“How they gossip! How delightfully they gossip!” said the duke. “But it is such a perfect subject. They have never been so enthralled before. Dear young man! how grateful we ought to be for him!”
One of the most discussed features of the case was the duke's own cultivation of the central figure. There was an actual oddity about it. He drove from Stone Hover to Temple Barholm repeatedly. He invited Tembarom to the castle and had long talks with him—long, comfortable talks in secluded, delightful rooms or under great trees on a lawn. He wanted to hear anecdotes of his past, to draw him on to giving his points of view. When he spoke of him to his daughters, he called him “T. Tembarom,” but the slight derision of his earlier tone modified itself.
“That delightful young man will shortly become my closest intimate,” he said. “He not only keeps up my spirits, but he opens up vistas. Vistas after a man's seventy-second birthday! At times I could clasp him to my breast.”
“I like him first rate,” Tembarom said to Miss Alicia. “I liked him the minute he got up laughing like an old sport when he fell out of the pony carriage.”
As he became more intimate with him, he liked him still better. Obscured though it was by airy, elderly persiflage, he began to come upon a background of stability and points of view wholly to be relied on in his new acquaintance. It had evolved itself out of long and varied experience, with the aid of brilliant mentality. The old peer's reasons were always logical. He laughed at most things, but at a few he did not laugh at all. After several of the long conversations Tembarom began to say to himself that this seemed like a man you need not be afraid to talk things over with—things you didn't want to speak of to everybody.
“Seems to me,” he said thoughtfully to Miss Alicia, “he's an old fellow you could tie to. I've got on to one thing when I've listened to him: he talks all he wants to and laughs a lot, but he never gives himself away. He wouldn't give another fellow away either if he said he wouldn't. He knows how not to.”
There was an afternoon on which during a drive they took together the duke was enlightened as to several points which had given him cause for reflection, among others the story beloved of Captain Palliser and his audiences.
“I guess you've known a good many women,” T. Tembarom remarked on this occasion after a few minutes of thought. “Living all over the world as you've done, you'd be likely to come across a whole raft of them one time and another.”
“A whole raft of them, one time and another,” agreed the duke. “Yes.”
“You've liked them, haven't you?”