"So I might," he said; "so I might.My loss entirely-- my abominable loss."They had reached this point of the argument when the carriage from Stone Hover arrived.It was a stately barouche the coachman and footman of which equally with its big horses seemed to have hastened to an extent which suggested almost panting breathlessness.It contained Lady Edith and Lady Celia, both pale, and greatly agitated by the news which had brought them horrified from Stone Hover without a moment's delay.
They both ascended in haste and swept in such alarmed anxiety up the terrace steps and through the hall to their father's side that they had barely a polite gasp for Miss Alicia and scarcely saw Tembarom at all.
"Dear Papa!" they cried when he revealed himself in his chair in the library intact and smiling."How wicked of you, dear! How you have frightened us!""I begged you to be good, dearest," said Lady Edith, almost in tears.
"Where was George? You must dismiss him at once.Really--really--""He was half a mile away, obeying my orders, "said the duke."A groom cannot be dismissed for obeying orders.It is the pony who must be dismissed, to my great regret; or else we must overfeed him until he is even fatter than he is and cannot run away."Were his arms and legs and his ribs and collar-bones and head quite right? Was he sure that he had not received any internal injury when he fell out of the pony-carriage? They could scarcely be convinced, and as they hung over and stroked and patted him, Tembarom stood aside and watched them with interest.They were the girls he had to please Ann by "getting next to," giving himself a chance to fall in love with them, so that she'd know whether they were his kind or not.They were nice-looking, and had a way of speaking that sounded rather swell, but they weren't ace high to a little slim, redheaded thing that looked at you like a baby and pulled your heart up into your throat.
"Don't poke me any more, dear children.I am quite, quite sound," he heard the duke say."In Mr.Temple Barholm you behold the preserver of your parent.Filial piety is making you behave with shocking ingratitude."They turned to Tembarom at once with a pretty outburst of apologies and thanks.Lady Celia wasn't, it is true, "a looker," with her narrow shoulders and rather long nose, but she had an air of breeding, and the charming color of which Palliser had spoken, returning to Lady Edith's cheeks, illuminated her greatly.
They both were very polite and made many agreeably grateful speeches, but in the eyes of both there lurked a shade of anxiety which they hoped to be able to conceal.Their father watched them with a wicked pleasure.He realized clearly their well-behaved desire to do and say exactly the right thing and bear themselves in exactly the right manner, and also their awful uncertainty before an entirely unknown quantity.Almost any other kind of young man suddenly uplifted by strange fortune they might have known some parallel for, but a newsboy of New York! All the New Yorkers they had met or heard of had been so rich and grand as to make them feel themselves, by contrast, mere country paupers, quite shivering with poverty and huddling for protection in their barely clean rags, so what was there to go on? But how dreadful not to be quite right, precisely right, in one's approach--quite familiar enough, and yet not a shade too familiar, which of course would appear condescending! And be it said the delicacy of the situation was added to by the fact that they had heard something of Captain Palliser's extraordinary little story about his determination to know "ladies." Really, if Willocks the butcher's boy had inherited Temple Barholm, it would have been easier to know where one stood in the matter of being civil and agreeable to him.First Lady Edith, made perhaps bold by the suggestion of physical advantage bestowed by the color, talked to him to the very best of her ability;and when she felt herself fearfully flagging, Lady Celia took him up and did her very well-conducted best.Neither she nor her sister were brilliant talkers at any time, and limited by the absence of any common familiar topic, effort was necessary.The neighborhood he did not know; London he was barely aware of; social functions it would be an impertinence to bring in; games he did not play; sport he had scarcely heard of.You were confined to America, and if you knew next to nothing of American life, there you were.
Tembarom saw it all,--he was sharp enough for that,--and his habit of being jocular and wholly unashamed saved him from the misery of awkwardness that Willocks would have been sure to have writhed under.