T. Tembarom Part 9

"You're very wet," she said. "You'll take a bad cold if you're not careful. Mrs. Bowse thinks you ought to go right to bed and have something hot to drink."

"It seems a long time since I was in bed," he answered her.

"I'm very tired. Thank you." He drew a weary, sighing breath, but he didn't move his eyes from the girl's face. Perhaps the cessation of action in certain cells of his brain had increased action in others.

He looked as though he were seeing something in Little Ann's face which might not have revealed itself so clearly to the more normal gaze.

He moved slightly nearer to her. He was a tall man, and had to look down at her.

"What is your name?" he asked anxiously. "Names trouble me."

It was Ann who drew a little nearer to him now. She had to look up, and the soft, absorbed kindness in her eyes might, Tembarom thought, have soothed a raging lion, it was so intent on its purpose.

"My name is Ann Hutchinson; but never you mind about it now," she said. "I'll tell it to you again. Let Mr. Tembarom take you up-stairs to bed. You'll be better in the morning." And because his hollow eyes rested on her so fixedly she put her hand on his wet sleeve.

"You're wet through," she said. "That won't do."

He looked down at her hand and then at her face again.

"Help me," he pleaded, "just help me. I don't know what's happened.

Have I gone mad? "

"No," she answered; "not a bit. It'll all come right after a while; you'll see."

"Will it, will it?" he begged, and then suddenly his eyes were full of tears. It was a strange thing to see him in his bewildered misery try to pull himself together, and bite his shaking lips as though he vaguely remembered that he was a man. "I beg pardon," he faltered: "I suppose I'm ill."

"I don't know where to put him," Mrs. Bowse was saying half aside; "I've not got a room empty."

"Put him in my bed and give me a shake-down on the floor," said Tembarom. "That'll be all right. He doesn't want me to leave him, anyhow."

He turned to the money on the table.

"Say," he said to his guest, "there's two thousand five hundred dollars here. We've counted it to make sure. That's quite some money.

And it's yours--"

The stranger looked disturbed and made a nervous gesture.

"Don't, don't!" he broke in. "Keep it. Some one took the rest. This was hidden. It will pay."

"You see he isn't real' out of his mind," Mrs. Bowse murmured feelingly.

"No, not real' out of it," said Tembarom. "Say,"--as an inspiration occurred to him, --"I guess maybe Miss Hutchinson will keep it. Will you, Little Ann? You can give it to him when he wants it."

"It's a good bit of money," said Little Ann, soberly; "but I can put it in a bank and pay Mrs. Bowse his board every week. Yes, I'll take it. Now he must go to bed. It's a comfortable little room," she said to the stranger, "and Mrs. Bowse will make you a hot milk-punch.

That'll be nourishing."

"Thank you," murmured the man, still keeping his yearning eyes on her.

"Thank you."

So he was taken up to the fourth floor and put into Tembarom's bed.

The hot milk-punch seemed to take the chill out of him, and when, by lying on his pillow and gazing at the shakedown on the floor as long as he could keep his eyes open, he had convinced himself that Tembarom was going to stay with him, he fell asleep.

Little Ann went back to her father carrying a roll of bills in her hands. It was a roll of such size that Hutchinson started up in his chair and stared at the sight of it.

"Is that the money?" he exclaimed. "What are you going to do with it?

What have you found out, la.s.s?"

"Yes, this is it," she answered. "Mr. Tembarom asked me to take care of it. I'm going to put it in the bank. But we haven't found out anything."

CHAPTER VI

His was the opening incident of the series of extraordinary and altogether incongruous events which took place afterwards, as it appeared to T. Tembarom, like scenes in a play in which he had become involved in a manner which one might be inclined to regard humorously and make jokes about, because it was a thousand miles away from anything like real life. That was the way it struck him. The events referred to, it was true, were things one now and then read about in newspapers, but while the world realized that they were actual occurrences, one rather regarded them, when their parallels were reproduced in books and plays, as belonging alone to the world of pure and highly romantic fiction.

"I guess the reason why it seems that way," he summed it up to Hutchinson and Little Ann, after the worst had come to the worst, "is because we've not only never known any one it's happened to, but we've never known any one that's known any one it's happened to. I've got to own up that it makes me feel as if the fellows'd just yell right out laughing when they heard it."

The stranger's money had been safely deposited in a bank, and the stranger himself still occupied Tembarom's bedroom. He slept a great deal and was very quiet. With great difficulty Little Ann had persuaded him to let a doctor see him, and the doctor had been much interested in his case. He had expected to find some signs of his having received accidentally or otherwise a blow upon the head, but on examination he found no scar or wound. The condition he was in was frequently the result of concussion of the brain, sometimes of prolonged nervous strain or harrowing mental shock. Such cases occurred not infrequently. Quiet and entire freedom from excitement would do more for such a condition than anything else. If he was afraid of strangers, by all means keep them from him. Tembarom had been quite right in letting him think he would help him to remember, and that somehow he would in the end reach the place he had evidently set out to go to. Nothing must be allowed to excite him. It was well he had had money on his person and that he had fallen into friendly hands. A city hospital would not have been likely to help him greatly.

The restraint of its necessary discipline might have alarmed him.

