She had tucked him in luxuriously in his arm-chair by the fire on the first day of his convalescence, and as she gave him his tray, with his beef-tea and toast, he saw that she contained anecdotal information of interest which tactful encouragement would cause to flow.
“Now that I am well enough to be entertained, Braddle,” he said, “tell me what has been happening.”
“A graidely lot, yore Grace,” she answered; “but not so much i’ Stone Hover as i’ Temple Barholm. He’s coom!”
Then the duke vaguely recalled rumors he had heard sometime before his indisposition.
“The new Mr. Temple Barholm? He’s an American, isn’t he? The lost heir who had to be sought for high and low—principally low, I understand.”
The beef-tea was excellently savory, the fire was warm, and relief from two weeks of pain left a sort of Nirvana of peace. Rarely had the duke passed a more delightfully entertaining morning. There was a richness in the Temple Barholm situation, as described in detail by Mrs. Braddle, which filled him with delight.
That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary flavor. No man or woman of his own class could have given such a recounting, or revealed so many facets of this jewel of entertainment. He and those like him could have seen the thing only from their own amused, outraged, bewildered, or cynically disgusted point of view. Mrs. Braddle saw it as the villagers saw it—excited, curious, secretly hopeful of undue lavishness from “a chap as had nivver had brass before an’ wants to chuck it away for brag’s sake.” She saw it as the servants saw it—secretly disdainful, outwardly respectful, waiting to discover whether the sacrifice of professional distinction would be balanced by liberties permitted and lavishness of remuneration and largess. She saw it also from her own point of view—that of a respectable cottage dweller whose great-great-grandfather had been born in a black-and-white timbered house in a green lane, and who knew what were “gentry ways” and what nature of being could never even remotely approach the assumption of them. She had seen Tembarom more than once, and summed him up by no means ill-naturedly.
“He’s not such a bad-lookin’ chap. He is na short-legged or turn-up-nosed, an’ that’s summat. He con stride along, an’ he looks healthy enow for aw he’s thin.”
“I think, perhaps,” amiably remarked the duke, sipping his beef-tea, “that you had better not call him a ‘chap,’ Braddle. The late Mr. Temple Barholm was never referred to as a ‘chap’ exactly, was he?”