As he was saying the words, he thought he was going to hear something when he had finished saying them; he knew that he would without a doubt. T. Tembarom made a quick move in his seat; he lost a shade of color and cleared his throat as he bent forward, casting a glance at the backs of the coachman and footman on the high seat above them.
“Can these fellows hear me?” he asked.
“No,” the duke answered; “if you speak as you are speaking now.”
“You are the biggest man about here,” the young man went on. “You stand for everything that English people care for, and you were born knowing all the things I don’t. I’ve been carrying a big load for quite a while, and I guess I’m not big enough to handle it alone, perhaps. Anyhow, I want to be sure I’m not making fool mistakes. The worst of it is that I’ve got to keep still if I’m right, and I’ve got to keep still if I’m wrong. I’ve got to keep still, anyhow.”
“I learned to hold my tongue in places where, if I had not held it, I might have plunged nations into bloodshed,” the duke said. “Tell me all you choose.”
As a result of which, by the time their drive had ended and they returned to Stone Hover, he had told him, and the duke sat in his corner of the carriage with an unusual light in his eyes and a flush of somewhat excited color on his cheek.
“You’re a queer fellow, T. Tembarom,” he said, when they parted in the drawing-room after taking tea. “You exhilarate me. You make me laugh. If I were an emotional person, you would at moments make me cry. There’s an affecting uprightness about you. You’re rather a fine fellow too, ’pon my life.” Putting a waxen, gout-knuckled old hand on his shoulder, and giving him a friendly push which was half a pat, he added, “You are, by God!”
After his guest had left him, the duke stood for some minutes gazing into the fire with a complicated smile and the air of a man who finds himself quaintly enriched.
“I have had ambitions in the course of my existence—several of them,” he said, “but even in over-vaulting moments never have I aspired to such an altitude as this—to be, as it were, part of a melodrama. One feels that one scarcely deserves it.”