T. Tembarom Part 89

Joan remembered well how her mother had worked to set the story afloat--how they had gone through the most awful of their scenes-- almost raving at each other, shut up together in the boudoir in Hill Street.

"That's all he remembers, except that he thought some one had hit him a crack on the head. Nothing had hit him. He'd had too much to stand up under and something gave way in his brain. He doesn't know what happened after that. He'd wake up sometimes just enough to know he was wandering about trying to get home. It's been the limit to try to track him. If he'd not come to himself we could never have been quite sure. That's why I stuck at it. But he DID come to himself. All of a sudden. Sir Ormsby will tell you that's what nearly always happens.

They wake up all of a sudden. It's all right; it's all right. I used to promise him it would be--when I wasn't sure that I wasn't lying."

And for the first time he broke into the friendly grin--but it was more valiant than spontaneous. He wanted her to know that it was "all right."

"Oh!" she cried, "oh! you--"

She stopped because the door was opening.

"It's Jem," he said sharply. "Ann, let's go." And that instant Little Ann was near him.

"No! no! don't go," cried Lady Joan.

Jem Temple Barholm came in through the doorway. Life and sound and breath stopped for a second, and then the two whirled into each other's arms as if a storm had swept them there.

"Jem!" she wailed. "Oh, Jem! My man! Where have you been?"

"I've been in h.e.l.l, Joan--in h.e.l.l!" he answered, choking, --"and this wonderful fellow has dragged me out of it."

But Tembarom would have none of it. He could not stand it. This sort of thing filled up his throat and put him at an overwhelming disadvantage. He just laid a hand on Jem Temple Barholm's shoulder and gave him an awkwardly friendly push.

"Say, cut me out of it!" he said. "You get busy," his voice rather breaking. "You've got a lot to say to her. It was up to me before;-- now, it's up to you."

Little Ann went with him into the next room.

The room they went into was a smaller one, quiet, and its oriel windows much overshadowed by trees. By the time they stood together in the center of it Tembarom had swallowed something twice or thrice, and had recovered himself. Even his old smile had come back as he took one of her hands in each of his, and holding them wide apart stood and looked down at her.

"G.o.d bless you, Little Ann," he said. "I just knew I should find you here. I'd have bet my last dollar on it."

The hands he held were trembling just a little, and the dimples quivered in and out. But her eyes were steady, and a lovely increasing intensity glowed in them.

"You went after him and brought him back. He was all wrought up, and he needed some one with good common sense to stop him in time to make him think straight before he did anything silly," she said.

"I says to him," T. Tembarom made the matter clear; "`Say, you've left something behind that belongs to you! Comeback and get it.' I meant Lady Joan. And I says, `Good Lord, man, you're acting like a fellow in a play. That place doesn't belong to me. It belongs to you. If it was mine, fair and square, Little Willie'd hang on to it. There'd be no n.o.ble sacrifice in his. You get a brace on.'"

"When they were talking in that silly way about you, and saying you'd run away," said Little Ann, her face uplifted adoringly as she talked, "I said to father, `If he's gone, he's gone to get something. And he'll be likely to bring it back.'"

He almost dropped her hands and caught her to him then. But he saved himself in time.

"Now this great change has come," he said, "everything will be different. The men you'll know will look like the pictures in the advertis.e.m.e.nts at the backs of magazines--those fellows with chins and smooth hair. I shall look like a chauffeur among them."

But she did not blench in the least, though she remembered whose words he was quoting. The intense and lovely femininity in her eyes only increased. She came closer to him, and so because of his height had to look up more.

"You will always make jokes--but I don't care. I don't care for anything but you," she said. "I love your jokes; I love everything about you: I love your eyes--and your voice --and your laugh. I love your very clothes." Her voice quivered as her dimples did. "These last months I've sometimes felt as if I should die of loving you."

It was a wonderful thing--wonderful. His eyes--his whole young being had kindled as he looked down drinking in every word.

"Is that the kind of quiet little thing you are?" he said.

"Yes, it is," she answered firmly.

"And you're satisfied--you know, who it is I want?-- You're ready to do what you said you would that last night at Mrs. Bowse's?"

"What do you think?" she said in her clear little voice.

He caught her then in a strong, hearty, young, joyous clutch.

"You come to me, Little Ann. You come right to me," he said.

