第89章

"She's going to be," he answered, "sure as you're alive.But whatever she does, is right, and this is as right as everything else.So it just goes."They wrote their letters at once, and sent them off by the afternoon post.The letter Miss Alicia composed, and which Tembarom copied, he read and reread, with visions of Jim Bowles and Julius looking over his shoulder.If they picked it up on Broadway, with his name signed to it, and read it, they'd throw a fit over it, laughing.But he supposed she knew what you ought to write.

It had not, indeed, the masculine touch.When Lady Mallowe read it, she laughed several times.She knew quite well that he had not known what to say, and, allowing Miss Alicia to instruct him, had followed her instructions to the letter.But she did not show the letter to Joan, who was difficult enough to manage without being given such material to comment upon.

The letters had just been sent to the post when a visitor was announced--Captain Palliser.Tembarom remembered the name, and recalled also certain points connected with him.He was the one who was a promoter of schemes--"One of the smooth, clever ones that get up companies," Little Ann had said.

That in a well-bred and not too pronounced way he looked smooth and clever might be admitted.His effect was that of height, finished slenderness of build, and extremely well-cut garments.He was no longer young, and he had smooth, thin hair and a languidly observant gray eye.

"I have been staying at Detchworth Grange," he explained when he had shaken hands with the new Temple Barholm and Miss Alicia."It gave me an excellent opportunity to come and pay my respects."There was a hint of uncertainty in the observant gray eye.The fact was that he realized in the space of five minutes that he knew his ground even less than he had supposed he did.He had not spent his week at Detchworth Grange without making many quiet investigations, but he had found out nothing whatever.The new man was an ignoramus, but no one had yet seemed to think him exactly a fool.He was not excited by the new grandeurs of his position and he was not ashamed of himself.Captain Palliser wondered if he was perhaps sharp--one of those New Yorkers shrewd even to light-fingeredness in clever scheming.Stories of a newly created method of business dealing involving an air of candor and almost primitive good nature--an American method--had attracted Captain Palliser's attention for some time.A certain Yankee rawness of manner played a part as a factor, a crudity which would throw a man off guard if he did not recognize it.

The person who employed the method was of philosophical non-combativeness.The New York phrase was that "He jollied a man along."Immense schemes had been carried through in that way.Men in London, in England, were not sufficiently light of touch in their jocularity.

He wondered if perhaps this young fellow, with his ready laugh and rather loose-jointed, casual way of carrying himself, was of this dangerous new school.

What, however, could he scheme for, being the owner of Temple Barholm's money? It may be mentioned at once that Captain Palliser's past had been such as had fixed him in the belief that every one was scheming for something.People with money wanted more or were privately arranging schemes to prevent other schemers from getting any shade the better of them.Debutantes with shy eyes and slim figures had their little plans to engineer delicately.Sometimes they were larger plans than the uninitiated would have suspected as existing in the brains of creatures in their 'teens, sometimes they were mere fantastic little ideas connected with dashing young men or innocent dances which must be secured or lovely young rivals who must be evaded.Young men had also deft things to do-- people to see or not to see, reasons for themselves being seen or avoiding observation.As years increased, reasons for schemes became more numerous and amazingly more varied.Women with daughters, with sons, with husbands, found in each relationship a necessity for active, if quiet, manoeuvering.Women like Lady Mallowe--good heaven! by what schemes did not that woman live and have her being--and her daughter's--from day to day! Without money, without a friend who was an atom more to be relied on than she would have been herself if an acquaintance had needed her aid, her outwardly well-to-do and fashionable existence was a hand-to-hand fight.No wonder she had turned a still rather brilliant eye upon Sir Moses Monaldini, the great Israelite financier.

All of these types passed rapidly before his mental vision as he talked to the American Temple Barholm.What could he want, by chance?

He must want something, and it would be discreet to find out what it chanced to be.

If it was social success, he would be better off in London, where in these days you could get a good run for your money and could swing yourself up from one rung of the ladder to another if you paid some one to show you how.He himself could show him how.A youngster who had lived the beastly hard life he had lived would be likely to find exhilaration in many things not difficult to purchase.It was an odd thing, by the way, the fancy he had taken to the little early-Victorian spinster.It was not quite natural.It perhaps denoted tendencies--or lack of tendencies--it would also be well to consider.

Palliser was a sufficiently finished product himself to be struck greatly by the artistic perfection of Miss Alicia, and to wonder how much the new man understood it.

He did not talk to him about schemes.He talked to him of New York, which he had never seen and hoped sometime shortly to visit.The information he gained was not of the kind he most desired, but it edified him.Tembarom's knowledge of high finance was a street lad's knowledge of it, and he himself knew its limitations and probable unreliability.Such of his facts as rested upon the foundation of experience did not include multimillionaires and their resources.