Part 19

This second inquiry, however, she could, as she slowly came round, substantially meet. “Pray, then, what is yours?”

“Mine would be, not that I should simply get my money back, but that I should get the effective value of the house.”

Mrs. Gracedew considered it. “But isn’t the effective value of the house just what your money expresses?”

The lid of his hard left eye, the harder of the two, just dipped with the effect of a wink. “No, madam. It’s just what _yours_ does. It’s moreover just what your lips have already expressed so distinctly!”

She clearly did her best to follow him. “To those people--when I showed the place off?”

Mr. Prodmore laughed. “You seemed to be _taking_ bids then!”

She was candid, but earnest. “Taking them?”

“Oh, like an auctioneer! You ran it up high!” And Mr. Prodmore laughed again.

She turned a little pale, but it added to her brightness. “I certainly did, if saying it was charming----”

“Charming?” Mr. Prodmore broke in. “You said it was magnificent. You said it was unique. That was your very word. You said it was the _perfect_ specimen of its class in England.” He was more than accusatory, he was really crushing. “Oh, you got in deep!”

It was indeed an indictment, and her smile was perhaps now rather set. “Possibly. But taunting me with my absurd high spirits and the dreadful liberties I took doesn’t in the least tell me how deep _you’re_ in!”

“For you, Mrs. Gracedew?” He took a few steps, looking at his shoes again and as if to give her time to plead--since he wished to be quite fair--that it was _not_ for her. “I’m in to the tune of fifty thousand.”

She was silent, on this announcement, so long that he once more faced her; but if what he showed her in doing so at last made her speak, it also took the life from her tone. “That’s a great deal of money, Mr. Prodmore.”

The tone didn’t matter, but only the truth it expressed, which he so thoroughly liked to hear. “So I’ve often had occasion to say to myself!”

“If it’s a large sum for you, then,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “it’s a still larger one for me.” She sank into a chair with a vague melancholy; such a mass loomed huge, and she sat down before it as a solitary herald, resigning himself with a sigh to wait, might have leaned against a tree before a besieged city. “We women”--she wished to conciliate--“have more modest ideas.”

But Mr. Prodmore would scarce condescend to parley. “Is it as a ‘modest idea’ that you describe your extraordinary intrusion----?”

His question scarce reached her; she was so lost for the moment in the sense of innocent community with her sex. “I mean I think we measure things often rather more exactly.”

There would have been no doubt of Mr. Prodmore’s very different community as he rudely replied: “Then you measured _this_ thing exactly half an hour ago!”

It was a long way to go back, but Mrs. Gracedew, in her seat, musingly made the journey, from which she then suddenly returned with a harmless, indeed quite a happy, memento. “Was I _very_ grotesque?”

He demurred. “Grotesque?”

“I mean--_did_ I go on about it?”

Mr. Prodmore would have no general descriptions; he was specific, he was vivid. “You banged the desk. You raved. You shrieked.”

This was a note she appeared indulgently, almost tenderly, to recognise. “We _do_ shriek at Missoura Top!”

“I don’t know what you do at Missoura Top, but I know what you did at Covering End!”

She warmed at last to his tone. “So do _I_ then! I surprised you. You weren’t at all prepared----”

He took her briskly up. “No--and I’m not prepared yet!”

Mrs. Gracedew could quite see it. “Yes, you’re too astonished.”

“My astonishment’s my own affair,” he retorted--“not less so than my memory!”

“Oh, I yield to your memory,” said the charming woman, “and I confess my extravagance. But quite, you know, _as_ extravagance.”

“I don’t at all know,”--Mr. Prodmore shook it off,--“nor what you _call_ extravagance.”

“Why, banging the desk. Raving. Shrieking. I over-did it,” she exclaimed; “I wanted to please you!”

She had too happy a beauty, as she sat in her high-backed chair, to have been condemned to say that to any man without a certain effect. The effect on Mr. Prodmore was striking. “So you said,” he sternly inquired, “what you didn’t believe?”

She flushed with the avowal. “Yes--for you.”

He looked at her hard. “For _me_?”

Under his eye--for her flush continued--she slowly got up. “And for those good people.”

“Oh!”--he sounded most sarcastic. “Should you like me to call them back?”

“No.” She was still gay enough, but very decided. “I took them in.”

“And now you want to take _me_?”

“Oh, Mr. Prodmore!” she almost pitifully, but not quite adequately, moaned.

He appeared to feel he had gone a little far. “Well, if we’re not what you say----”

“Yes?”--she looked up askance at the stroke.

“Why the devil do you want us?” The question rang out and was truly for the poor lady, as the quick suffusion of her eyes showed, a challenge it would take more time than he left her properly to pick up. He left her in fact no time at all before he went on: “Why the devil did you say you’d offer fifty?”

