第41章

The necessary business in London having been transacted, Tembarom went north to take possession of the home of his forefathers.It had rained for two days before he left London, and it rained steadily all the way to Lancashire, and was raining steadily when he reached Temple Barholm.He had never seen such rain before.It was the quiet, unmoved persistence of it which amazed him.As he sat in the railroad carriage and watched the slanting lines of its unabating downpour, he felt that Mr.Palford must inevitably make some remark upon it.But Mr.Palford continued to read his newspapers undisturbedly, as though the condition of atmosphere surrounding him were entirely accustomed and natural.It was of course necessary and proper that he should accompany his client to his destination, but the circumstances of the case made the whole situation quite abnormal.Throughout the centuries each Temple Barholm had succeeded to his estate in a natural and conventional manner.He had either been welcomed or resented by his neighbors, his tenants, and his family, and proper and fitting ceremonies had been observed.But here was an heir whom nobody knew, whose very existence nobody had even suspected, a young man who had been an outcast in the streets of the huge American city of which lurid descriptions are given.Even in New York he could have produced no circle other than Mrs.Bowse's boarding-house and the objects of interest to the up-town page, so he brought no one with him; for Strangeways seemed to have been mysteriously disposed of after their arrival in London.

Never had Palford & Grimby on their hands a client who seemed so entirely alone.What, Mr.Palford asked himself, would he do in the enormity of Temple Barholm, which always struck one as being a place almost without limit.But that, after all, was neither here nor there.

There he was.You cannot undertake to provide a man with relatives if he has none, or with acquaintances if people do not want to know him.

His past having been so extraordinary, the neighborhood would naturally be rather shy of him.At first, through mere force of custom and respect for an old name, punctilious, if somewhat alarmed, politeness would be shown by most people; but after the first calls all would depend upon how much people could stand of the man himself.

The aspect of the country on a wet winter's day was not enlivening.

The leafless and dripping hedges looked like bundles of sticks; the huge trees, which in June would be majestic bowers of greenery, now held out great skeleton arms, which seemed to menace both earth and sky.Heavy-faced laborers tramped along muddy lanes; cottages with soaked bits of dead gardens looked like hovels; big, melancholy cart-horses, dragging jolting carts along the country roads, hung their heads as they splashed through the mire.

As Tembarom had known few persons who had ever been out of America, he had not heard that England was beautiful, and he saw nothing which led him to suspect its charms.London had impressed him as gloomy, dirty, and behind the times despite its pretensions; the country struck him as "the limit." Hully gee! was he going to be expected to spend his life in this! Should he be obliged to spend his life in it.He'd find that out pretty quick, and then, if there was no hard-and-fast law against it, him for little old New York again, if he had to give up the whole thing and live on ten per.If he had been a certain kind of youth, his discontent would have got the better of him, and he might have talked a good deal to Mr.Palford and said many disparaging things.

"But the man was born here," he reflected."I guess he doesn't know anything else, and thinks it's all right.I've heard of English fellows who didn't like New York.He looks like that kind."He had supplied himself with newspapers and tried to read them.Their contents were as unexciting as the rain-sodden landscape.There were no head-lines likely to arrest any man's attention.There was a lot about Parliament and the Court, and one of them had a column or two about what lords and ladies were doing, a sort of English up-town or down-town page.

He knew the stuff, but there was no snap in it, and there were no photographs or descriptions of dresses.Galton would have turned it down.He could never have made good if he had done no better than that.He grinned to himself when he read that the king had taken a drive and that a baby prince had the measles.

"I wonder what they'd think of the Sunday Earth," he mentally inquired.

He would have been much at sea if he had discovered what they really would have thought of it.They passed through smoke-vomiting manufacturing towns, where he saw many legs seemingly bearing about umbrellas, but few entire people; they whizzed smoothly past drenched suburbs, wet woodlands, and endless-looking brown moors, covered with dead bracken and bare and prickly gorse.He thought these last great desolate stretches worse than all the rest.

But the railroad carriage was luxuriously upholstered and comfortable, though one could not walk about and stretch his legs.In the afternoon, Mr.Palford ordered in tea, and plainly expected him to drink two cups and eat thin bread and butter.He felt inclined to laugh, though the tea was all right, and so was the bread and butter, and he did not fail his companion in any respect.The inclination to laugh was aroused by the thought of what Jim Bowles and Julius would say if they could see old T.T.with nothing to do at 4:30 but put in cream and sugar, as though he were at a tea-party on Fifth Avenue.

But, gee! this rain did give him the Willies.If he was going to be sorry for himself, he might begin right now.But he wasn't.He was going to see this thing through.