CHAPTER XL

Many an honest penny was turned, with the a.s.sistance of the romantic Temple Barholm case, by writers of paragraphs for newspapers published in the United States. It was not merely a romance which belonged to England but was excitingly linked to America by the fact that its hero regarded himself as an American, and had pa.s.sed through all the picturesque episodes of a most desirably struggling youth in the very streets of New York itself, and had "worked his way up" to the proud position of society reporter "on" a huge Sunday paper. It was generally considered to redound largely to his credit that refusing "in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations," he had been born in Brooklyn, that he had worn ragged clothes and shoes with holes in them, that he had blacked other people's shoes, run errands, and sold newspapers there. If he had been a mere English young man, one recounting of his romance would have disposed of him; but as he was presented to the newspaper public every characteristic lent itself to elaboration. He was, in fact, flaringly anecdotal. As a newly elected President who has made boots or driven a ca.n.a.l-boat in his unconsidered youth endears himself indescribably to both paragraph reader and paragraph purveyor, so did T. Tembarom endear himself. For weeks, he was a perennial fount. What quite credible story cannot be related of a hungry lad who is wildly flung by chance into immense fortune and the laps of dukes, so to speak? The feeblest imagination must be stirred by the high color of such an episode, and stimulated to superb effort. Until the public had become sated with reading anecdotes depicting the extent of his early privations, and dwelling on ill.u.s.trations which presented lumber-yards in which he had slept, and the facades of tumble-down tenements in which he had first beheld the light of day, he was a modest source of income. Any lumber-yard or any tenement sufficiently dilapidated would serve as a model; and the fact that in the shifting architectural life of New York the actual original scenes of the incidents had been demolished and built upon by new apartment-houses, or new railroad stations, or new factories seventy-five stories high, was an un.o.bstructing triviality. Accounts of his manner of conducting himself in European courts to which he had supposedly been bidden, of his immense popularity in glittering circles, of his finely democratic bearing when confronted by emperors surrounded by their guilty splendors, were the joy of remote villages and towns. A thrifty and young minor novelist hastily incorporated him in a serial, and syndicated it upon the spot under the t.i.tle of "Living or Dead." Among its especial public it was a success of such a nature as betrayed its author into as hastily writing a second romance, which not being rendered stimulating by a foundation of fact failed to repeat his triumph.

T. Tembarom, reading in the library at Temple Barholm the first newspapers sent from New York, smiled widely.

"You see they've got to say something, Jem," he explained. "It's too big a scoop to be pa.s.sed over. Something's got to be turned in. And it means money to the fellows, too. It's good copy."

"Suppose," suggested Jem, watching him with interest, "you were to write the facts yourself and pa.s.s them on to some decent chap who'd be glad to get them."

"Glad!" Tembarom flushed with delight. "Any chap would be'way up in the air at the chance. It's the best kind of stuff. Wouldn't you mind?

Are you sure you wouldn't?" He was the warhorse snuffing battle from afar.

Jem Temple Barholm laughed outright at the gleam in his eyes.

"No, I shouldn't care a hang, dear fellow. And the fact that I objected would not stop the story."

"No, it wouldn't, by gee! Say, I'll get Ann to help me, and we'll send it to the man who took my place on the Earth. It'll mean board and boots to him for a month if he works it right. And it'll be doing a good turn to Galton, too. I shall be glad to see old Galton when I go back."

"You are quite sure you want to go back?" inquired Jem. A certain glow of feeling was always in his eyes when he turned them on T. Tembarom.

"Go back! I should smile! Of course I shall go back. I've got to get busy for Hutchinson and I've got to get busy for myself. I guess there'll be work to do that'll take me half over the world; but I'm going back first. Ann's going with me."

But there was no reference to a return to New York when the Sunday Earth and other widely circulated weekly sheets gave prominence to the marriage of Mr. Temple Temple Barholm and Miss Hutchinson, only child and heiress of Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, the celebrated inventor. From a newspaper point of view, the wedding had been rather unfairly quiet, and it was necessary to fill s.p.a.ce with a revival of the renowned story, with pictures of bride and bridegroom, and of Temple Barholm surrounded by ancestral oaks. A thriving business would have been done by the reporters if an ocean greyhound had landed the pair at the dock some morning, and snap-shots could have been taken as they crossed the gangway, and wearing apparel described. But hope of such fortune was swept away by the closing paragraph, which stated that Mr. and Mrs.

Temple Barholm would "spend the next two months in motoring through Italy and Spain in their 90 h. p. Panhard."

It was T. Tembarom who sent this last item privately to Galton.

"It's not true," his letter added, "but what I'm going to do is n.o.body's business but mine and my wife's, and this will suit people just as well." And then he confided to Galton the thing which was the truth.

The St. Francesca apartment-house was a very new one, situated on a corner of an as yet spa.r.s.ely built but rapidly spreading avenue above the "100th Streets"--many numbers above them. There was a frankly unfinished air about the neighborhood, but here and there a "store"

had broken forth and valiantly displayed necessities, and even articles verging upon the economically ornamental. It was plainly imperative that the idea should be suggested that there were on the spot sources of supply not requiring the immediate employment of the services of the elevated railroad in the achievement of purchase, and also that enterprise rightly encouraged might develop into being equal to all demands. Here and there an exceedingly fresh and clean "market store," brilliant with the highly colored labels adorning tinned soups and meats and edibles in gla.s.s jars, alluringly presented itself to the pa.s.ser-by. The elevated railroad perched upon iron supports, and with iron stairways so tall that they looked almost perilous, was a prominent feature of the landscape. There were stretches of waste ground, and high backgrounds of bits of country and woodland to be seen. The rush of New York traffic had not yet reached the streets, and the avenue was of an agreeable suburban cleanliness and calm.

People who lived in upper stories could pride themselves on having "views of the river." These they laid stress upon when it was hinted that they "lived a long way uptown."