Part 14

His visitor’s mirth, at this, quickly enough revived. “My dear fellow, I’m not alluding to the sole ornament of the garden, but to the young lady at present in the morning-room. Do you happen to have noticed if she’s pretty?”

Chivers stood queerly rueful. “Laws, sir--it’s a matter I mostly notice; but isn’t it, at the same time, sir, a matter--like--of taste?”

“Pre-eminently. That’s just why I appeal with such confidence to yours.”

The old man acknowledged with a flush of real embarrassment a responsibility he had so little invited. “Well, sir,--mine was always a sort of fancy for something more merry-like.”

“She isn’t merry-like then, poor Miss Prodmore?” Captain Yule’s attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an “Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn’t signify,” he went on. “What are _you_?” he more sociably demanded.

Chivers clearly had to think a bit. “Well, sir, I’m not quite _that_. Whatever has there been to make me, sir?” he asked in dim extenuation.

“How in the world do _I_ know? I mean to whom do you belong?”

Chivers seemed to scan impartially the whole field. “If you could just only _tell_ me, sir! I quite seem to waste away--for someone to take an order of.”

Clement Yule, by this time, had become aware he was amusing. “Who pays your wages?”

“No one at all, sir,” said the old man very simply.

His friend, fumbling an instant in a waistcoat pocket, produced something that his hand, in obedience to a little peremptory gesture and by a trick of which he had unlearned, through scant custom, the neatness, though the propriety was instinctive, placed itself in a shy practical relation to. “Then there’s a sovereign. And I haven’t many!” the young man, turning away resignedly, threw after it.

Chivers, for an instant, intensely studied him. “Ah, then, shouldn’t it stay in the family?”

Clement Yule wheeled round, first struck, then, at the sight of the figure made by his companion in this offer, visibly touched. “I think it does, old boy.”

Chivers kept his eyes on him now. “I’ve served your house, sir.”

“How long?”

“All my life.”

So, for a time, they faced each other, and something in Chivers made Yule at last speak. “Then I won’t give _you_ up!”

“Indeed, sir, I hope you won’t give up anything.”

The Captain took up his hat. “It remains to be seen.” He looked over the place again; his eyes wandered to the open door. “Is that the garden?”

“It _was_!”--and the old man’s sigh was like the creak of the wheel of time. “Shall I show you how it used to be?”

“It’s just as it _is_, alas, that I happen to require it!” Captain Yule reached the door and stood looking beyond. “Don’t come,” he then said; “I want to think.” With which he walked out.

Chivers, left alone, appeared to wonder at it, and his wonder, like that of most old people, lay near his lips. “What does he want, poor dear, to think about?” This speculation, however, was immediately checked by a high, clear voice that preceded the appearance on the stairs, before she had reached the middlemost landing, of the wonderful figure of a lady, a lady who, with the almost trumpeted cheer of her peremptory but friendly call--“Housekeeper, Butler, old Family Servant!”--fairly waked the sleeping echoes. Chivers gazed up at her in quick remembrance, half dismayed, half dazzled, of a duty neglected. She appeared now; she shone at him out of the upper dusk; reaching the middle, she had begun to descend, with beautiful laughter and rustling garments; and though she was alone she gave him the sense of coming in a crowd and with music. “Oh, I should have told him of _her_!”

III

She was indeed an apparition, a presence requiring announcement and explanation just in the degree in which it seemed to show itself in a relation quite of its own to all social preliminaries. It evidently either assumed them to be already over or wished to forestall them altogether; what was clear at any rate was that it allowed them scant existence. She was young, tall, radiant, lovely, and dressed in a manner determined at once, obviously, by the fact and by the humour of her journey--it might have proclaimed her so a pilgrim or so set her up as a priestess. Most journeys, for this lady, at all events, were clearly a brush of Paris. “Did you think I had got snapped down in an old box like that poor girl--what’s her name? the one who was poking round too--in the celebrated poem? You dear, delightful man, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you, mum----?”