So long as he was persuaded that Tembarom was not going to desert him, he was comparatively calm, though sunk in a piteous and tormented melancholy. His worst hours were when he sat alone in the hall bedroom, with his face buried in his hands. He would so sit without moving or speaking, and Little Ann discovered that at these times he was trying to remember. Sometimes he would suddenly rise and walk about the little room, muttering, with woe in his eyes. Ann, who saw how hard this was for him, found also that to attempt to check or distract him was even worse. When, sitting in her father's room, which was on the other side of the wall, she heard his fretted, hurried pacing feet, her face lost its dimpled cheerfulness. She wondered if her mother would not have discovered some way of clearing the black cloud distracting his brain. Nothing would induce him to go down to the boarders' dining-room for his meals, and the sight of a servant alarmed him so that it was Ann who took him the scant food he would eat. As the time of her return to England with her father drew near, she wondered what Mr. Tembarom would do without her services. It was she who suggested that they must have a name for him, and the name of a part of Manchester had provided one. There was a place called Strangeways, and one night when, in talking to her father, she referred to it in Tembarom's presence, he suddenly seized upon it.

"Strangeways," he said. "That'd make a good-enough name for him. Let's call him Mr. Strangeways. I don't like the way the fellows have of calling him 'the Freak.'"

So the name had been adopted, and soon became an established fact.

"The way I feel about him," Tembarom said, "is that the fellow's not a bit of a joke. What I see is that he's up against about the toughest proposition I've ever known. Gee! that fellow's not crazy. He's worse.

If he was out-and-out dippy and didn't know it, he'd be all right.

Likely as not he'd be thinking he was the Pope of Rome or Anna Held.

What knocks him out is that he's just right enough to know he's wrong, and to be trying to get back. He reminds me of one of those chaps the papers tell about sometimes--fellows that go to work in livery-stables for ten years and call themselves Bill Jones, and then wake up some morning and remember they're some high-browed minister of the gospel named the Rev. James Cadwallader."

When the curtain drew up on Tembarom's amazing drama, Strangeways had been occupying his bed nearly three weeks, and he himself had been sleeping on a cot Mrs. Bowse had put up for him in his room. The Hutchinsons were on the point of sailing for England--steerage--on the steamship Transatlantic, and Tembarom was secretly torn into fragments, though he had done well with the page and he was daring to believe that at the end of the month Galton would tell him he had "made good" and the work would continue indefinitely.

If that happened, he would be raised to "twenty-five per" and would be a man of means. If the Hutchinsons had not been going away, he would have been floating in clouds of rose color. If he could persuade Little Ann to take him in hand when she'd had time to "try him out,"

even Hutchinson could not utterly flout a fellow who was making his steady twenty-five per on a big paper, and was on such terms with his boss that he might get other chances. Gee! but he was a fellow that luck just seemed to chase, anyhow! Look at the other chaps, lots of 'em, who knew twice as much as he did, and had lived in decent homes and gone to school and done their darned best, too, and then hadn't been able to get there! It didn't seem fair somehow that he should run into such pure luck.

The day arrived when Galton was to give his decision. Tembarom was going to hand in his page, and while he was naturally a trifle nervous, his nervousness would have been a hopeful and not unpleasant thing but that the Transatlantic sailed in two days, and in the Hutchinson's rooms Little Ann was packing her small trunk and her father's bigger one, which held more models and drawings than clothing. Hutchinson was redder in the face than usual, and indignant condemnation of America and American millionaires possessed his soul.

Everybody was rather depressed. One boarder after another had wakened to a realization that, with the pa.s.sing of Little Ann, Mrs. Bowse's establishment, even with the parlor, the cozy-corner, and the second- hand pianola to support it, would be a deserted-seeming thing. Mrs.

Bowse felt the tone of low spirits about the table, and even had a horrible secret fear that certain of her best boarders might decide to go elsewhere, merely to change surroundings from which they missed something. Her eyes were a little red, and she made great efforts to keep things going.

"I can only keep the place up when I've no empty rooms, "she had said to Mrs. Peck, "but I'd have boarded her free if her father would have let her stay. But he wouldn't, and, anyway, she'd no more let him go off alone than she'd jump off Brooklyn Bridge."

It had been arranged that partly as a farewell banquet and partly to celebrate Galton's decision about the page, there was to be an oyster stew that night in Mr. Hutchinson's room, which was distinguished as a bed-sitting-room. Tembarom had diplomatically suggested it to Mr.

Hutchinson. It was to be Tembarom's oyster supper, and somehow he managed to convey that it was only a proper and modest tribute to Mr.

Hutchinson himself. First-cla.s.s oyster stew and pale ale were not so bad when properly suggested, therefore Mr. Hutchinson consented. Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger were to come in to share the feast, and Mrs. Bowse had promised to prepare.

It was not an inspiring day for Little Ann. New York had seemed a bewildering and far too noisy place for her when she had come to it directly from her grandmother's cottage in the English village, where she had spent her last three months before leaving England. The dark rooms of the five-storied boarding-house had seemed gloomy enough to her, and she had found it much more difficult to adjust herself to her surroundings than she could have been induced to admit to her father.

At first his temper and the open contempt for American habits and inst.i.tutions which he called "speaking his mind" had given her a great deal of careful steering through shoals to do. At the outset the boarders had resented him, and sometimes had snapped back their own views of England and courts. Violent and disparaging argument had occasionally been imminent, and Mrs. Bowse had worn an ominous look.