Headpiece for “T. Tembarom”T. TEMBAROMBY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETTAuthor of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN
Headpiece for “T. Tembarom”
BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Author of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.
WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN
L
LADY MALLOWE and her daughter did not pay their visit to Asshawe Holt, the absolute, though not openly referred to, fact being that they had not been invited.
The visit in question had merely floated in the air as a delicate suggestion made by her ladyship in her letter to Mrs. Asshe Shawe, to the effect that as she and Joan were going to stay at Temple Barholm, the visit to Asshawe they had partly arranged might now be fitted in.
The partial arrangement itself, Mrs. Asshe Shawe remarked when she received the note, was so partial as to require slight consideration, since it had been made by a woman who would push herself into any house if a back door were left open. In the civilly phrased letter she received in answer to her own, Lady Mallowe read between the lines and writhed secretly, as she had been made to writhe scores of times in the course of her career. It had happened so often, indeed, that she should have been used to it; but the woman who acted as maid to herself and Joan always knew when “she had tried to get in somewhere” and failed.
The note of explanation sent immediately to Miss Alicia was at once adroit and amiable. They had unfortunately been detained in London a day or two past the date fixed for their visit to Asshawe, and Lady Mallowe would not allow Mrs. Asshe Shawe, who had so many guests, to be inconvenienced by their arriving late and perhaps disarranging her plans. So if it was quite convenient, they would come to Temple Barholm a week earlier; but not, of course, if that would be the least upsetting.
When they arrived, Tembarom himself was in London. He had suddenly found he was obliged to go. The business which called him was something which could not be put off. He expected to return at once.It was made very easy for him when he made his excuses to Palliser, who suggested that he might even find himself returning by the same train with his guests, which would give him opportunities. If he was detained, Miss Alicia could take charge of the situation. They would quite understand when she explained. Captain Palliser foresaw for himself some quiet entertainment in his own meeting with the visitors. Lady Mallowe always provided a certain order of amusement for him, and no man alive objected to finding interest and even a certain excitement in the society of Lady Joan. It was her chief characteristic that she inspired in a man a vague, even if slightly irritated, desire to please her in some degree. To lead her on to talk in her sometimes brilliant, always heartlessly unsparing, fashion, perhaps to smile her shade of a bitter smile, gave a man something to do, especially if he was bored. The following would have been Palliser’s trenchant summing up of her: “Flaringly handsome girl, brought up by her mother to one end. Bad temper to begin with. Girl who might, if she lost her head, get into some frightful mess. Meets a fascinating devil in her first season. A regularRomeoandJulietpassion blazes up—all for love and the world well lost. All London looking on. Lady Mallowe frantic and furious. Suddenly the fascinating devil ruined for life. Done for. Bolts. Gets killed. Lady Mallowe triumphant. Girl dragged about afterward like a beautiful young demon in chains. Refuses all sorts of things. Behaves infernally. Nobody knows anything else.”
Nobody did know; Lady Mallowe herself did not. From the first year in which Joan had looked at her with child consciousness she had felt that there was antagonism in the deeps of her eyes. No mother likes to recognize such a thing, and Lady Mallowe was a particularly vain woman. The child was going to be an undeniable beauty, and she ought to adore the mother who was to arrange her future. Instead of which, she plainly disliked her.
When the years had become three, the evident antagonism had become defiance and rebellion. Lady Mallowe could not even indulge herself in the satisfaction of showing her embryo beauty off, and thus preparing a reputation for her. She was not cross or tearful, but she had the temper of a little devil. She would not be shown off. She hated it, and her bearing dangerously suggested that she hated her handsome young mother. No effect could be produced with her.
Before she was six, the antagonism was mutual, and it increased with years. The child was of a passionate nature, and had been born intensely all her mother was not, and intenselynotall her mother was. A throw-back to some high-spirited and fiercely honest ancestor created in her a fury at the sight of falsities and dishonors. As she grew older, she had to admit that nothing palliative could be said about her temper. It had been violent from the first, and she had lived in an atmosphere which infuriated it. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered,—not that she believed in prayer,—but nothing came of it.
