"You have, I see," he replied quietly."Once I myself did." (He had cried out, "Ah! Heloise!" though he had laughed at himself when he seemed facing his ridiculous tragedy.)"Yes," confessed T.Tembarom."I met her at the boarding-house where Ilived.Her father was a Lancashire man and an inventor.I guess you've heard of him; his name is Joseph Hutchinson."The whole country had heard of him; more countries, indeed, than one had heard.He was the man who was going to make his fortune in America because T.Tembarom had stood by him in his extremity.He would make a fortune in America and another in England and possibly several others on the Continent.He had learned to read in the village school, and the girl was his daughter.
"Yes," replied the duke.
"I don't know whether the one you knew had that quiet little way of seeing right straight into a thing, and making you see it, too," said Tembarom.
"She had," answered the duke, and an odd expression wavered in his eyes because he was looking backward across forty years which seemed a hundred.
"That's what I meant by moving the world," T.Tembarom went on."You know she's RIGHT, and you've got to do what she says, if you love her.""And you always do," said the duke--"always and forever.There are very few.They are the elect."T.Tembarom took it gravely.
"I said to her once that there wasn't more than one of her in the world because there couldn't be enough to make two of that kind.Iwasn't joshing either; I meant it.It's her quiet little voice and her quiet, babyfied eyes that get you where you can't move.And it's something else you don't know anything about.It's her never doing anything for herself, but just doing it because it's the right thing for you."The duke's chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was.The one he remembered had been another man's wife, a little angel brought up in a convent by white-souled nuns, passed over by her people to an elderly vaurien of great magnificence, and she had sent the strong, laughing, impassioned young English peer away before it was too late, and with the young, young eyes of her looking upward at him in that way which saw "straight into a thing" and with that quiet little voice.So long ago! So long ago!
"Ah! Heloise!" he sighed unconsciously.
"What did you say?" asked T.Tembarom.The duke came back.
"I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty," he answered.
"It was not yesterday nor even the day before.The one I knew died when she was twenty-four.""Died!" said Tembarom."Good Lord!" He dropped his head and even changed color."A fellow can't get on to a thing like that.It seems as if it couldn't happen.Suppose--" he caught his breath hard and then pulled himself up-- "Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I've proved what I said--just proved it, and done every single thing she told me to do.""I am sure you have," the duke said.
"It's because of that I began to say this." Tembarom spoke hurriedly that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought."You're a man, and I'm a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you're a man, too.I was crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn't."The duke's eyes lighted anew.
"She had her reasons," he said.
"She laid 'em out as if she'd been my mother instead of a little red-headed angel that you wanted to snatch up and crush up to you so she couldn't breathe.She didn't waste a word.She just told me what I was up against.She'd lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew.She said I'd got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me.She told me about the kind of girls I'd see--beauties that were different from anything I'd ever seen before.And it was up to me to see all of them--the best of them.""Ladies?" interjected the duke gently.
"Yes.With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like those in the Ladies' Pictorial.The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid.Housemaid be darned!" he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot."I've seen the whole lot of them;I've done my darndest to get next, and there's not one--" he stopped short."Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?" he added suddenly.
"That was not her point," remarked the duke."She wanted you to look at them, and you have looked." T.Tembarom's eagerness was inspiring to behold.
"I have, haven't I?" he cried."That was what I wanted to ask you.
I've done as she said.I haven't shirked a thing.I've followed them around when I knew they hadn't any use on earth for me.Some of them have handed me the lemon pretty straight.Why shouldn't they? But Idon't believe she knew how tough it might be for a fellow sometimes.""No, she did not," the duke said."Also she probably did not know that in ancient days of chivalry ladies sent forth their knights to bear buffeting for their sakes in proof of fealty.Rise up, Sir Knight!"This last phrase of course T.Tembarom did not know the poetic significance of.