the least like him.
“I wonder if it is wrong of me to be so pleased,” Miss Alicia thought.
“I must make it a subject of prayer.”
She was pathetically serious, having been trained to a view of the
great first cause as figuratively embodied in the image of a gigantic,
irascible, omnipotent old gentleman specially wrought to fury by
feminine follies connected with becoming headgear.
“It has sometimes even seemed to me that our Heavenly Father has a
special objection to ladies,” she had once timorously confessed to
Tembarom. “I suppose it is because we are so much weaker than men, and
so much more given to vanity and petty vices.”
He had caught her in his arms and actually hugged her that time. Their
intimacy had reached the point where the affectionate outburst did not
alarm her.
“Say,” he had laughed, “it’s not the men who are going to have the
biggest pull with the authorities when folks try to get into the place
where things are evened up. What I’m going to work my passage with is
a list of the few ‘ladies’ I’ve known. You and Ann will be at the head
of it. I shall just slide it in at the box-office window and say: ’Just
look over this, will you? These were friends of mine, and they were
mighty good to me. I guess if they didn’t turn me down, you needn’t.
I know they’re in here. Reserved seats. I’m not expecting to be put
with them, but if I’m allowed to hang around where they are, that’ll be
heaven enough for me.’”
“I know you don’t mean to be irreverent, dear Temple,” she had gasped,
“I am quite sure you don’t. It is--it is only your American way of
expressing your kind thoughts.” Somehow or other, he was always _so_
comforting.
He held her arm as they took their walk. She had become used to that
also, and no longer thought it odd. It was only one of the ways he had
of making her feel that she was being taken care of. They had not been
able to have many walks together since the arrival of the visitors, and
this occasion was at once a cause of relief and inward rejoicing. The
entire truth was that she had not been altogether happy about him of
late. Sometimes, when he was not talking and saying amusing New York
things which made people laugh, he seemed almost to forget where he was
and to be thinking of something which baffled and tried him. The way
in which he pulled himself together when he realized that any one was
looking at him was, to her mind, the most disturbing feature of his
fits of abstraction.
As they walked through the park and the village, her heart was greatly
warmed by the way in which every person they met greeted him. They
_liked_ him, really _liked_ him. Every man touched his cap or forehead
with a friendly grin. It was as if there were some extremely human
joke between them. Miss Alicia had delightedly remembered the Duke of
Stone’s saying that he was “the most popular man in the county.”
Tembarom was rather silent during the first part of their walk, and
when he spoke it was of Captain Palliser.
“He’s a fellow that’s got lots of curiosity. I guess he’s asked you
more questions than he’s asked me,” he began at last, and he looked at
her interestedly, though she was not aware of it.
“I thought,--” she hesitated slightly because she did not wish to be
critical,--“I sometimes thought he asked me too many. He asked so much
about you and your life in New York, but more, I think, about you and
Mr. Strangeways. He was really quite persistent once or twice about
poor Mr. Strangeways.”
“What did he ask?”
“He asked if I had seen him, and if you had preferred that I should
not. He calls him your mystery, and thinks your keeping him here is so
extraordinary.”
“I guess it is, the way he’d look at it,” Tembarom dropped in.
“He was so anxious to find out what he looked like. He asked how old he
was and how tall, and whether he was quite mad or only a little, and
where you picked him up, and when, and what reason you gave for not
putting him in some respectable asylum. I could only say that I really
knew nothing about him, and that I hadn’t seen him because he had a
dread of strangers and I was a little timid.”
She hesitated again.
“I wonder,” she said, still hesitating even after her pause--“I wonder
if I ought to mention a rather rude thing I once saw him do?”
“Yes, you ought,” Tembarom answered promptly, “I’ve a reason for
wanting to know.”
“It was such a singular thing to do--in the circumstances,” she went on
obediently. “He knew, as we all know, that Mr. Strangeways must _not_
be disturbed. One afternoon I saw him walk slowly backward and forward
before the west room window. He had something in his hand, and kept
looking up. That was what first attracted my attention--his queer way
of looking up. Quite suddenly he threw something which rattled on the
panes of glass; it sounded like gravel or small pebbles. I couldn’t
help believing he thought Mr. Strangeways would be startled into coming
to the window.”