“Well, that you’re so perfectly--perfect! You’re ever so much better than anyone has ever said. Why, in the name of common sense, has nobody ever said _anything_? You’re everything in the world you ought to be, and not the shade of a shade of anything you oughtn’t!”

It was a higher character to be turned out with than poor Chivers had ever dreamed. “Well, mum, I try!” he gaped.

“Oh, no, you don’t--that’s just your charm! _I_ try,” cried his friend, “but you do nothing: here you simply _are_--you can’t help it!”

He stood overwhelmed. “Me, mum?”

She took him in at the eyes--she could take everything at once. “Yes, you too, you positive old picture! I’ve seen the old masters--but you’re the old master!”

“The master--I?” He fairly fell back.

“‘The good and faithful servant’--Rembrandt van Rhyn: with three stars. _That’s_ what you are!” Nothing would have been more droll to a spectator than her manner of meeting his humbleness, or more charming indeed than the practical sweetness of her want of imagination of it. “The house is a vision of beauty, and you’re simply worthy of the house. I can’t say more for you!”

“I find it a bit of a strain, mum,” Chivers candidly replied, “to keep up--fairly to call it--with what you _do_ say.”

“That’s just what everyone finds it!”--she broke into the happiest laugh. “Yet I haven’t come here to suffer in silence, you know--to suffer, I mean, from envy and despair.” She was in constant movement, from side to side, observing, comparing, returning, taking notes while she gossiped and gossiping, too, for remembrance. The intention of remembrance even had in it, however, some prevision of failure or some alloy of irritation. “You’re so fatally right and so deadly complete, all the same, that I can really scarcely bear it: with every fascinating feature that I had already heard of and thought I was prepared for, and ever so many others that, strange to say, I hadn’t and wasn’t, and that you just spring right _at_ me like a series of things going off. What do you call it,” she asked--“a royal salute, a hundred guns?”

Her enthusiasm had a bewildering form, but it had by this time warmed the air, and the old man rubbed his hands as over a fire to which the bellows had been applied. “I saw as soon as you arrived, mum, that you were looking for more things than ever _I_ heard tell of!”

“Oh, I had got you by heart,” she returned, “from books and drawings and photos; I had you in my pocket when I came: so, you see, as soon as you were so good as to give me my head and let me loose, I knew my way about. It’s all here, every inch of it,” she competently continued, “and now at last I can do what I want!”

A light of consternation, at this, just glimmered in Chivers’s face. “And pray, mum, what might that be?”

“Why, take you right back with me--to Missoura Top.”

This answer seemed to fix his bewilderment, but he was there for the general convenience.

“Do I understand you, mum, that you require to take _me_?”

Her particular convenience, on the spot, embraced him, so new and delightful a sense had he suddenly read into her words. “Do you mean to say you’d come--as the old Family Servant? Then _do_, you nice real thing: it’s just what I’m dying for--an old Family Servant! You’re somebody’s else, yes--but everything, over here, is somebody’s else, and I want, too, a first-rate second-hand one, all ready made, as you are, but not too much done up. You’re the best I’ve seen yet, and I wish I could have you packed--put up in paper and bran--as I shall have my old pot there.” She whisked about, remembering, recovering, eager: “Don’t let me _forget_ my precious pot!” Excited, with quick transitions, she quite sociably appealed to her companion, who shuffled sympathetically to where, out of harm, the object had been placed on a table. “Don’t you just love old crockery? That’s awfully sweet old Chelsea.”

He took up the piece with tenderness, though, in his general agitation, not perhaps with all the caution with which, for daily service, he handled ancient frailties. He at any rate turned on this fresh subject an interested, puzzled eye. “Where is it I’ve known this very bit--though not to say, as _you_ do, by name?” Suddenly it came to him. “In the pew-opener’s front parlour!”

“No,” his interlocutress cried, “in the pew-opener’s best bedroom: on the old chest of drawers, you know--with those ducks of brass handles. I’ve got the handles too--I mean the whole thing; and the brass fender and fire-irons, and the chair her grandmother died in. Not in the fly,” she added--“it was such a bore that they have to be sent.”

