Tembarom did not look as though he had slept particularly well, Miss
Alicia thought, when they met the next morning; but when she asked
him whether he had been disappointed in his last night’s experiment,
he answered that he had not. The experiment had come out all right,
but Strangeways had been a good deal worked up, and had not been
able to sleep until daylight. Sir Ormsby Galloway was to arrive in
the afternoon, and he’d probably give him something quieting. “Had
the coming down-stairs seemed to help him to recall anything?” Miss
Alicia naturally inquired. Tembarom thought it had. He drove to Stone
Hover and spent the morning with the duke; he even lunched with him.
He returned in time to receive Sir Ormsby Galloway, however, and until
that great personage left, they were together in Mr. Strangeways’ rooms.
“I guess I shall get him up to London to the place where Sir Ormsby
wants him,” he said rather nervously, after dinner. “I’m not going to
miss any chances. If he’ll go, I can get him away quietly some time
when I can fix it so there’s no one about to worry him.”
She felt that he had no inclination to go much into detail. He had
never had the habit of entering into the details connected with his
strange charge. She did not ask questions because she was afraid she
could not ask them intelligently.
During the passage of the next few weeks, Tembarom went up to London
several times. Once he seemed called there suddenly, as it was only
during dinner that he told her that he was going to take a late train,
and should leave the house after she had gone to bed. She felt as
though something important must have happened, and hoped it was nothing
disturbing.
When he had said that Captain Palliser would return to visit them, her
private impression, despite his laugh, had been that it must surely be
some time before this would occur. But a little more than three weeks
later he appeared, preceded only half an hour by a telegram, asking
whether he might not spend a night with them on his way farther north.
He could not at all understand why the telegram, which he said he had
sent the day before, had been delayed.
A certain fatigued haggardness in his countenance caused Miss Alicia
to ask whether he had been ill, and he admitted that he had at least
not been well, as a result of long and too hurried journeys, and the
strenuousness of extended and profoundly serious interviews with his
capitalist and magnates.
“No man can engineer gigantic schemes to success without feeling the
reaction when his load drops from his shoulders,” he remarked.
“You’ve carried it quite through?” inquired Tembarom.
“We have set on foot one of the largest, most substantially capitalized
companies in the European business world,” Palliser replied with the
composure which is almost indifference.
“Good!” said Tembarom, cheerfully.
He watched his guest a good deal during the day. He was a bad color for
a man who had just steered clear of all shoals and reached the highest
point of success. He had a haggard eye as well as a haggard face.
It was a terrified eye when its desperate determination to hide its
terrors dropped from it for an instant, as a veil might drop. A certain
restlessness was manifest in him, and he talked more than usual. He
was going to make a visit in Northumberland to an elderly lady of
great possessions. It was to be vaguely gathered that she was somewhat
interested in the great company--the Cedric. She was a remarkable old
person who found a certain agreeable excitement in dabbling in stocks.
She was rich enough to be in a position to regard it as a sort of game,
and he had been able on several occasions to afford her entertainment.
“If she can play with things that way, she’ll be sure to want stock in
it,” Tembarom remarked.
“If she does, she must make up her mind quickly,” Palliser smiled, “or
she will not be able to get it. It is not easy to lay one’s hands on
even now.”
Tembarom thought of certain speculators of entirely insignificant
standing of whom he had chanced to see and hear anecdotes in New York.
He always detested “bluff,” whatsoever its disguise.
“He’s got badly stung,” was his internal comment as he sucked at his
pipe and smiled urbanely at Palliser across the room as they sat
together. “He’s come here with some sort of deal on that he knows he
couldn’t work with any one but just such a fool as he thinks I am. I
guess,” he added in composed reflectiveness, “I don’t really know _how_
big a fool I do look.”
Whatsoever the deal was, he would be likely to let it be known in time.
“He’ll get it off his chest if he’s going away to-morrow,” decided
Tembarom. “If there’s anything he’s found out, he’ll use it. If it
doesn’t pan out as he thinks it will, he’ll just float away to his old
lady.”
He gave Palliser every chance, talking to him and encouraging him to
talk, even asking him to let him look over the prospectus of the new
company and explain details to him, as he was going to explain them
to the old lady in Northumberland. He opened up avenues; but for a
time Palliser made no attempt to stroll down them. His walk would be a
stroll, Tembarom knew, being familiar with his methods. He seemed to be
thinking things over before he decided upon the psychological moment at
which he would begin, if he began. When a man had a good deal to lose
or to win, Tembarom realized that he would be likely to hold back until
he felt something like solid ground under him.