Tembarom smiled.
“He did that twice,” he said. “Pearson caught him at it, though
Palliser didn’t know he did. He’d have done it three times, or more
than that, perhaps, but I casually mentioned in the smoking-room one
night that some curious fool of a gardener-boy had thrown some stones
and frightened Strangeways, and that Pearson and I were watching
for him, and that if I caught him, I was going to knock his block
off--_bing_! He didn’t do it again. Darned fool! And he’d better not
try it again when he comes back,” remarked Tembarom.
Miss Alicia’s surprised expression made him laugh.
“Do you think he will come back?” she exclaimed, “after such a long
visit?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll come back. He’ll come back as often as he can until
he’s got a chunk of my income to treble--or until I’ve done with him.”
“Until you’ve done with him, dear?” she said inquiringly.
“Oh, well,” he said casually, “I’ve a sort of idea that he may tell me
something I’d like to know. I’m not sure; I’m only guessing. But even
if he knows it, he won’t tell me until he gets good and ready, and
thinks I don’t want to hear it.”
He would not talk any more of Captain Palliser or allow her to talk of
him. He began to make jokes, and led her to other subjects. He asked
her to go to the Hibblethwaites’ cottage and pay a visit to Tummas.
He had learned to understand his accepted privileges in the making
of cottage visits by this time; and when he clicked any wicket-gate,
the door was open before he had time to pass up the wicket-path. They
called at several cottages, and he nodded at the windows of others
where faces appeared as he passed by.
They had a happy morning together, a pleasant drive in the afternoon,
and a cozy evening in the library.
About nine o’clock he laid his paper aside and spoke to her.
“I’m going to ask you to do me a favor,” he said. “I couldn’t ask it
if we weren’t alone like this. I know you won’t mind. I’m going to ask
you to go to your room rather early. I want to try a sort of stunt on
Strangeways. I want to bring him down-stairs if he’ll come. I’m not
sure I can get him to do it; but he’s been a heap better lately, and
perhaps I can.”
“Is he so much better as that?” she said. “Will it be safe?”
He looked as serious as she had ever seen him look, even a trifle more
serious.
“I don’t know how much better he is,” was his answer. “Sometimes you’d
think he was almost all right, and then--The doctor says that if he
could get over being afraid of leaving his room, it would be a big
thing for him. He wants him to go to his place in London so that he can
watch him.”
“Do you think you could persuade him to go?”
“I’ve tried my level best, but so far nothing doing.”
He got up and stood before the mantel, his back against it, his hands
in his pockets.
“I’ve found out one thing,” he said. “He’s used to houses like this.
Every now and again he lets something out quite natural. He knew that
the furniture in his room was Jacobean--that’s what he called it--and
he knew it was fine stuff. He wouldn’t have known that if he’d been a
piker. I’m going to try if he won’t let out something else when he sees
things here, if he’ll come.”
“You have such a wonderfully reasoning mind, dear,” said Miss Alicia as
she rose.
“If Ann had been with him,” he said, rather gloomily, “she’d have
caught on to a lot more than I have. I don’t feel very chesty about the
way I’ve managed it.”
Miss Alicia went up-stairs shortly afterward, and half an hour later
Tembarom told the footmen in the hall that they might go to bed. The
experiment he was going to make demanded that the place should be
cleared of any disturbing presence. He had been thinking it over for
some time past. He had sat in the private room of the great nerve
specialist in London and had talked it over with him. He had talked of
it with the duke on the lawn at Stone Hover. There had been a flush of
color in the older man’s cheek-bones, and his eyes had been alight as
he took his part in the discussion. He had added the touch of his own
personality to it, as always happened.
“We are having some fine moments, my dear fellow,” he had said, rubbing
his hands. “This is extremely like the fourth act. I’d like to be sure
what comes next.”
“I’d like to be sure myself,” Tembarom answered. “It’s as if a flash
of lightning came sometimes, and then things clouded up. And sometimes
when I am trying something out, he’ll get so excited that I daren’t go
on until I’ve talked to the doctor.”
