T. Tembarom Part 29

"T," she ended with much emphasis--"R. S. _T_."

His expression cleared itself.

"T," he repeated. "T--Tembarom. R, S, T. How clever you are!"

Little Ann's gaze concentrated itself still more intently.

"Now you'll never forget it again," she said, "because of the T.

You'll say the other letters until you come to it. R, S, T."

"T. Tembarom," he ended relievedly. "How you help me!" He took her hand and kissed it very gently.

"We are all going to help you," Ann soothed him, "T. Tembarom most of all."

"Say," Tembarom broke out in an aside to her, "I'm going to come here and try things on him every day. When it seems like he gets on to something, however little a thing it is, I'm going to follow it up and see if it won't get somewhere."

Ann nodded.

"There'll be something some day," she said. "Are you quite comfortable here?" she asked aloud to Strangeways.

"Very comfortable, thank you," he answered courteously. "They are beautiful rooms. They are furnished with such fine old things. This is entirely Jacobean. It's quite perfect." He glanced about him. "And so quiet. No one comes in here but my man, and he is a very nice chap. I never had a man who knew his duties better."

Little Ann and Tembarom looked at each other.

"I shouldn't be a bit surprised," she said after they had left the room, "if it wouldn't be a good thing to get Pearson to try to talk to him now and then. He's been used to a man-servant."

"Yes," answered Tembarom. "Pearson didn't rattle HIM, you bet your life."

CHAPTER XIV

He could not persuade them to remain to take lunch with him. The firmness of Hutchinson's declination was not unconnected with a private feeling that "them footmen chaps 'u'd be on the lookout to see the way you handled every bite you put in your mouth." He couldn't have stood it, dang their impudence! Little Ann, on her part, frankly and calmly said, "It wouldn't DO." That was all, and evidently covered everything.

After they had gone, the fog lifted somewhat, but though it withdrew from the windows, it remained floating about in ma.s.ses, like huge ghosts, among the trees of the park. When Tembarom sat down alone to prolong his lunch with the aid of Burrill and the footmen, he was confronted by these unearthly shapes every time he lifted his eyes to the window he faced from his place at the table. It was an outlook which did not inspire to cheerfulness, and the fact that Ann and her father were going back to Manchester and later to America left him without even the simple consolation of a healthy appet.i.te. Things were bound to get better after a while; they were BOUND to. A fellow would be a fool if he couldn't fix it somehow so that he could enjoy himself, with money to burn. If you made up your mind you couldn't stand the way things were, you didn't have to lie down under them, with a thousand or so "per" coming in. You could fix it so that it would be different. By jinks! there wasn't any law against your giving it all to the church but just enough to buy a flat in Harlem out- right, if you wanted to. But you weren't going to run crazy and do a lot of fool things in a minute, and be sorry the rest of your life.

Money was money. And first and foremost there was Ann, with her round cheeks flushed and her voice all sweet and queer, saying, "You wouldn't be T. Tembarom; and it was T. Tembarom that--that was T.

Tembarom."

He couldn't help knowing what she had begun to say, and his own face flushed as he thought of it. He was at that time of life when there generally happens to be one center about which the world revolves. The creature who pa.s.ses through this period of existence without watching it revolve about such a center has missed an extraordinary and singularly developing experience. It is sometimes happy, often disastrous, but always more or less developing. Speaking calmly, detachedly, but not cynically, it is a phase. During its existence it is the blood in the veins, the sight of the eyes, the beat of the pulse, the throb of the heart. It is also the day and the night, the sun, the moon, and the stars, heaven and h.e.l.l, the entire universe.

And it doesn't matter in the least to any one but the creatures living through it. T. Tembarom was in the midst of it. There was Ann. There was this new crazy thing which had happened to him--"this fool thing,"

as he called it. There was this monstrous, magnificent house,--he knew it was magnificent, though it wasn't his kind,--there was old Palford and his solemn talk about ancestors and the name of Temple Barholm. It always reminded him of how ashamed he had been in Brooklyn of the "Temple Temple" and how he had told lies to prevent the fellows finding out about it. And there was seventy thousand pounds a year, and there was Ann, who looked as soft as a baby,--Good Lord! how soft she'd feel if you got her in your arms and squeezed her!--and yet was somehow strong enough to keep him just where she wanted him to stay and believed he ought to stay until "he had found out." That was it.

She wasn't doing it for any fool little idea of making herself seem more important: she just believed it. She was doing it because she wanted to let him "have his chance," just as if she were his mother instead of the girl he was clean crazy about. His chance! He laughed outright--a short, confident laugh which startled Burrill exceedingly.

