WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN
CHAPTER XXVI
THE neighborhood of Temple Barholm was not, upon the whole, a brilliant one. Indeed, it had been frankly designated by the casual guest as dull.
Most of the residents took their sober season in London, the men of the family returning gladly to the pheasants, the women not regretfully to their gardens and tennis, because their successes in town had not been particularly delirious. The guests who came to them were generally as respectable and law-abiding as themselves, and introduced no iconoclastic diversions. For the greater portion of the year, in fact, diners out were of the neighborhood and met the neighborhood, and were reduced to discussing neighborhood topics, which was not, on the whole, a fevered joy.
In such circumstances it cannot be found amazing that a situation such as Temple Barholm presented should provide rich food for conversation, supposition, argument, and humorous comment.
T. Tembarom himself, after the duke had established him, furnished an unlimited source of interest. His household became a perennial fount of quiet discussion. Lady Mallowe and her daughter were the members of it who met with the most attention. They appeared to have become members of it rather than visitors. Her ladyship had plainly elected to extend her stay even beyond the period to which a relative might feel entitled to hospitality. She was not going away, the neighborhood decided, until she had achieved that which she really had come to accomplish. Lady Joan would be obliged to stay also, if her mother intended that she should. But the poor American—What was he going to do in the end? What was she going to do? What was Lady Mallowe going to do if there was no end at all? He was not as unhappy-looking a lover as one might have expected, they said. He kept up his spirits wonderfully. Perhaps she was not always as icily indifferent to him as she chose to appear in public.
So they talked it over as they looked on.
“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 the 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.