It was the excitement he was dubious about to-night. It was not
possible to be quite certain as to the entire safety of the plan; but
there might be a chance, even a big chance, of wakening some cell from
its deadened sleep. Sir Ormsby Galloway had talked to him a good deal
about brain-cells, and he had listened faithfully, and learned more
than he could put into scientific English. Gradually, during the past
months, he had been coming upon strangely exciting hints of curious
possibilities. They had been mere hints at first, and had seemed almost
absurd in their unbelievableness; but each one had linked itself with
another, and led him on to further wondering and exploration. When
Miss Alicia and Palliser had seen that he looked absorbed and baffled,
it had been because he had frequently found himself, to use his own
figures of speech, “mixed up to beat the band.” He had not known which
way to turn; but he had gone on turning because he could not escape
from his own excited interest, and the inevitable emotion roused by
being caught in the whirl of a melodrama. That was what he’d dropped
into--a whacking big play. It had begun for him when Palford butted
in that night and told him he was a lost heir, with a fortune and an
estate in England; and the curtain had been jerking up and down ever
since. But there had been thrills in it, queer as it was. Something
doing all the time, by gee!
He sat and smoked his pipe and wished Ann were with him because he knew
he was not as cool as he had meant to be. He felt a certain tingling
of excitement in his body, and this was not the time to be excited.
He waited for some minutes before he went up-stairs. It was true that
Strangeways had been much better lately. He had seemed to find it
easier to follow conversation. During the last few days, Tembarom had
talked to him in a matter-of-fact way about the house and its various
belongings. He had at last seemed to waken to an interest in the
picture-gallery. Evidently he knew something of picture-galleries and
portraits, and found himself relieved by his own clearness of thought
when he talked of them.
“I feel better,” he said two or three times. “Things seem
clearer--nearer.”
“Good business!” exclaimed Tem-barom. “I told you it’d be that way.
Let’s hold on to pictures. It won’t be any time before you’ll be
remembering where you’ve seen some.”
He had been secretly rather strung up; but he had been very gradual in
approaching his final suggestion that some night, when everything was
quiet, they might go and look at the gallery together.
“What you need is to get out of the way of wanting to stay in one
place,” he argued. “The doctor says you’ve got to have change, and even
going from one room to another is a fine thing.”
Strangeways had looked at him anxiously for a few moments, even
suspiciously, but his face had cleared after the look. He drew himself
up and passed his hand over his forehead.
“I believe--perhaps he is right,” he murmured.
“Sure he’s right,” said Tembarom. “He’s the sort of chap who ought to
know. He’s been made into a baronet for knowing. Sir Ormsby Galloway,
by jingo! That’s no slouch of a name. Oh, he knows, you bet your life!”
This morning when he had seen him he had spoken of the plan again. The
visitors had gone away; the servants could be sent out of sight and
hearing; they could go into the library and smoke and he could look at
the books. And then they could take a look at the picture-gallery if he
wasn’t too tired. It would be a change, anyhow.
* * * * *
To-night, as he went up the huge staircase, Tembarom’s calmness of
being had not increased. He was aware of a quickened pulse. The dead
silence of the house added to the unusualness of things. He could not
remember ever having been so anxious before, except on the occasion
when he had taken his first day’s “stuff” to Galton. But he showed
no outward signs of excitement when he entered the room and found
Strangeways standing, perfectly attired in evening dress.
Pearson, setting things in order at the other side of the room, was
taking note of him furtively over his shoulder. Quite in the casual
manner of the ordinary man, he had expressed his intention of dressing
for the evening, and Pearson had thanked his stars for the fact
that the necessary garments were at hand. From the first, he had
not infrequently asked for articles such as only the resources of a
complete masculine wardrobe could supply; and on one occasion he had
suddenly wished to dress for dinner, and the lame excuses it had been
necessary to make had disturbed him horribly instead of pacifying him.
To explain that his condition precluded the necessity of the usual
appurtenances would have been out of the question. He had been angry.
