“But why was nobody told?” put in Palliser.
“Why should people be told? There was nothing sufficiently definite to tell. It was a waiting game.” His Grace wasted no words. “I was told. Mr. Temple Barholm did not know England or English methods. His idea—perhaps a mistaken one—was that an English duke ought to be able to advise him. He came to me and made a clean breast of it. He goes straight at things, that young fellow. Makes what he calls a `bee line.' Oh! I've been in it—I 've been in it, I assure you.”
It was as they crossed the hall that his Grace slightly laughed.
“It struck me as a sort of wild-goose chase at first. He had only a ghost of a clue—a mere resemblance to a portrait. But he believed in it, and he had an instinct.” He laughed again. “The dullest and most unmelodramatic neighborhood in England has been taking part in a melodrama—but there has been no villain in it—only a matter-of-fact young man, working out a queer thing in his own queer, matter-of-fact way.”
When the door closed behind them, Tembarom went to Lady Joan. She had risen and was standing before the window, her back to the room. She looked tall and straight and tensely braced when she turned round, but there was endurance, not fierceness in her eyes.
“Did he leave the country knowing I was here—waiting?” she asked. Her voice was low and fatigued. She had remembered that years had passed, and that it was perhaps after all only human that long anguish should blot things out, and dull a hopeless man's memory.
“No,” answered Tembarom sharply. “He didn't. You weren't in it then. He believed you'd married that Duke of Merthshire fellow. This is the way it was: Let me tell it to you quick. A letter that had been wandering round came to him the night before the cave-in, when they thought he was killed. It told him old Temple Barholm was dead. He started out before daylight, and you can bet he was strung up till he was near crazy with excitement. He believed that if he was in England with plenty of money he could track down that cardsharp lie. He believed you'd help him. Somewhere, while he was traveling he came across an old paper with a lot of dope about your being engaged.”
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—”