After Miss Alicia had left them for the night, perhaps he felt, as a
result of thinking the matter over, that he had reached a foothold of a
firmness at least somewhat to be depended upon.
“What a change you have made in that poor woman’s life!” he said,
walking to the side table and helping himself to a brandy and soda.
“What a change!”
“It struck me that a change was needed just about the time I dropped
in,” answered his host.
“All the same,” suggested Palliser, tolerantly, “you were immensely
generous. She wasn’t entitled to expect it, you know.”
“She didn’t expect anything, not a darned thing,” said Tembarom. “That
was what hit me.”
Palliser smiled a cold, amiable smile.
“Do you purpose to provide for the future of all your indigent
relatives even to the third and fourth generation, my dear chap?” he
inquired.
“I won’t refuse till I’m asked, anyhow,” was the answer.
“Asked!” Palliser repeated. “I’m one of them, you know, and Lady
Mallowe is another. There are lots of us, when we come out of our
holes. If it’s only a matter of asking, we might all descend on you.”
Tembarom, smiling, wondered whether they hadn’t descended already, and
whether the descent had so far been all that they had anticipated.
Palliser strolled down his opened avenue with an incidental air
which was entirely creditable to his training of himself. His host
acknowledged that much.
“You are too generous,” said Palliser. “You are the sort of fellow
who will always need all he has, and more. The way you go among the
villagers! You think you merely slouch about and keep it quiet, but you
don’t. You’ve set an example no other landowner can expect to live up
to. It’s too lavish. It’s pernicious, dear chap. I know all about the
cottage you are doing over for Pearson and his bride. You had better
invest in the Cedric.”
Palliser had reason to be so much more eager than he professed to be
that momentarily he swerved, despite himself, and ceased to be casual.
“It is an enormous opportunity,” he said--“timber lands in Mexico, you
know. If you had spent your life in England, you would realize that
timber has become a desperate necessity, and that the difficulties
which exist in the way of supplying the demand are almost insuperable.
These forests are virtually boundless, and the company which controls
them--”
“That’s a good spiel!” broke in Tembarom.
It sounded like the crudely artless interruption of a person whose
perceptions left much to be desired.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he replied rather stiffly.
“There was a fellow I knew in New York who used to sell type-writers,
and he had a thing to say he used to reel off when any one looked like
a customer. He used to call it his ’spiel.’”
Palliser’s quick glance at him asked questions, and his stiffness did
not relax itself.
“Is this New York chaff?” he inquired coldly.
“No,” Tembarom said. “You’re not doing it for ten per. He was.”
“No, not exactly,” said Palliser. “Neither would you be doing it for
ten per if you went into it.” His voice changed. He became slightly
haughty. “Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to think you might care
to connect yourself with it. You have not, of course, been in the
position to comprehend such matters.”
But the expression of Tembarom’s face did not change. He only gave a
half-awkward sort of laugh.
“I guess I can learn,” he said.
Palliser felt the foothold become firmer. The bounder was interested,
but, after a bounder’s fashion, was either nervous or imagined that
a show of hesitation looked shrewd. The slight hit made at his
inexperience in investment had irritated him and made him feel less
cock-sure of himself. A slightly offended manner might be the best
weapon to rely upon.
“I thought you might care to have the thing made clear to you,” he
continued indifferently. “I meant to explain. You may take the chance
or leave it, as you like, of course. That is nothing to me at this
stage of the game. But, after all, we are, as I said, relatives of a
sort, and it is a gigantic opportunity. Suppose we change the subject.”
Palliser paused in an unconcerned opening of a copy of the Sunday
“Earth.”
“Oh, I don’t mind trying to catch on to what’s doing in any big
scheme,” said Tembarom.
Palliser’s manner at the outset was perfect. He produced his papers
without too obvious eagerness. He spread them upon the table, and
coolly examined them himself before beginning his explanation. There
was more to explain to a foreigner and one unused to investment than
there would be to a man who was an Englishman and familiar with the
methods of large companies, he said. He went into technicalities, so to
speak, and used rapidly and lightly some imposing words and phrases, to
which T. Tembarom listened attentively, but without any special air of
illumination. He dealt with statistics and the resulting probabilities.
He made apparent the existing condition of England’s inability to
supply an enormous and unceasing demand for timber. He had acquired
divers excellent methods of stating his case to the party of the second
part.
“He made me feel as if a fellow had better hold on to a box of matches
like grim death, and that the time wasn’t out of sight when you’d have
to give fifty-seven dollars and a half for a toothpick,” Tembarom later
said to the duke.