Chivers, with the pot still in his hands, fairly rocked in the high wind of so much confidence and such great transactions. He had nothing for these, however, but approval. “You did right to take this out, mum, when the fly went to the stables. Them flymen do be cruel rash with anything that’s delicate.” Of the delicacy of the vessel it now rested with him to deposit safely again he was by this time so appreciatively aware that in returning with it to its safe niche he stumbled into some obscure trap literally laid for him by his nervousness. It was the matter of a few seconds, of a false movement, a knock of the elbow, a gasp, a shriek, a complete little crash. There was the pot on the pavement, in several pieces, and the clumsy cup-bearer blue with fear. “Mercy _on_ us, mum,--I’ve brought shame on my old grey hairs!”

The little shriek of his companion had smothered itself in the utterance, and the next minute, with the ruin between them, they were contrastedly face to face. The charming woman, who had already found more voices in the air than anyone had found before, could, in the happy play of this power, find a poetry in her accident. “Oh, but the way you _take_ it!” she laughed--“you’re too quaint to live!” She looked at him as if he alone had suffered--as if his suffering indeed positively added to his charm. “The way you said that now--it’s just the very ‘type’! That’s all I want of you now--to _be_ the very type. It’s what you are, you poor dear thing--for you _can’t_ help it; and it’s what everything and everyone else is, over here; so that you had just better all make up your minds to it and not try to shirk it. There was a type in the train with me--the ‘awfully nice girl’ of all the English novels, the ‘simple maiden in her flower’ of--who is it?--your great poet. _She_ couldn’t help it either--in fact I wouldn’t have _let_ her!” With this, while Chivers picked up his fragments, his lady had a happy recall. His face, as he stood there with the shapeless elements of his humiliation fairly rattling again in his hands, was a reflection of her extraordinary manner of enlarging the subject, or rather, more beneficently perhaps, the space that contained it. “By the way, the girl was coming right here. Has she come?”

Chivers crept solemnly away, as if to bury his dead, which he consigned, with dumb rites, to a situation of honourable publicity; then, as he came back, he replied without elation: “Miss Prodmore is here, mum. She’s having her tea.”

This, for his friend, was a confirmatory touch to be fitted with eagerness into the picture. “Yes, that’s exactly it--they’re always having their tea!”

“With Mr. Prodmore--in the morning-room,” the old man supplemented. “Captain Yule’s in the garden.”

“Captain Yule?”

“The new master. He’s also just arrived.”

The wonderful lady gave an immediate “Oh!” to the effect of which her silence for another moment seemed to add. “She didn’t tell me about _him_.”

“Well, mum,” said Chivers, “it do be a strange thing to tell. He had never--like, mum--so much as seen the place.”

“Before today--his very own?” This too, for the visitor, was an impression among impressions, and, like most of her others, it ended after an instant as a laugh. “Well, I hope he likes it!”

“I haven’t seen many, mum,” Chivers boldly declared, “that like it as much as _you_.”

She made with her handsome head a motion that appeared to signify still deeper things than he had caught. Her beautiful wondering eyes played high and low, like the flight of an imprisoned swallow, then, as she sank upon a seat, dropped at last as if the creature were bruised with its limits. “I should like it still better if it were _my_ very own!”

“Well, mum,” Chivers sighed, “if it wasn’t against my duty I could wish indeed it were! But the Captain, mum,” he conscientiously added, “is the lawful heir.”

It was a wonder what she found in whatever he said; he touched with every word the spring of her friendly joy. “That’s another of your lovely old things--I adore your lawful heirs!” She appeared to have, about everything that came up, a general lucid vision that almost glorified the particular case. “He has come to take possession?”

Chivers accepted, for the credit of the house, this sustaining suggestion. “He’s a-taking of it now.”

This evoked, for his companion, an instantaneous show. “What does he do and how does he do it? Can’t I _see_?” She was all impatience, but she dropped to disappointment as her guide looked blank. “There’s no grand fuss----?”