What did Pearson mean? What was the matter? He had said it over and
over again, and then had sunk into a hopelessly bewildered mood, and
had sat huddled in his dressing-gown staring at the fire. Pearson
had been so harrowed by the situation that it had been his own idea
to suggest to his master that all possible requirements should be
provided. There were occasions when it appeared that the cloud over him
lifted for a passing moment, and a gleam of light recalled to him some
familiar usage of his past. When he had finished dressing, Pearson had
been almost startled by the amount of effect produced by the straight,
correctly cut lines of black and white. The mere change of clothes had
suddenly changed the man himself--had “done something to him,” Pearson
put it. After his first glance at the mirror he had straightened
himself, as if recognizing the fault of his own carriage. When he
crossed the room it was with the action of a man who has been trained
to move well. The good looks, which had been almost hidden behind a
veil of uncertainty of expression and strained fearfulness, became
obvious. He was tall, and his lean limbs were splendidly hung together.
His head was perfectly set, and the bearing of his square shoulders was
a soldierly thing. It was an extraordinarily handsome man Tembarom and
Pearson found themselves gazing at. Each glanced involuntarily at the
other.
“Now, that’s first-rate. I’m glad you feel like coming,” Tembarom
plunged in. He didn’t intend to give him too much time to think.
“Thank you. It will be a change, as you said,” Strangeways answered.
“One needs change.”
His deep eyes looked somewhat deeper than usual, but his manner was
that of any well-bred fellow doing an accustomed thing. If he had been
an ordinary guest in the house, and his host had dropped into his
room, he would have comported himself in exactly the same way.
They went together down the corridor as if they had passed down it
together a dozen times before. On the stairway Strangeways looked at
the tapestries with the interest of a familiarized intelligence.
“It is a beautiful old place,” he said as they crossed the hall. “That
armor was worn by a crusader.” He hesitated a moment when they entered
the library, but it was only for a moment. He went to the hearth
and took the chair his host offered him, and, lighting a cigar, sat
smoking it. If T. Tembarom had chanced to be a man of an analytical or
metaphysical order of intellect, he would have found during the last
month many things to lead him far in mental argument concerning the
weird wonder of the human mind--of its power where its possessor, the
body, is concerned, its sometime closeness to the surface of sentient
being, its sometime remoteness. He would have known, awed, marveling at
the blackness of the pit into which it can descend, the unknown shades
that may enfold it and imprison its gropings. The old Duke of Stone
had sat and pondered many an hour over stories his favorite companion
had related to him. What curious and subtle processes had the queer
fellow not been watching in the closely guarded quiet of the room
where the stranger had spent his days: the strange thing cowering in
its darkness; the ray of light piercing the cloud one day and seeming
lost again the next; the struggles the imprisoned thing made to come
forth--to cry out that it was only immured, not wholly conquered,
and that some hour would arrive when it would fight its way through
at last! Tembarom had not entered into psychological research. He
had been entirely uncomplex in his attitude, sitting down before his
problem as a besieger might have sat down before a castle. The duke
had sometimes wondered whether it was not a good enough thing that he
had been so simple about it, merely continuing to believe the best
with an unswerving obstinacy and lending a hand when he could. A never
flagging sympathy had kept him singularly alive to every chance, and
now and then he had illuminations which would have done credit to a
cleverer man, and which the duke had rubbed his hands in half-amused,
half-touched elation. How he had kept his head and held to his purpose!
T. Tembarom talked but little as he sat in his big chair and smoked.
Best let him alone and give him time to get used to the newness, he
thought. Nothing must happen that could give him a jolt. Let things
sort of sink into him, and perhaps they’d set him to thinking and lead
him somewhere. Strangeways himself evidently did not want talk. He
never wanted it unless he was excited. He was not excited now, and had
settled down as if he was comfortable. Having finished one cigar, he
took another, and began to smoke it much more slowly than he had smoked
his first. The slowness began to arrest Tembarom’s attention. This was
the smoking of a man who was either growing sleepy or sinking into deep
thought, becoming oblivious to what he was doing. Sometimes he held
the cigar absently between his strong, fine fingers, seeming to forget
it. Tembarom watched him do this until he saw it go out, and its white
ash drop on the rug at his feet. He did not notice it, but sat sinking
deeper and deeper into his own being, growing more remote. What was
going on under his absorbed stillness? Tembarom would not have moved or
spoken “for a block of Fifth Avenue,” he said internally. The dark eyes
seemed to become darker until there was only a pin’s point of light
to be seen in their pupils. It was as if he were looking at something
at a distance--at a strangely long distance. Twice he turned his head
and appeared to look slowly round the room, but not as normal people
look--as if it also was at the strange, long distance from him, and he
were somewhere outside its walls. It was an uncanny thing to behold.
