第83章

Extraordinary as it was, "the creature"--she thought of Tembarom as "the creature"-- had plainly been so pleased with the chance of being properly coached that he had put everything, so to speak, in the little old woman's hands.She had got a hold upon him.It was quite likely that to regard her as a definite factor would only be the part of the merest discretion.She was evidently quite in love with him in her early-Victorian, spinster way.One had to be prudent with women like that who had got hold of a male creature for the first time in their lives, and were almost unaware of their own power.Their very unconsciousness made them a dangerous influence.

With a masterly review of these facts in her mind Lady Mallowe went on with a fluent and pleasant talk, through the medium of which she managed to convey a large number of things Miss Alicia was far from being clever enough to realize she was talking about.She lightly waved wings of suggestion across the scene, she dropped infinitesimal seeds in passing, she left faint echoes behind her-- the kind of echoes one would find oneself listening to and trying to hear as definitely formed sounds.She had been balancing herself on a precarious platform of rank and title, unsupported by any sordid foundation of a solid nature, through a lifetime spent in London.She had learned to catch fiercely at straws of chance, and bitterly to regret the floating past of the slightest, which had made of her a finished product of her kind.She talked lightly, and was sometimes almost witty.To her hearer she seemed to know every brilliant personage and to be familiar with every dazzling thing.She knew well what social habits and customs meant, what their value, or lack of value, was.There were customs, she implied skilfully, so established by time that it was impossible to ignore them.Relationships, for instance, stood for so much that was fine in England that one was sometimes quite touched by the far-reachingness of family loyalty.The head of the house of a great estate represented a certain power in the matter of upholding the dignity of his possessions, of caring for his tenantry, of standing for proper hospitality and friendly family feeling.It was quite beautiful as one often saw it.Throughout the talk there were several references to Joan, who really must come in shortly, which were very interesting to Miss Alicia.Lady Joan, Miss Alicia heard casually, was a great beauty.Her perfection and her extreme cleverness had made her perhaps a trifle difficile.She had not done--Lady Mallowe put it with a lightness of phrasing which was delicacy itself-- what she might have done, with every exalted advantage, so many times.She had a profound nature.Here Lady Mallowe waved away, as it were, a ghost of a sigh.Since Miss Temple Barholm was a relative, she had no doubt heard of the unfortunate, the very sad incident which her mother sometimes feared prejudiced the girl even yet.

"You mean--poor Jem!" broke forth involuntarily from Miss Alicia's lips.Lady Mallowe stared a little.

"Do you call him that?" she asked."Did you know him, then?""I loved him," answered Miss Alicia, winking her eyes to keep back the moisture in them, "though it was only when he was a little boy.""Oh," said Lady Mallowe, with a sudden, singular softness, "I must tell Joan that."Lady Joan had not appeared even after they had had tea and her mother went away, but somehow Miss Alicia had reached a vaguely yearning feeling for her and wished very much the dressmaker had released her.

She was quite stirred when it revealed itself almost at the last moment that in a few weeks both she and Lady Mallowe were to pay a visit at no great distance from Temple Barholm itself, and that her ladyship would certainly arrange to drive over to continue her delightful acquaintance and to see the beautiful old place again.

"In any case one must, even if he lived in lonely state, pay one's respects to the head of the house.The truth is, of course, one is extremely anxious to meet him, and it is charming to know that one is not merely invading the privacy of a bachelor," Lady Mallowe put it.

"She'll come for YOU," Little Ann had soberly remarked.

Tembarom remembered the look in her quiet, unresentful blue eyes when he came in to dinner and Miss Alicia related to him the events of the afternoon.