CHAPTER XXII
IN a certain sense Joan had been dragged to the place by her mother. But though she had been dragged, she had come with an intention. She knew what she would find herself being forced to submit to if the intruder were not disposed of at the outset. Lady Mallowe’s stakes at this special juncture were seriously high. Joan knew what they were, and that she was in a mood touched with desperation. The defenselessly new and ignorant Temple Barholm was to her mother’s mind a direct intervention of Providence, and it was only Joan herself who could rob her of the benefits and reliefs he could provide. So she was capable to-day of inflicting upon her latest victim any hurt which might sweep him out of her way. She had not been a tender-hearted girl, and in these years she was absolutely callous.
But though her deliberate intention had been so to conduct herself that he would be put to absolute flight, she had also come for another reason. She had never seen Temple Barholm, and she knew that Jem had loved it with a slighted and lonely child’s romantic longing; he had dreamed of it as boy and man, knowing that it must some time be his own, his home, and yet prevented by his uncle’s attitude toward him from daring to act as though he remembered the fact. Old Mr. Temple Barholm’s special humor had been that of a man guarding against presumption.
Jem had not intended to presume, but he had been snubbed with relentless cruelty even for boyish expressions of admiration. And he had hid his feeling in his heart until he poured it out to Joan. To-day it would have been his. Together, together, they would have lived in it and loved every stone of it, every leaf on every great tree, every wild daffodil nodding in the green grass. Her brief dream of young joy had been the one reality in her life.
And the man who stood in the place Jem had longed for, the man who sat at the head of his table, was this “thing!” That was what she felt him to be, and every hurt she could do him, every humiliation which should write large before him his presumption and grotesque unfitness, would be a blow struck for Jem, who could never strike a blow for himself again.
She watched Tembarom under her lids at the dinner-table.
He had not wriggled or shuffled when she spoke to him in the gallery; he did neither now. She addressed no remarks to him herself, and answered with chill indifference such things as he said to her. If conversation had flagged between him and Mr. Palford because the solicitor did not know how to talk to him, it did not even reach the point of flagging with her, because she would not talk and did not allow it to begin. Lady Mallowe, sick with annoyance, was quite brilliant. She drew out Miss Alicia by detailed reminiscences of a visit paid to Rowcroft Hall years before. The vicar had dined at the hall while she had been there. She remembered perfectly his “charm of manner and powerful originality of mind. A really remarkable personality.”
“His sermons,” faltered Miss Alicia, as a refuge, “were indeed remarkable. I am sure he must greatly have enjoyed his conversations with you. I am afraid there were very few clever women in the neighborhood of Rowcroft.”
Casting a bitter side glance on her silent daughter, Lady Mallowe lightly seized upon New York as a subject. She knew so much of it from delightful New Yorkers. London was full of delightful New Yorkers. She would like beyond everything to spend a winter in New York. She understood that the season there was in the winter and that it was most brilliant. Mr. Temple Barholm must tell them about it.