“How dead-still the room is!” Tembarom found himself thinking.
It was “dead-still.” And it was “a queer deal,” sitting, not daring to
move, just watching. Something was bound to happen, sure. What was it
going to be?
Strangeways’s cigar dropped from his fingers and appeared to rouse him.
He looked puzzled for a moment, and then stooped quite naturally to
pick it up.
“I forgot it altogether. It’s gone out,” he remarked.
“Have another,” suggested Tembarom, moving the box nearer to him.
“No, thank you.” He rose and crossed the room to the wall of
book-shelves. And Tembarom’s eye was caught again by the fineness of
movement and line the evening clothes made manifest. “What a swell he
looked when he moved about like that! What a swell, by jingo!”
He looked along the line of shelves and presently took a book down
and opened it. He turned over its leaves until something arrested his
attention, and then he fell to reading. He read several minutes, while
Tembarom watched him. The silence was broken by his laughing a little.
“Listen to this,” he said, and began to read something in a language
totally unknown to his hearer. “A man who writes that sort of thing
about a woman is an old bounder, whether he’s a poet or not. There’s a
small, biting spitefulness about it that’s cattish.”
“_Who_ did it?” Tembarom inquired softly. It might be a good idea to
lead him on.
“Horace. In spite of his genius, the ‘Lampoons’ make you feel he was
rather a blackguard.”
“Horace!” For the moment T. Tembarom forgot himself. “I always heard he
was a sort of Y. M. C. A. old guy--old Horace Greeley. The ‘Tribune’
was no yellow journal when he had it.”
He was sorry he had spoken the next moment. Strangeways looked puzzled.
“The ’Tribune,’” he hesitated. “The Roman tribune?”
“No, New York. He started it--old Horace did. But perhaps we’re not
talking of the same man.”
Strangeways hesitated again.
“No, I think we’re not,” he answered politely.
“I’ve made a break,” thought Tembarom. “I ought to have kept my mouth
shut. I must try to switch him back.”
Strangeways was looking down at the back of the book he held in his
hand.
“This one was the Latin poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65
~B.C.~ You know it,” he said.
“Oh, _that_ one!” exclaimed Tembarom, as if with an air of immense
relief. “What a fool I was to forget! I’m glad it’s him. Will you go on
reading, and let me hear some more? He’s a winner from Winnersville,
that Horace is.”
Perhaps it was a sort of miracle, accomplished by his great desire to
help the right thing to happen, to stave off any shadow of the wrong
thing. Whatsoever the reason, Strangeways waited only a moment before
turning to his book again. It seemed to be a link in some chain slowly
forming itself to draw him back from his wanderings. And T. Tembarom,
lightly sweating as a frightened horse will, sat smoking another pipe
and listening intently to “Satires” and “Lampoons,” read aloud in the
Latin of 65 ~B.C.~
“By gee!” he said faithfully, at intervals, when he saw on the reader’s
face that the moment was ripe, “He knew it all,--old Horace,--didn’t
he?”
He had steered his charge back. Things were coming along the line to
him. He’d learned Latin at one of these big English schools. Boys
always learned Latin, the duke had told him. They just had to. Most of
them hated it like thunder, and they used to be caned when they didn’t
recite it right. Perhaps if he went on, he’d begin to remember the
school. A queer part of it was that he did not seem to notice that he
was not reading his own language.
He did not, in fact, seem to remember anything in particular, but went
on quite naturally for some minutes. He had replaced Horace on the
shelf and was on the point of taking another book when he paused, as if
recalling something else.
