CHAPTER X
The necessary business in London having been transacted, Tembarom went
north to take possession of the home of his forefathers. It had rained
for two days before he left London, and it rained steadily all the way
to Lancashire, and was raining steadily when he reached Temple
Barholm. He had never seen such rain before. It was the quiet, unmoved
persistence of it which amazed him. As he sat in the railroad carriage
and watched the slanting lines of its unabating downpour, he felt that
Mr. Palford must inevitably make some remark upon it. But Mr. Palford
continued to read his newspapers undisturbedly, as though the
condition of atmosphere surrounding him were entirely accustomed and
natural. It was of course necessary and proper that he should
accompany his client to his destination, but the circumstances of the
case made the whole situation quite abnormal. Throughout the centuries
each Temple Barholm had succeeded to his estate in a natural and
conventional manner. He had either been welcomed or resented by his
neighbors, his tenants, and his family, and proper and fitting
ceremonies had been observed. But here was an heir whom nobody knew,
whose very existence nobody had even suspected, a young man who had
been an outcast in the streets of the huge American city of which
lurid descriptions are given. Even in New York he could have produced
no circle other than Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and the objects of
interest to the up-town page, so he brought no one with him; for
Strangeways seemed to have been mysteriously disposed of after their
arrival in London.
Never had Palford & Grimby on their hands a client who seemed so
entirely alone. What, Mr. Palford asked himself, would he do in the
enormity of Temple Barholm, which always struck one as being a place
almost without limit. But that, after all, was neither here nor there.
There he was. You cannot undertake to provide a man with relatives if
he has none, or with acquaintances if people do not want to know him.
His past having been so extraordinary, the neighborhood would
naturally be rather shy of him. At first, through mere force of custom
and respect for an old name, punctilious, if somewhat alarmed,
politeness would be shown by most people; but after the first calls
all would depend upon how much people could stand of the man himself.
The aspect of the country on a wet winter's day was not enlivening.
The leafless and dripping hedges looked like bundles of sticks; the
huge trees, which in June would be majestic bowers of greenery, now
held out great skeleton arms, which seemed to menace both earth and
sky. Heavy-faced laborers tramped along muddy lanes; cottages with
soaked bits of dead gardens looked like hovels; big, melancholy cart-
horses, dragging jolting carts along the country roads, hung their
heads as they splashed through the mire.
As Tembarom had known few persons who had ever been out of America, he
had not heard that England was beautiful, and he saw nothing which led
him to suspect its charms. London had impressed him as gloomy, dirty,
and behind the times despite its pretensions; the country struck him
as "the limit." Hully gee! was he going to be expected to spend his
life in this! Should he be obliged to spend his life in it. He'd find
that out pretty quick, and then, if there was no hard-and-fast law
against it, him for little old New York again, if he had to give up
the whole thing and live on ten per. If he had been a certain kind of
youth, his discontent would have got the better of him, and he might
have talked a good deal to Mr. Palford and said many disparaging
things.
"But the man was born here," he reflected. "I guess he doesn't know
anything else, and thinks it's all right. I've heard of English
fellows who didn't like New York. He looks like that kind."
He had supplied himself with newspapers and tried to read them. Their
contents were as unexciting as the rain-sodden landscape. There were
no head-lines likely to arrest any man's attention. There was a lot
about Parliament and the Court, and one of them had a column or two
about what lords and ladies were doing, a sort of English up-town or
down-town page.
He knew the stuff, but there was no snap in it, and there were no
photographs or descriptions of dresses. Galton would have turned it
down. He could never have made good if he had done no better than
that. He grinned to himself when he read that the king had taken a
drive and that a baby prince had the measles.
"I wonder what they'd think of the Sunday Earth," he mentally
inquired.
He would have been much at sea if he had discovered what they really
would have thought of it. They passed through smoke-vomiting
manufacturing towns, where he saw many legs seemingly bearing about
umbrellas, but few entire people; they whizzed smoothly past drenched
suburbs, wet woodlands, and endless-looking brown moors, covered with
dead bracken and bare and prickly gorse. He thought these last great
desolate stretches worse than all the rest.
But the railroad carriage was luxuriously upholstered and comfortable,
though one could not walk about and stretch his legs. In the
afternoon, Mr. Palford ordered in tea, and plainly expected him to
drink two cups and eat thin bread and butter. He felt inclined to
laugh, though the tea was all right, and so was the bread and butter,
and he did not fail his companion in any respect. The inclination to
laugh was aroused by the thought of what Jim Bowles and Julius would
say if they could see old T. T. with nothing to do at 4:30 but put in
cream and sugar, as though he were at a tea-party on Fifth Avenue.
But, gee! this rain did give him the Willies. If he was going to be
sorry for himself, he might begin right now. But he wasn't. He was
going to see this thing through.