What Tembarom was thinking as he listened to him was that he was not
getting over the ground with much rapidity.
“If he thought I wanted to know what he thinks I’d a heap rather _not_
know, he’d never tell me,” he speculated. “If he gets a bit hot in the
collar, he may let it out. Thing is to stir him up. He’s lost his nerve
a bit, and he’ll get mad pretty easy.”
“Of course money is wanted,” Palliser said at length. “Money is always
wanted, and as much when a scheme is a success as when it isn’t.
Good names, with a certain character, are wanted. The fact of your
inheritance is known everywhere; and the fact that you are an American
is a sort of guaranty of shrewdness.”
“Is it?” said T. Tembarom. “Well,” he added slowly, “I guess Americans
are pretty good business men.”
Palliser thought that this was evolving upon perfectly natural lines,
as he had anticipated it would. The fellow was flattered and pleased.
He went on in smooth, casual laudation:
“No American takes hold of a scheme of this sort until he knows jolly
well what he’s going to get out of it. You were shrewd enough,” he
added significantly, “about Hutchinson’s affair. You ‘got in on the
ground floor’ there. That was New York forethought, by Jove!”
Tembarom shuffled a little in his chair, and grinned a faint, pleased
grin.
“I’m a man of the world, my boy--the business world,” Palliser
commented, hoping that he concealed his extreme satisfaction. “I know
New York, though I haven’t lived there. I’m only hoping to. Your air of
ingenuous ignorance is the cleverest thing about you,” which agreeable
implication of the fact that he had been privately observant and
impressed ought to have fetched the bounder if any thing would.
T. Tembarom’s grin was no longer faint, but spread itself. Palliser’s
first impression was that he had “fetched” him. But when he answered,
though the very crudeness of his words seemed merely the result of
his betrayal into utter tactlessness by soothed vanity, there was
something--a shade of something--not entirely satisfactory in his face
and nasal twang.
“Well, I guess,” he said, “New York _did_ teach a fellow not to buy a
gold brick off every con man that came along.”
Palliser was guilty of a mere ghost of a start. Was there something
in it, or was he only the gross, blundering fool he had trusted to his
being? He stared at him a moment, and saw that there _was_ something
under the words and behind his professedly flattered grin--something
which must be treated with a high hand.
“What do you mean?” he exclaimed haughtily. “I don’t like your tone. Do
you take _me_ for what you call a ’con man’?”
“Good Lord, no!” answered Tembarom; and he looked straight at Palliser
and spoke slowly. “You’re a gentleman, and you’re paying me a visit.
You could no more try on a game to do me in my own house than--well,
than I could _tell_ you if I’d got on to you if I saw you doing it.
You’re a gentleman.”
Palliser glared back into his infuriatingly candid eyes. He was a far
cry from being a dullard himself; he was sharp enough to “catch on” to
the revelation that the situation was not what he had thought it, the
type was more complex than he had dreamed. The chap had been playing
a part; he had absolutely been “jollying him along,” after the New
York fashion. He became pale with humiliated rage, though he knew his
only defense was to control himself and profess not to see through the
trick. Until he could use his big lever, he added to himself.
“Oh, I see,” he commented acridly. “I suppose you don’t realize that
your figures of speech are unfortunate.”
“That comes of New York streets, too,” Tembarom answered with
deliberation. “But you can’t live as I’ve lived and be dead easy--not
_dead_ easy.”
Palliser had left his chair, and stood in contemptuous silence.
“You know how a fellow hates to be thought _dead_ easy”--Tembarom
actually went to the insolent length of saying the words with a touch
of cheerful confidingness--“when he’s _not_. And I’m not. Have another
drink.”
There was a pause. Palliser began to see, or thought he began to
see, where he stood. He had come to Temple Barholm because he had
been driven into a corner and had a dangerous fight before him. In
anticipation of it he had been following a clue for some time, though
at the outset it had been one of incredible slightness. Only his
absolute faith in his theory that every man had something to gain
or lose, which he concealed discreetly, had led him to it. He held a
card too valuable to be used at the beginning of a game. Its power
might have lasted a long time, and proved an influence without limit.
He forbore any mental reference to blackmail; the word was absurd.
One used what fell into one’s hands. If Tembarom had followed his
lead with any degree of docility, he would have felt it wiser to save
his ammunition until further pressure was necessary. But behind his
ridiculous rawness, his foolish jocularity, and his professedly candid
good humor, had been hidden the Yankee trickster who was fool enough to
think he could play his game through. Well, he could not.