Every year she lived she raged more furiously at the tricks she saw played by her mother, who would carry off slights and snubs as though they were actual tributes, if she could gain her end. Since she definitely disliked her daughter, Lady Mallowe did not mince matters when they were alone. What her future would be was made unsparingly clear to the girl. She had no money, she was extremely good-looking, she had a certain number of years in which to fight for her own hand among the new debutantes who were presented every season. Beggary stared them both in the face if she did not make the most of her looks and waste no time. And Joan knew it was all true, and that worse, far worse things were true also. She would be obliged to spend a long life with her mother in cheap lodgings, a faded, penniless, unmarried woman, railed at, taunted, sneered at, forced to be part of humiliating tricks played to enable them to get into debt and then to avoid paying what they owed.
Then that first season! Dear, dear God! that first season when she met Jem! She was not nineteen, and the facile world pretended to be at her feet, and the sun shone as though London were in Italy, and the park was marvelous with flowers, and there were such dances and such laughter!
And it was all so young—and she metJem! It was at a garden-party at a lovely old house on the river, a place with celebrated gardens which would always come back to her memory as a riot of roses. The frocks of the people on the lawn looked as though they were made of the petals of flowers, and a mad little haunting waltz was being played by the band, and there under a great copper birch on the green velvet turf near her stood Jem, looking at her with dark, liquid, slanting eyes. They were only a few feet from each other, and he looked, and she looked, and the haunting, mad little waltz played on, and it was as though they had been standing there since the world began, and nothing else was true.
Afterward nothing mattered to either of them. Lady Mallowe herself ceased to count. Now and then the world stops for two people in this unearthly fashion. At such times, as far as such a pair are concerned, causes and effects cease. Her bad temper fled, and she believed she would never feel its furious lash again.
With Jem looking at her with his glowing, drooping eyes, there would be no reason for rage and shame. She confessed the temper to him and told of her terror of it; he confessed to her his fondness for high play, and they held each other’s hands, not with sentimental, youthful lightness, but with the strong clasp of sworn comrades, and promised on honor that they would stand by each other every hour of their lives against their worst selves.
They would have kept the pact. Neither was a slight or dishonest creature. The phase of life through which they passed is not a new one, but it is not often so nearly an omnipotent power as was their three-months’ dream.
It lasted only that length of time; then came the end of the world. Joan did not look fresh in her second season, and before it was over, men were rather afraid of her. Because she was so young, the freshness returned to her cheek, but it never came back to her eyes.
What exactly had happened, or what she thought of it, was impossible to know. She had delicate, black brows, and between them appeared two delicate, fierce lines. Her eyes were of a purplish-gray, “the color of thunder,” a snubbed admirer had once said. Between their black lashes they were more deeply thunder-colored. Her life with her mother was a thing not to be spoken of. To the desperate girl’s agony of rebellion against the horror of fate, Lady Mallowe’s taunts and beratings were devilish. There was a certain boudoir in the house in Hill Street where the two went through scenes which in their cruelty would have done credit to the Middle Ages.
“We fight,” Joan said with a short, horrible laugh one morning—“we fight like cats and dogs. No, like two cats. A cat-and-dog fight is more quickly over.”
The evening after she met Jem, when she went to her room in Hill Street for the night, she prayed because she suddenly did believe. Since there was Jem in the world, there must be the Other somewhere.
“I want to be made good,” she said. “I have been bad all my life. I was a bad child, I have been a bad girl; but now Imustbe good.”
On the night after the tragic card-party she went to her room and kneeled down in a new spirit. She knelt with throat strained and her fierce young face thrown back and upward.
Her hands were clenched to fists, and flung out and shaken at the ceiling. She said things so awful that her own blood shuddered as she uttered them. But she could not, in her mad helplessness, make them awful enough. She flung herself on the carpet at last, her arms outstretched like a creature crucified face downward.
Several years had passed since that night, and no living being knew what she carried in her soul. If she had a soul, she said to herself, it was black—black. But she had none. Neither had Jem had one; when the earth and stones had fallen upon him it had been the end, as it would have been if he had been a beetle.
This was the guest who was coming to the house where Miles Hugo smiled from his frame in the picture-gallery—the house which would to-day have been Jem’s if T. Tembarom had not inherited it.
TEMBAROMreturned some twenty-four hours after Miss Alicia had received his visitors for him. He had been “going into” absorbing things in London. His thoughts during his northward journey were puzzled and discouraged ones.
The price he would have given for a talk with Ann would not have been easy to compute. Her head, her level little head and her way of seeing into things and picking out facts without being rattled by what didn’t really count, would have been worth anything. The day itself was a discouraging one, with heavy threatenings of rain which did not fall.