The train had been continuing its smooth whir through fields, wooded
lands, and queer, dead-and-alive little villages for some time before
it drew up at last at a small station. Bereft by the season of its
garden bloom and green creepers, it looked a bare and uninviting
little place. On the two benches against the wall of the platform a
number of women sat huddled together in the dampness. Several of them
held children in their laps and all stared very hard, nudging one
another as he descended from the train. A number of rustics stood
about the platform, giving it a somewhat crowded air. It struck
Tembarom that, for an out- of-the-way place, there seemed to be a good
many travelers, and he wondered if they could all be going away. He
did not know that they were the curious element among such as lived in
the immediate neighborhood of the station and had come out merely to
see him on his first appearance. Several of them touched their hats as
he went by, and he supposed they knew Palford and were saluting him.
Each of them was curious, but no one was in a particularly welcoming
mood. There was, indeed, no reason for anticipating enthusiasm. It
was, however, but human nature that the bucolic mind should bestir
itself a little in the desire to obtain a view of a Temple Barholm who
had earned his living by blacking boots and selling newspapers,
unknowing that he was "one o' th' gentry."
When he stepped from his first-class carriage, Tembarom found himself
confronted by a very straight, clean-faced, and well-built young man,
who wore a long, fawn-colored livery coat with claret facings and
silver buttons. He touched his cockaded hat, and at once took up the
Gladstone bags. Tembarom knew that he was a footman because he had
seen something like him outside restaurants, theaters, and shops in
New York, but he was not sure whether he ought to touch his own hat or
not. He slightly lifted it from his head to show there was no ill
feeling, and then followed him and Mr. Palford to the carriage waiting
for them. It was a severe but sumptuous equipage, and the coachman was
as well dressed and well built as the footman. Tembarom took his place
in it with many mental reservations.
"What are the illustrations on the doors?" he inquired.
"The Temple Barholm coat of arms," Mr. Palford answered. "The people
at the station are your tenants. Members of the family of the stout
man with the broad hat have lived as yeoman farmers on your land for
three hundred years."
They went on their way, with more rain, more rain, more dripping
hedges, more soaked fields, and more bare, huge-armed trees. CLOP,
CLOP, CLOP, sounded the horses' hoofs along the road, and from his
corner of the carriage Mr. Palford tried to make polite conversation.
Faces peered out of the windows of the cottages, sometimes a whole
family group of faces, all crowded together, eager to look, from the
mother with a baby in her arms to the old man or woman, plainly
grandfather or grandmother--sharp, childishly round, or bleared old
eyes, all excited and anxious to catch glimpses.
"They are very curious to see you," said Mr. Palford. "Those two
laborers are touching their hats to you. It will be as well to
recognize their salute."
At a number of the cottage doors the group stood upon the threshold
and touched foreheads or curtsied. Tembarom saluted again and again,
and more than once his friendly grin showed itself. It made him feel
queer to drive along, turning from side to side to acknowledge
obeisances, as he had seen a well-known military hero acknowledge them
as he drove down Broadway.
The chief street of the village of Temple Barholm wandered almost
within hailing distance of the great entrance to the park. The gates
were supported by massive pillars, on which crouched huge stone
griffins. Tembarom felt that they stared savagely over his head as he
was driven toward them as for inspection, and in disdainful silence
allowed to pass between them as they stood on guard, apparently with
the haughtiest mental reservations.
The park through which the long avenue rolled concealed its beauty to
the unaccustomed eye, showing only more bare trees and sodden
stretches of brown grass. The house itself, as it loomed up out of the
thickening rain-mist, appalled Tembarom by its size and gloomily gray
massiveness. Before it was spread a broad terrace of stone, guarded by
more griffins of even more disdainful aspect than those watching over
the gates. The stone noses held themselves rigidly in the air as the
reporter of the up-town society page passed with Mr. Palford up a
flight of steps broad enough to make him feel as though he were going
to church. Footmen with powdered heads received him at the carriage
door, seemed to assist him to move, to put one foot before the other
for him, to stand in rows as though they were a military guard ready
to take him into custody.
