Sometimes the experiments tried on him were successful, sometimes they were not, but he never resented them.
"You are trying to help me to remember," he said once."I think you will sometime.""Sure I will," said Tembarom."You're better every day."Pearson was to remain in charge of him until toward the end of the London visit.Then he was to run up for a couple of days, leaving in his place a young footman to whom the invalid had become accustomed.
The visit to London was to Miss Alicia a period of enraptured delirium.The beautiful hotel in which she was established, the afternoons at the Tower, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the evenings at the play, during which one saw the most brilliant and distinguished actors, the mornings in the shops, attended as though one were a person of fortune, what could be said of them? And the sacred day on which she saw her Majesty drive slowly by, glittering helmets, splendid uniforms, waving plumes, and clanking swords accompanying and guarding her, and gentlemen standing still with their hats off, and everybody looking after her with that natural touch of awe which royalty properly inspires! Miss Alicia's heart beat rapidly in her breast, and she involuntarily made a curtsey as the great lady in mourning drove by.She lost no shade of any flavor of ecstatic pleasure in anything, and was to Tembarom, who knew nothing about shades and flavors, indeed a touching and endearing thing.
He had never got so much out of anything.If Ann had just been there, well, that would have been the limit.Ann was on her way to America now, and she wouldn't write to him or let him write to her.He had to make a fair trial of it.He could find out only in that way, she said.
It was not to be denied that the youth and longing in him gave him some half-hours to face which made him shut himself up in his room and stare hard at the wall, folding his arms tightly as he tilted his chair.
There arrived a day when one of the most exalted shops in Bond Street was invaded by an American young man of a bearing the peculiarities of which were subtly combined with a remotely suggested air of knowing that if he could find what he wanted, there was no doubt as to his power to get it.What he wanted was not usual, and was explained with a frankness which might have seemed unsophisticated, but, singularly, did not.He wanted to have a private talk with some feminine power in charge, and she must be some one who knew exactly what ladies ought to have.
Being shown into a room, such a feminine power was brought to him and placed at his service.She was a middle-aged person, wearing beautifully fitted garments and having an observant eye and a dignified suavity of manner.She looked the young American over with a swift inclusion of all possibilities.He was by this time wearing extremely well-fitting garments himself, but she was at once aware that his tailored perfection was a new thing to him.
He went to his point without apologetic explanation.
"You know all the things any kind of a lady ought to have," he said--"all the things that would make any one feel comfortable and as if they'd got plenty? Useful things as well as ornamental ones?""Yes, sir," she replied, with rising interest."I have been in the establishment thirty years.""Good business," Tembarom replied.Already he felt relieved."I've got a relation, a little old lady, and I want her to fix herself out just as she ought to be fixed.Now, what I'm afraid of is that she won't get everything she ought to unless I manage it for her somehow beforehand.She's got into a habit of-- well, economizing.Now the time's past for that, and I want her to get everything a woman like you would know she really wants, so that she could look her best, living in a big country house, with a relation that thinks a lot of her."He paused a second or so, and then went further, fixing a clear and astonishingly shrewd eye upon the head of the department listening to him.
"I found out this was a high-class place," he explained."I made sure of that before I came in.In a place that was second or third class there might be people who'd think they'd caught a 'sucker' that would take anything that was unloaded on to him, because he didn't know.The things are for Miss Temple Barholm, and she DOES know.I shall ask her to come here herself to-morrow morning, and I want you to take care of her, and show her the best you've got that's suitable." He seemed to like the word; he repeated it--"Suitable," and quickly restrained a sudden, unexplainable, wide smile.
The attending lady's name was Mrs.Mellish.Thirty years' experience had taught her many lessons.She was a hard woman and a sharp one, but beneath her sharp hardness lay a suppressed sense of the perfect in taste.To have a customer with unchecked resources put into her hands to do her best by was an inspiring incident.A quiver of enlightenment had crossed her countenance when she had heard the name of Temple Barholm.She had a newspaper knowledge of the odd Temple Barholm story.This was the next of kin who had blacked boots in New York, and the obvious probability that he was a fool, if it had taken the form of a hope, had been promptly nipped in the bud.The type from which he was furthest removed was that of the fortune-intoxicated young man who could be obsequiously flattered into buying anything which cost money enough.
"Not a thing's to be unloaded on her that she doesn't like," he added, "and she's not a girl that goes to pink teas.She's a--a--lady --and not young--and used to quiet ways."The evidently New York word "unload" revealed him to his hearer as by a flash, though she had never heard it before.
"We have exactly the things which will be suitable, sir," she said."Ithink I quite understand." Tembarom smiled again, and, thanking her, went away still smiling, because he knew Miss Alicia was safe.
