"I should like it if I'd been born here," was the answer.
"I see, I see."
"If it had not been for finding Miss Alicia, and that I made a promise I'd stay for a year, anyhow, I'd have broken loose at the end of the first week and worked my passage back if I hadn't had enough in my clothes to pay for it." He laughed, but it was not real laughter.
There was a thing behind it.The situation was more edifying than one could have hoped."I made a promise, and I'm going to stick it out,"he said.
He was going to stick it out because he had promised to endure for a year Temple Barholm and an income of seventy thousand pounds! The duke gazed at him as at a fond dream realized.
"I've nothing to do," Tembarom added.
"Neither have I," replied the Duke of Stone.
"But you're used to it, and I'm not.I'm used to working 'steen hours a day, and dropping into bed as tired as a dog, but ready to sleep like one and get up rested.""I used to play twenty hours a day once," answered the duke, "but Ididn't get up rested.That's probably why I have gout and rheumatism combined.Tell me how you worked, and I will tell you how I played."It was worth while taking this tone with him.It had been worth while taking it with the chestnut-gathering peasants in the Apennines, sometimes even with a stone-breaker by an English roadside.And this one was of a type more unique and distinctive than any other--a fellow who, with the blood of Saxon kings and Norman nobles in his veins, had known nothing but the street life of the crudest city in the world, who spoke a sort of argot, who knew no parallels of the things which surrounded him in the ancient home he had inherited and in which he stood apart, a sort of semi-sophisticated savage.The duke applied himself with grace and finished ability to drawing him out.The questions he asked were all seemingly those of a man of the world charmingly interested in the superior knowledge of a foreigner of varied experience.His method was one which engaged the interest of Tembarom himself.He did not know that he was not only questioned, but, so to speak, delicately cross-examined and that before the end of the interview the Duke of Stone knew more of him, his past existence and present sentiments, than even Miss Alicia knew after their long and intimate evening talks.The duke, however, had the advantage of being a man and of cherishing vivid recollections of the days of his youth, which, unlike as it had been to that of Tembarom, furnished a degree of solid foundation upon which go to build conjecture.
"A young man of his age," his grace reflected astutely, "has always just fallen out of love, is falling into it, or desires vaguely to do so.Ten years later there would perhaps be blank spaces, lean years during which he was not in love at all; but at his particular period there must be a young woman somewhere.I wonder if she is employed in one of the department stores he spoke of, and how soon he hopes to present her to us.His conversation has revealed so far, to use his own rich simile, 'neither hide nor hair' of her."On his own part, he was as ready to answer questions as to ask them.
In fact, he led Tembarom on to asking.
"I will tell you how I played" had been meant.He made a human document of the history he enlarged, he brilliantly diverged, he included, he made pictures, and found Tembarom's point of view or lack of it gave spice and humor to relations he had thought himself tired of.To tell familiar anecdotes of courts and kings to a man who had never quite believed that such things were realities, who almost found them humorous when they were casually spoken of, was edification indeed.The novel charm lay in the fact that his class in his country did not include them as possibilities.Peasants in other countries, plowmen, shopkeepers, laborers in England--all these at least they knew of, and counted them in as factors in the lives of the rich and great; but this dear young man--!
"What's a crown like? I'd like to see one.How much do you guess such a thing would cost--in dollars?""Did not Miss Temple Barholm take you to see the regalia in the Tower of London? I am quite shocked," said the duke.He was, in fact, a trifle disappointed.With the puce dress and undersleeves and little fringes she ought certainly to have rushed with her pupil to that seat of historical instruction on their first morning in London, immediately after breakfasting on toast and bacon and marmalade and eggs.
"She meant me to go, but somehow it was put off.She almost cried on our journey home when she suddenly remembered that we'd forgotten it, after all.""I am sure she said it was a wasted opportunity," suggested his grace.
"Yes, that was what hit her so hard.She'd never been to London before, and you couldn't make her believe she could ever get there again, and she said it was ungrateful to Providence to waste an opportunity.She's always mighty anxious to be grateful to Providence, bless her!""She regards you as Providence," remarked the duke, enraptured.With a touch here and there, the touch of a master, he had gathered the whole little story of Miss Alicia, and had found it of a whimsical exquisiteness and humor.
"She's a lot too good to me," answered Tembarom."I guess women as nice as her are always a lot too good to men.She's a kind of little old angel.What makes me mad is to think of the fellows that didn't get busy and marry her thirty-five years ago.""Were there--er--many of 'em?" the duke inquired.
"Thousands of 'em, though most of 'em never saw her.I suppose you never saw her then.If you had, you might have done it."The duke, sitting with an elbow on each arm of his chair, put the tips of his fine, gouty fingers together and smiled with a far-reaching inclusion of possibilities.