Then he was inside, standing in an enormous hall filled with
furnishings such as he had never seen or heard of before. Carved oak,
suits of armor, stone urns, portraits, another flight of church steps
mounting upward to surrounding galleries, stained-glass windows,
tigers' and lions' heads, horns of tremendous size, strange and
beautiful weapons, suggested to him that the dream he had been living
in for weeks had never before been so much a dream. He had walked
about as in a vision, but among familiar surroundings. Mrs. Bowse's
boarders and his hall bedroom had helped him to retain some hold over
actual existence. But here the reverently saluting villagers staring
at him through windows as though he were General Grant, the huge,
stone entrance, the drive of what seemed to be ten miles through the
park, the gloomy mass of architecture looming up, the regiment of
liveried men-servants, with respectfully lowered but excitedly curious
eyes, the dark and solemn richness inclosing and claiming him--all
this created an atmosphere wholly unreal. As he had not known books,
its parallel had not been suggested to him by literature. He had
literally not heard that such things existed. Selling newspapers and
giving every moment to the struggle for life or living, one did not
come within the range of splendors. He had indeed awakened in that
other world of which he had spoken. And though he had heard that there
was another world, he had had neither time nor opportunity to make
mental pictures of it. His life so far had expressed itself in another
language of figures. The fact that he had in his veins the blood of
the Norman lords and Saxon kings may or may not have had something to
do with the fact that he was not abashed, but bewildered. The same
factor may or may not have aided him to preserve a certain stoic,
outward composure. Who knows what remote influences express themselves
in common acts of modern common life? As Cassivellaunus observed his
surroundings as he followed in captive chains his conqueror's
triumphal car through the streets of Rome, so the keen-eyed product of
New York pavement life "took in" all about him. Existence had forced
upon him the habit of sharp observance. The fundamental working law of
things had expressed itself in the simple colloquialism, "Keep your
eye skinned, and don't give yourself away." In what phrases the
parallel of this concise advice formulated itself in 55 B.C. no
classic has yet exactly informed us, but doubtless something like it
was said in ancient Rome. Tembarom did not give himself away, and he
took rapid, if uncertain, inventory of people and things. He remarked,
for instance, that Palford's manner of speaking to a servant was
totally different from the manner he used in addressing himself. It
was courteous, but remote, as though he spoke across an accepted chasm
to beings of another race. There was no hint of incivility in it, but
also no hint of any possibility that it could occur to the person
addressed to hesitate or resent. It was a subtle thing, and Tembarom
wondered how he did it.
They were shown into a room the walls of which seemed built of books;
the furniture was rich and grave and luxuriously comfortable. A fire
blazed as well as glowed in a fine chimney, and a table near it was
set with a glitter of splendid silver urn and equipage for tea.
"Mrs. Butterworth was afraid you might not have been able to get tea,
sir," said the man-servant, who did not wear livery, but whose
butler's air of established authority was more impressive than any
fawn color and claret enriched with silver could have encompassed.
Tea again? Perhaps one was obliged to drink it at regular intervals.
Tembarom for a moment did not awaken to the fact that the man was
speaking to him, as the master from whom orders came. He glanced at
Mr. Palford.
"Mr. Temple Barholm had tea after we left Crowly," Mr. Palford said.
"He will no doubt wish to go to his room at once, Burrill."
"Yes, sir," said Burrill, with that note of entire absence of comment
with which Tembarom later became familiar. "Pearson is waiting."
It was not unnatural to wonder who Pearson was and why he was waiting,
but Tembarom knew he would find out. There was a slight relief on
realizing that tea was not imperative. He and Mr. Palford were led
through the hall again. The carriage had rolled away, and two footmen,
who were talking confidentially together, at once stood at attention.
The staircase was more imposing as one mounted it than it appeared as
one looked at it from below. Its breadth made Tembarom wish to lay a
hand on a balustrade, which seemed a mile away. He had never
particularly wished to touch balustrades before. At the head of the
first flight hung an enormous piece of tapestry, its forest and
hunters and falconers awakening Tembarom's curiosity, as it looked
wholly unlike any picture he had ever seen in a shop-window. There
were pictures everywhere, and none of them looked like chromos. Most
of the people in the portraits were in fancy dress. Rumors of a New
York millionaire ball had given him some vague idea of fancy dress. A
lot of them looked like freaks. He caught glimpses of corridors
lighted by curious, high, deep windows with leaded panes. It struck
him that there was no end to the place, and that there must be rooms
enough in it for a hotel.
"The tapestry chamber, of course, Burrill," he heard Mr. Palford say
in a low tone.
"Yes, sir. Mr. Temple Barholm always used it."
A few yards farther on a door stood open, revealing an immense room,
rich and gloomy with tapestry-covered walls and dark oak furniture. A
bed which looked to Tembarom incredibly big, with its carved oak
canopy and massive posts, had a presiding personality of its own. It
was mounted by steps, and its hangings and coverlid were of embossed
velvet, time-softened to the perfection of purples and blues. A fire
enriched the color of everything, and did its best to drive the
shadows away. Deep windows opened either into the leafless boughs of
close-growing trees or upon outspread spaces of heavily timbered park,
where gaunt, though magnificent, bare branches menaced and defied. A
slim, neat young man, with a rather pale face and a touch of anxiety
in his expression, came forward at once.
"This is Pearson, who will valet you," exclaimed Mr. Palford.
"Thank you, sir," said Pearson in a low, respectful voice. His manner
was correctness itself.
There seemed to Mr. Palford to be really nothing else to say. He
wanted, in fact, to get to his own apartment and have a hot bath and a
rest before dinner.
"Where am I, Burrill?" he inquired as he turned to go down the
corridor.
"The crimson room, sir," answered Burrill, and he closed the door of
the tapestry chamber and shut Tembarom in alone with Pearson.