During the few moments’ pause he saw the situation as by a photographic
flashlight. He leaned over the table and supplied himself with a fresh
brandy and soda from the tray of siphons and decanters. He gave himself
time to take the glass up in his hand.
“No,” he answered, “you are not ‘dead easy.’ That’s why I am going to
broach another subject to you.”
Tembarom was refilling his pipe.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Who, by the way, is Mr. Strangeways?”
He was deliberate and entirely unemotional. So was T. Tembarom, when,
with match applied to his tobacco, he replied between puffs as he
lighted it:
“You can search me. You can search him, too, for that matter. He
doesn’t know who he is himself.”
“Bad luck for him!” remarked Palliser, and allowed a slight pause
again. After it he added, “Did it ever strike you it might be good luck
for somebody else?”
“Somebody else?” Tembarom puffed more slowly, because his pipe was
lighted.
Palliser took some brandy in his soda.
“There are men, you know,” he suggested, “who can be spared by their
relatives. I have some myself, by Jove!” he added with a laugh. “You
keep him rather dark, don’t you?”
“He doesn’t like to see people.”
“Does he object to people seeing him? I saw him once myself.”
“When you threw the gravel at his window?”
Palliser stared contemptuously.
“What are you talking about? I did not throw stones at his window,” he
lied. “I’m not a school-boy.”
“That’s so,” Tembarom admitted.
“I saw him, nevertheless. And I can tell you he gave me rather a start.”
“Why?”
Palliser half laughed again. He did not mean to go too quickly; he
would let the thing get on Tembarom’s nerves gradually.
“Well, I’m hanged if I didn’t take him for a man who is dead.”
“Enough to give any fellow a jolt,” Tembarom admitted again.
“It gave me a ‘jolt.’ Good word, that. But it would give you a bigger
one, my dear fellow, if he was the man he looked like.”
“Why?” Tembarom asked laconically.
“He looked like Jem Temple Barholm.”
He saw Tembarom start. There could be no denying it.
“You thought that? Honest?” he said sharply, as if for a moment he had
lost his head. “You thought that?”
“Don’t be nervous. Perhaps I couldn’t have sworn to it. I did not see
him very close.”
T. Tembarom puffed rapidly at his pipe, and only ejaculated, “Oh!”
“Of course he’s dead. If he wasn’t,”--with a shrug of his
shoulders,--“Lady Joan Fayre would be Lady Joan Temple Barholm, and
the pair would be bringing up an interesting family here.” He looked
about the room, and then, as if suddenly recalling the fact, added, “By
George! you’d be selling newspapers, or making them--which was it?--in
New York!”
It was by no means unpleasing to see that he had made his hit there. T.
Tembarom swung about and walked across the room with a very perturbed
expression.
“Say,” he put it to him, coming back, “are you in earnest, or are you
just saying it to give me a jolt?”
Palliser studied him. The American sharpness was not always so keen as
it seemed. His face would have betrayed his uneasiness to the dullest
onlooker.
“Have you any objection to my seeing him in his own room?” Palliser
inquired.
“It does him harm to see people,” Tembarom said with nervous bruskness.
“It worries him.”
Palliser smiled a quiet, but far from agreeable, smile. He enjoyed what
he put into it.
“Quite so; best to keep him quiet,” he returned. “Do you know what
my advice would be? Put him in a comfortable sanatorium. A lot of
stupid investigations would end in nothing, of course, but they’d be a
frightful bore.”
He thought it extraordinarily stupid in T. Tembarom to come nearer to
him with an eagerness entirely unconcealed, if he really knew what he
was doing.
“Are you sure that if you saw him close you’d _know_, so that you could
swear to him?” he demanded.
“You’re extremely nervous, aren’t you?” Palliser watched him with
smiling coolness. “Of course Jem Temple Barholm is dead; but I’ve no
doubt that if I saw this man of yours, I could swear he had remained
dead--if I were asked.”
“If you knew him well, you could make me sure. You could swear one way
or another. I want to be _sure_,” said Tembarom.
“So should I in your place; couldn’t be too sure. Well, since you ask
me, I _could_ swear. I knew him well enough. He was one of my most
intimate enemies. What do you say to letting me see him?”
“I would if I could,” Tembarom replied, as if thinking it over. “I
would if I could.”
Palliser treated him to the far from pleasing smile again.
“But it’s quite impossible at present?” he suggested. “Excitement is
not good for him, and all that sort of thing. You want time to think it
over.”