He went to his room at once when he reached home. He was late, and Pearson told him that the ladies were dressing for dinner. Pearson was in waiting with everything in readiness for the rapid performance of his duties. Tembarom had learned to allow himself to be waited upon. He had, in fact, done this for the satisfying of Pearson, whose respectful unhappiness would otherwise have been manifest despite his efforts to conceal it. He dressed quickly and asked some questions about Strangeways. Otherwise Pearson thought he seemed preoccupied.
On his way to the drawing-room he deflected from the direct path, turning aside for a moment to the picture-gallery because for a reason of his own he wanted to take a look at Miles Hugo.
The gallery was dim and gloomy enough in the purple-gray twilight. He walked through it without glancing at the pictures until he came to the portrait, and looked hard at the handsome face.
“Gee!” he exclaimed under his breath, “it’s queer! Gee!”
Then he turned suddenly round toward one of the big windows. He turned because he had been startled by a sound, a movement. Some one was standing before the window. For a second’s space the figure seemed as though it were almost one with the purple-gray clouds that were its background. It was a tall young woman, and her dress was of a thin material of exactly their color—dark-gray and purple at once. The wearer held her head high and haughtily. She had a beautiful, stormy face, and the slender, black brows were drawn together in a frown. Tembarom had never seen a girl so handsome and disdainful. He had, indeed, never been looked at as she looked at him when she moved slightly forward.
He knew who it was. It was the Lady Joan girl, and the sudden sight of her momentarily “rattled” him.
“You quite gave me a jolt,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t know any one was in the gallery.”
“What areyoudoing here?” she asked. She spoke to him as though she were addressing, an intruding servant. There was emphasis on the word “you.”
Her intention was so evident that it increased his feeling of being “rattled.” To find himself confronting deliberate ill nature of a superior and finished kind was like being spoken to in a foreign language.
“I—I’m T. Tembarom,” he answered, not able to keep himself from staring because she was such a “winner” as to looks.
“T. Tembarom?” she repeated slowly, and her tone made him at once see what a fool he had been to say it.
“I forgot,” he half laughed. “I ought to have said I’m Temple Barholm.”
“Oh!” was her sole comment. She actually stood still and looked him up and down.
She knew perfectly well who he was, and she knew perfectly well that no palliative view could possibly be taken by any well-bred person of her bearing toward him. He was her host. She had come, a guest, to his house to eat his bread and salt, and the commonest decency demanded that she should conduct herself with civility. But she cared nothing for the commonest, or the most uncommon, decency. She was thinking of other things. As she had stood before the window she had felt that her soul had never been so black as it was when she turned away from Miles Hugo’s portrait—never, never. She wanted to hurt people. Perhaps Nero had felt as she did and was not so hideous as he seemed.
The man’s tailor had put him into proper clothes, and his features were respectable enough, but nothing on earth could make him anything but what he so palpably was. She had seen that much across the gallery as she had watched him staring at Miles Hugo.
“I should think,” she said, dropping the words slowly again, “that you would often forget that you are Temple Barholm.”
“You’re right there,” he answered. “I can’t nail myself down to it. It seems like a sort of joke.”
She looked him over again.
“It is a joke,” she said.
At the Table
It was as though she had slapped him in the face, though she said it so quietly. He knew he had received the slap, and that, as it was a woman, he could not slap back. It was a sort of surprise to her that he did not giggle nervously and turn red and shuffle his feet in impotent misery. He kept quite still a moment or so and looked at her, though not as she had looked at him. She wondered if he was so thick-skinned that he did not feel anything at all.
“That’s so,” he admitted. “That’s so.” Then he actually smiled at her. “I don’t know how to behave myself, you see,” he said. “You’re Lady Joan Fayre, ain’t you? I’m mighty glad to see you. Happy to make your acquaintance, Lady Joan.”
He took her hand and shook it with friendly vigor before she knew what he was going to do.
“I’ll bet a dollar dinner’s ready,” he added, “and Burrill’s waiting. It scares me to death to keep Burrill waiting. He’s got no use for me, anyhow. Let’s go and pacify him.”
He did not lead the way or drag her by the arm, as it seemed to her quite probable that he might, as costermongers do on Hampstead Heath. He knew enough to let her pass first through the door; and when Lady Mallowe looked up to see her enter the drawing-room, he was behind her. To her ladyship’s amazement and relief, they came in, so to speak, together. She had been spared the trying moment of assisting at the ceremony of their presentation to each other.