When he went back to the library and lighted his pipe he began to stride up and down as he continued to think it over.

"I wish she was as sure as I am," he said. "I wish she was as sure of me as I am of myself--and as I am of her." He laughed the short, confident laugh again. "I wish she was as sure as I am of us both.

We're all right. I've got to get through this, and find out what it's best to do, and I've got to show her. When I've had my chance good and plenty, us two for little old New York! Gee! won't it be fine!" he exclaimed imaginatively. "Her going over her bills, looking like a peach of a baby that's trying to knit its brows, and adding up, and thinking she ought to economize. She'd do it if we had ten million."

He laughed outright joyfully. "Good Lord! I should kiss her to death!"

The simplest process of ratiocination would lead to a realization of the fact that though he was lonely and uncomfortable, he was not in the least pathetic or sorry for himself. His normal mental and physical structure kept him steady on his feet, and his practical and unsentimental training, combining itself with a touch of iron which centuries ago had expressed itself through some fighting Temple Barholm and a medium of battle-axes, crossbows, and spears, did the rest.

"It'd take more than this to get me where I'd be down and out. I'm feeling fine," he said. "I believe I'll go and 'take a walk,' as Palford says."

The fog-wreaths in the park were floating away, and he went out grinning and whistling, giving Burrill and the footman a nod as he pa.s.sed them with a springing young stride. He got the door open so quickly that he left them behind him frustrated and staring at each other.

"It wasn't our fault," said Burrill, gloomily. "He's never had a door opened for him in his life. This won't do for me."

He was away for about an hour, and came back in the best of spirits.

He had found out that there was something in "taking a walk" if a fellow had nothing else to do. The park was "fine," and he had never seen anything like it. When there were leaves on the trees and the gra.s.s and things were green, it would be better than Central Park itself. You could have base-ball matches in it. What a cinch it would be if you charged gate-money! But he supposed you couldn't if it belonged to you and you had three hundred and fifty thousand a year.

You had to get used to that. But it did seem a fool business to have all that land and not make a cent out of it. If it was just outside New York and you cut it up into lots, you'd just pile it up. He was quite innocent--calamitously innocent and commercial and awful in his views. Thoughts such as these had been crammed into his brain by life ever since he had gone down the staircase of the Brooklyn tenement with his twenty-five cents in his ten-year-old hand.

The stillness of the house seemed to have accentuated itself when he returned to it. His sense of it let him down a little as he entered.

The library was like a tomb--a comfortable luxurious tomb with a bright fire in it. A new Punch and the morning papers had been laid upon a table earlier in the day, and he sat down to look at them.

"I guess about fifty-seven or eight of the hundred and thirty- six hours have gone by," he said. "But, gee! ain't it lonesome!"

He sat so still trying to interest himself in "London Day by Day" in the morning paper that the combination of his exercise in the fresh air and the warmth of the fire made him drowsy. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes without being aware that he did so. He was on the verge of a doze.

He remained upon the verge for a few minutes, and then a soft, rustling sound made him open his eyes.

An elderly little lady had timidly entered the room. She was neatly dressed in an old-fashioned and far-from-new black silk dress, with a darned lace collar and miniature brooch at her neck. She had also thin, gray side-ringlets dangling against her cheeks from beneath a small, black lace cap with pale-purple ribbons on it. She had most evidently not expected to find any one in the room, and, having seen Tembarom, gave a half-frightened cough.

"I--I beg your pardon," she faltered. "I really did not mean to intrude--really."

Tembarom jumped up, awkward, but good-natured. Was she a kind of servant who was a lady?

"Oh, that's all right," he said.

But she evidently did not feel that it was all right. She looked as though she felt that she had been caught doing something wrong, and must properly propitiate by apology.

"I'm so sorry. I thought you had gone out--Mr. Temple Barholm."

"I did go out--to take a walk; but I came in."

Having been discovered in her overt act, she evidently felt that duty demanded some further ceremony from her. She approached him very timidly, but with an exquisite, little elderly early-Victorian manner.

She was of the most astonishingly perfect type, though Tembarom was not aware of the fact. The manner, a century earlier, would have expressed itself in a curtsy.

"It is Mr. Temple Barholm, isn't it? " she inquired.

"Yes; it has been for the last few weeks," he answered, wondering why she seemed so in awe of him and wishing she didn't.

"I ought to apologize for being here," she began.

"Say, don't, please!" he interrupted. "What I feel is, that it ought to be up to me to apologize for being here."

She was really quite flurried and distressed.