“Weren’t we going to see the picture-gallery?” he inquired. “Isn’t it
getting late? I should like to see the portraits.”
“No hurry,” answered T. Tembarom. “I was just waiting till you were
ready. But we’ll go right away, if you like.”
They went without further ceremony. As they walked through the hall and
down the corridors side by side, an imaginative person might have felt
that perhaps the eyes of an ancient, darkling portrait or so looked
down at the pair curiously: the long, loosely built New Yorker rather
slouching along by the soldierly almost romantic figure which in a
measure suggested that others not unlike it might have trod the same
oaken floor, wearing ruff and doublet, or lace jabot and sword. There
was a far cry between the two, but they walked closely in friendly
union. When they entered the picture-gallery, Strangeways paused a
moment again, and stood peering down its length.
“It is very dimly lighted. How can we see?” he said.
“I told Pearson to leave it dim,” Tembarom answered.
He tried, and succeeded tolerably well, to say it casually as he led
the way ahead of them. He and the duke had not talked the scheme over
for nothing. As his grace had said, they had “worked the thing up.” As
they moved down the gallery, the men and women in their frames looked
like ghosts staring out to see what was about to happen.
“We’ll turn up the lights after a while,” T. Tembarom explained still
casually. “There’s a picture here I think a good deal of. I’ve stood
and looked at it pretty often. It reminded me of someone the first day
I set eyes on it; but it was quite a time before I made up my mind who
it was. It used to drive me half dotty trying to think it out.”
“Which one?” asked Strangeways.
“We’re coming to it. I want to see if it reminds you of any one. And I
want you to see it sudden.” “It’s got to be sudden,” he had said to the
duke. “If it’s going to pan out, I believe it’s got to be sudden. When
he first sees that picture he’s _got_ to get a jolt--he’s got to.”
That was why Tembarom had the lights left dim. He had told Pearson to
leave a lamp that he could turn up quickly.
The lamp was on a table near by and was shaded by a screen. He took
it from the shadow and lifted it suddenly, so that its full gleam
fell upon the portrait of the handsome youth with the lace collar and
the dark, drooping eyes. It was done in a second, with a dramatically
unexpected swiftness. His heart fairly thumped.
“Who’s that?” he demanded, with abruptness so sharp-pitched that the
gallery echoed with the sound. “Who’s that?”
He heard a hard, quick gasp, a sound which was momentarily a little
horrible, as if the man’s soul was being jerked out of his body’s
depths.
“Who is he?” Tembarom cried again. “Tell me!”
After the gasp, Strangeways stood still and stared. His eyes were glued
to the canvas, drops of sweat came out on his forehead, and he was
shuddering. He began to back away with a look of gruesome struggle. He
backed and backed, and stared and stared. The gasp came twice again,
and then his voice seemed to tear itself loose from some power that was
holding it back.
“Th--at!” he cried. “It is--it--is Miles Hugo!”
The last words were almost a shout, and he shook as if he would have
fallen. But T. Tembarom put his hand on his shoulder and held him,
breathing fast himself. Gee! if it wasn’t like a thing in a play!
“Page at the court of Charles the Second,” he rattled off. “Died of
smallpox when he was nineteen. Miles Hugo! Miles Hugo! You hold on to
that for all you’re worth. And hold on to me. I’ll keep you steady. Say
it again.”
“Miles Hugo,” the poor majestic-looking fellow almost sobbed it. “Where
am I? What is the name of this place?”
“It’s Temple Barholm, in the county of Lancashire, England. Hold on to
that, too--like thunder!”
Strangeways held the young man’s arm with hands that clutched. He
dragged at him. His nightmare held him yet; Tembarom saw it, but
flashes of light were blinding him.
“Who,” he pleaded in a shaking and hollow whisper, “are you?”
Here was a stumper, by jingo! and not a minute to think it out. But the
answer came all right.
“My name’s Tembarom. T. Tembarom.” And he grinned his splendid grin
from sheer sense of relief. “I’m a New Yorker--Brooklyn. I was just
forked in here anyhow. Don’t you waste time thinking over me. You sit
down here and do your durndest with Miles Hugo.”