“I scarce think him, mum,” Chivers with propriety hastened to respond, “the gentleman to make any about anything.”

She had to resign herself, but she smiled as she thought. “Well, perhaps I like them better when they don’t!” She had clearly a great range of taste, and it all came out in the wistfulness with which, before the notice apparently served on her, she prepared to make way. “I also”--she lingered and sighed--“have taken possession!”

Poor Chivers really rose to her. “It was you, mum,” he smiled, “took it first!”

She sadly shook her head. “Ah, but for a poor little hour! _He’s_ for life.”

The old man gave up, after a little, with equal depression, the pretence of dealing with such realities. “For mine, mum, I do at least hope.”

She made again the circuit of the great place, picking up without interest the jacket she had on her previous entrance laid down. “I shall think of you, you know, here together.” She vaguely looked about her as for anything else to take; then abruptly, with her eyes again on Chivers: “Do you suppose he’ll be kind to you?”

His hand, in his trousers-pocket, seemed to turn the matter over. “He has already been, mum.”

“Then be sure to be so to _him_!” she replied with some emphasis. The house-bell sounded as she spoke, giving her quickly another thought. “Is that his bell?”

Chivers was hardly less struck. “I must see whose!”--and hurrying, on this, to the front, he presently again vanished.

His companion, left alone, stood a minute with an air in which happy possession was oddly and charmingly mingled with desperate surrender; so much as to have left you in doubt if the next of her lively motions were curiosity or disgust. Impressed, in her divided state, with a small framed plaque of enamel, she impulsively detached it from the wall and examined it with hungry tenderness. Her hovering thought was so vivid that you might almost have traced it in sound. “Why, bless me if it isn’t Limoges! I wish awfully I were a _bad_ woman: then, I do devoutly hope, I’d just quietly take it!” It testified to the force of this temptation that on hearing a sound behind her she started like a guilty thing; recovering herself, however, and--just, of course, not to appear at fault--keeping the object familiarly in her hand as she jumped to a recognition of the gentleman who, coming in from the garden, had stopped in the open doorway. She gathered indeed from his being there a positive advantage, the full confidence of which was already in her charming tone. “Oh, Captain Yule, I’m delighted to meet you! It’s such a comfort to ask you if I _may_!”

His surprise kept him an instant dumb, but the effort not too closely to betray it appeared in his persuasive inflection. “If you ‘may,’ madam----?”

“Why, just _be_ here, don’t you know? and poke round!” She presented such a course as almost vulgarly natural. “Don’t tell me I can’t now, because I already _have_: I’ve been upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber--I won’t answer for it even perhaps that I’ve not been in my lord’s! I got round your lovely servant--if you don’t look out I’ll grab him. If you don’t look out, you know, I’ll grab everything.” She gave fair notice and went on with amazing serenity; she gathered positive gaiety from his frank stupefaction. “That’s what I came over for--just to lay your country waste. Your house is a wild old dream; and besides”--she dropped, oddly and quaintly, into real responsible judgment--“you’ve got some quite good things. Oh, yes, you _have_--several: don’t coyly pretend you haven’t!” Her familiarity took these flying leaps, and she alighted, as her victim must have phrased it to himself, without turning a hair. “Don’t you _know_ you have? Just look at that!” She thrust her enamel before him, but he took it and held it so blankly, with an attention so absorbed in the mere woman, that at the sight of his manner her zeal for his interest and her pity for his detachment again flashed out. “Don’t you know _anything_? Why, it’s Limoges!”

Clement Yule simply broke into a laugh--though his laugh indeed was comprehensive. “It seems absurd, but I’m not in the least acquainted with my house. I’ve never happened to see it.”

She seized his arm. “Then do let me show it to you!”

“I shall be delighted.” His laughter had redoubled in a way that spoke of his previous tension; yet his tone, as he saw Chivers return breathless from the front, showed that he had responded sincerely enough to desire a clear field. “Who in the world’s there?”

The old man was full of it. “A party!”

“A party?”

Chivers confessed to the worst. “Over from Gossage--to see the house.”