Tembarom’s slowly uttered answer, spoken as if he were still
considering the matter, was far from being the one he had expected.
“I want time; but that’s not the reason you can’t see him right now.
You can’t see him because he’s not here. He’s gone.”
Then it was Palliser who started, taken totally unaware in a manner
which disgusted him altogether. He had to pull himself up.
“He’s gone!” he repeated. “You are quicker than I thought. You’ve got
him safely away, have you? Well, I told you a comfortable sanatorium
would be a good idea.”
“Yes, you did.” T. Tembarom hesitated, seeming to be thinking it over
again. “That’s so.” He laid his pipe aside because it had gone out.
He suddenly sat down at the table, putting his elbows on it and his
face in his hands, with a harried effect of wanting to think it over in
a sort of withdrawal from his immediate surroundings. This was as it
should be. His Yankee readiness had deserted him altogether.
“By Jove! you are nervous!” Palliser commented. “It’s not surprising,
though. I can sympathize with you.” With a markedly casual air he
himself sat down and drew his documents toward him. “Let us talk of
something else,” he said. He preferred to be casual and incidental, if
he were allowed. It was always better to suggest things and let them
sink in until people saw the advantage of considering them and you. To
manage a business matter without open argument or too frank a display
of weapons was at once more comfortable and in better taste.
“You are making a great mistake in not going into this,” he suggested
amiably. “You could go in now, as you went into Hutchinson’s affair,
‘on the ground floor.’ That’s a good enough phrase, too. Twenty
thousand pounds would make you a million. You Americans understand
nothing less than millions.”
But T. Tembarom did not take him up. He muttered in a worried way from
behind his shading hands, “We’ll talk about that later.”
“Why not talk about it now, before anything can interfere?” Palliser
persisted politely, almost gently.
Tembarom sprang up, restless and excited. He had plainly been planning
fast in his temporary seclusion.
“I’m thinking of what you said about Lady Joan,” he burst forth. “Say,
she’s gone through all this Jem Temple Barholm thing once; it about
half killed her. If any one raised false hopes for her, she’d go
through it all again. Once is enough for any woman.”
His effect at professing heat and strong feeling made a spark of
amusement show itself in Palliser’s eye. It struck him as being
peculiarly American in its affectation of sentiment and chivalry.
“I see,” he said. “It’s Lady Joan you’re disturbed about. You want to
spare her another shock. You are a considerate man, as well as a man
of business.”
“I don’t want her to begin to hope if--”
“Very good taste on your part.” Palliser’s polite approval was
admirable, but he tapped lightly on the paper after expressing it. “I
don’t want to seem to press you about this, but don’t you feel inclined
to consider it? I can assure you that an investment of this sort would
be a good thing to depend on if the unexpected happened. If you gave
me your check now, it would be Cedric stock to-morrow, and quite safe.
Suppose you--”
“I--I don’t believe you were right--about what you thought.” The
sharp-featured face was changing from pale to red. “You’d have to be
able to swear to it, anyhow, and I don’t believe you can.” He looked at
Palliser in eager and anxious uncertainty. “If you could,” he dragged
out, “I shouldn’t have a check-book. Where would you be then?”
“I should be in comfortable circumstances, dear chap, and so would you
if you gave me the money to-night, while you possess a check-book. It
would be only a sort of temporary loan in any case, whatever turned up.
The investment would quadruple itself. But there is no time to be lost.
Understand that.”
T. Tembarom broke out into a sort of boyish resentment.
“I don’t believe he did look like him, anyhow,” he cried. “I believe
it’s all a bluff.” His crude-sounding young swagger had a touch of
final desperation in it as he turned on Palliser. “I’m dead sure it’s
a bluff. What a fool I was not to think of that! You want to bluff me
into going into this Cedric thing. You could no more swear he was like
him than--than I could.”
The outright, presumptuous, bold stripping bare of his phrases
infuriated Palliser too suddenly and too much. He stepped up to him and
looked into his eyes.
“Bluff you, you young bounder!” he flung out at him. “You’re losing
your head. You’re not in New York streets here. You are talking to a
gentleman. No,” he said furiously, “I couldn’t swear that he was like
him, but what I _can_ swear in any court of justice is that the man I
saw at the window _was_ Jem Temple Barholm, and no other man on earth.”
[Illustration]
When he had said it, he saw the astonishing dolt change his expression
utterly again, as if in a flash. He stood up, putting his hands in his
pockets. His face changed, his voice changed.
“Fine!” he said. “First-rate! That’s what I wanted to get on to.”