He stood still now and listened to the silence.
“There's not a sound within a thousand miles of the place. What do fellows with money DO to keep themselves alive?” he said piteously. “They've got to do SOMETHING. Shall I have to go out and take a walk, as Palford called it? Take a walk, by gee!”
He couldn't conceive it, a man “taking a walk” as though it were medicine--a walk nowhere, to reach nothing, just to go and turn back again.
“I'll begin and take in sewing,” he said, “or I'll open a store in the village--a department store. I could spend something on that. I'll ask Pearson what he thinks of it--or Burrill. I'd like to see Burrill if I said that to him.”
He decided at last that he would practise his “short” awhile; that would be doing something, at any rate. He sat down at the big writing-table and began to dash off mystic signs at furious speed. But the speed did not keep up. The silence of the great room, of the immense house, of all the scores of rooms and galleries and corridors, closed in about him. He had practised his “short” in the night school, with the “L” thundering past at intervals of five minutes; in the newspaper office, with all the babel of New York about him and the bang of steam-drills going on below in the next lot, where the foundation of a new building was being excavated; he had practised it in his hall bedroom at Mrs. Bowse's, to the tumultuous accompaniment of street sounds and the whizz and TING-A-LING of street-cars dashing past, and he had not been disturbed. He had never practised it in any place which was silent, and it was the silence which became more than he could stand. He actually jumped out of his chair when he heard mysterious footsteps outside the door, and a footman appeared and spoke in a low voice which startled him as though it had been a thunderclap.
“A young person with her father wants to see you, sir,” he announced. “I don't think they are villagers, but of the working-class, I should say.”
“I didn't know exactly what to do, sir, so I left them in the hall. The young person has a sort of quiet, determined way--”
“Little Ann, by gee!” exclaimed Tembarom with mad joy, and shot out of the room.
The footman--he had not seen Little Ann when she had brought Strangeways--looked after him and rubbed his chin.