The worst, however, clearly, was quite good enough for their companion, who embraced the incident with sudden enthusiasm. “Oh, let _me_ show it!” But before either of the men could reply she had, addressing herself to Chivers, one of those droll drops that betrayed the quickness of her wit and the freedom of her fancy. “Dear me, I forgot--_you_ get the tips! But, you dear old creature,” she went on, “I’ll get them, too, and I’ll simply make them over to you.” She again pressed Yule--pressed him into this service. “Perhaps they’ll be bigger--for me!”

He continued to be highly amused. “I should think they’d be enormous--for you! But I _should_ like,” he added with more concentration--“I should like extremely, you know, to go over with you alone.”

She was held a moment. “Just you and me?”

“Just you and me--as you kindly proposed.”

She stood reminded; but, throwing it off, she had her first inconsequence. “That must be for after----!”

“Ah, but not too late.” He looked at his watch. “I go back tonight.”

“Laws, sir!” Chivers irrepressibly groaned.

“You want to keep him?” the stranger asked. Captain Yule turned away at the question, but her look went after him, and she found herself, somehow, instantly answered. “Then I’ll help you,” she said to Chivers; “and the oftener we go over the better.”

Something further, on this, quite immaterial, but quite adequate, passed, while the young man’s back was turned, between the two others; in consequence of which Chivers again appealed to his master. “Shall I show them straight in, sir?”

His master, still detached, replied without looking at him. “By all means--if there’s money in it!” This was jocose, but there would have been, for an observer, an increase of hope in the old man’s departing step. The lady had exerted an influence.

She continued, for that matter, with a start of genial remembrance, to exert one in his absence. “Oh, and I promised to show it to Miss Prodmore!” Her conscience, with a kind smile for the young person she named, put the question to Clement Yule. “Won’t you call her?”

The coldness of his quick response made it practically none. “‘Call’ her? Dear lady, I don’t _know_ her!”

“You must, then--she’s wonderful.” The face with which he met this drew from the dear lady a sharper look; but, for the aid of her good-nature, Cora Prodmore, at the moment she spoke, presented herself in the doorway of the morning-room. “See? She’s charming!” The girl, with a glare of recognition, dashed across the open as if under heavy fire; but heavy fire, alas--the extremity of exposure--was promptly embodied in her friend’s public embrace. “Miss Prodmore,” said this terrible friend, “let me present Captain Yule.” Never had so great a gulf been bridged in so free a span. “Captain Yule, Miss Prodmore. Miss Prodmore, Captain Yule.”

There was stiffness, the cold mask of terror, in such notice as either party took of this demonstration, the convenience of which was not enhanced for the divided pair by the perception that Mr. Prodmore had now followed his daughter. Cora threw herself confusedly into it indeed, as with a vain rebound into the open. “Papa, let me ‘present’ you to Mrs. Gracedew. Mrs. Gracedew, Mr. Prodmore. Mr. Prodmore, Mrs. Gracedew.”

Mrs. Gracedew, with a free salute and a distinct repetition, took in Mr. Prodmore as she had taken everything else. “Mr. Prodmore”--oh, she pronounced him, spared him nothing of himself. “So happy to meet your daughter’s father. Your daughter’s so perfect a specimen.”

Mr. Prodmore, for the first moment, had simply looked large and at sea; then, like a practical man and without more question, had quickly seized the long perch held out to him in this statement. “So perfect a specimen, yes!”--he seemed to pass it on to his young friend.

Mrs. Gracedew, if she observed his emphasis, drew from it no deterrence; she only continued to cover Cora with a gaze that kept her well in the middle. “So fresh, so quaint, so droll!”

It was apparently a result of what had passed in the morning-room that Mr. Prodmore had grasped afresh the need for effective action, which he clearly felt he did something to meet in clutching precipitately the helping hand popped so suddenly out of space, yet so beautifully gloved and so pressingly and gracefully brandished. “So fresh, so quaint, so droll!”--he again gave Captain Yule the advantage of the stranger’s impression.