She looked quite wan and seemed to wonder. “_Did_ I say that?” She could only let his challenge lie. “It was a figure of speech!”

“Then that’s the kind of figure we’re talking about!” Mr. Prodmore’s sharpness would have struck an auditor as the more effective that, on the heels of this thrust, seeing the ancient butler reappear, he dropped the victim of it as comparatively unimportant and directed his fierceness instantly to Chivers, who mildly gaped at him from the threshold of the court. “Have you seen Miss Prodmore? If you haven’t, find her!”

Mrs. Gracedew addressed their visitor in a very different tone, though with the full authority of her benevolence. “You won’t, my dear man.” To Mr. Prodmore also she continued bland. “I happen to know she has gone for a walk.”

“A walk--alone?” Mr. Prodmore gasped.

“No--not alone.” Mrs. Gracedew looked at Chivers with a vague smile of appeal for help, but he could only give her, from under his bent old brow, the blank decency of his wonder. It seemed to make her feel afresh that she was, after all, alone--so that in her loneliness, which had also its fine sad charm, she risked another brush with their formidable friend. “Cora has gone with Mr. Pegg.”

“Pegg has _been_ here?”

It was like a splash in a full basin, but she launched the whole craft. “He walked with her from the station.”

“When she arrived?” Mr. Prodmore rose like outraged Neptune. “That’s why she was so late?”

Mrs. Gracedew assented. “Why I got here first. I get everywhere first!” she bravely laughed.

Mr. Prodmore looked round him in purple dismay--it was so clearly a question for him where _he_ should get, and what! “In which direction did they go?” he imperiously asked.

His rudeness was too evident to be more than lightly recognised. “I think I must let you ascertain for yourself!”

All he could do then was to shout it to Chivers. “Call my carriage, you ass!” After which, as the old man melted into the vestibule, he dashed about blindly for his hat, pounced upon it and seemed, furious but helpless, on the point of hurling it at his contradictress as a gage of battle. “So you abetted and protected this wicked, low intrigue?”

She had something in her face now that was indifferent to any violence. “You’re too disappointed to see your real interest: oughtn’t I therefore in common charity to point it out to you?”

He faced her question so far as to treat it as one. “What do _you_ know of my disappointment?”

There was something in his very harshness that even helped her, for it added at this moment to her sense of making out in his narrowed glare a couple of tears of rage. “I know everything.”

“What do you know of my real interest?” he went on as if he had not heard her.

“I know enough for my purpose--which is to offer you a handsome condition. I think it’s not I who have protected the happy understanding that you call by so ugly a name; it’s the happy understanding that has put me”--she gained confidence--“well, in a position. Do drive after them, if you like--but catch up with them only to forgive them. If you’ll do that, I’ll pay your price.”

The particular air with which, a minute after Mrs. Gracedew had spoken these words, Mr. Prodmore achieved a transfer of his attention to the inside of his hat--this special shade of majesty would have taxed the descriptive resources of the most accomplished reporter. It is none the less certain that he appeared for some time absorbed in that receptacle--appeared at last to breathe into it hard. “What do you call my price?”

“Why, the sum you just mentioned--fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew feverishly quavered.

He looked at her as if stupefied. “_That’s_ not my price--and it never for a moment was!” If derision can be dry, Mr. Prodmore’s was of the driest. “Besides,” he rang out, “my price is up!”

She caught it with a long wail. “Up?”

Oh, he let her have it now! “Seventy thousand.”

She turned away overwhelmed, but still with voice for her despair. “Oh, deary me!”

Mr. Prodmore was already at the door, from which he launched his ultimatum. “It’s to take or to leave!”

She would have had to leave it, perhaps, had not something happened at this moment to nerve her for the effort of staying him with a quick motion. Captain Yule had come into sight on the staircase and, after just faltering at what he himself saw, had marched resolutely enough down. She watched him arrive--watched him with an attention that visibly and responsively excited his own; after which she passed nearer to their companion. “Seventy thousand, then!”--it gleamed between them, in her muffled hiss, as if she had planted a dagger.

Mr. Prodmore, to do him justice, took his wound in front. “Seventy thousand--done!” And, without another look at Yule, he was presently heard to bang the outer door after him for a sign.

VIII

The young man, meanwhile, had approached in surprise. “He’s gone? I’ve been looking for him!”

Mrs. Gracedew was out of breath; there was a disturbed whiteness of bosom in her which needed time to subside and which she might have appeared to retreat before him on purpose to veil. “I don’t think, you know, that you need him--now.”

Clement Yule was mystified. “Now?”

She recovered herself enough to explain--made an effort at least to be plausible. “I mean that--if you don’t mind--you must deal with _me_. I’ve arranged with Mr. Prodmore to take it over.”

Oh, he gave her no help! “Take what over?”

She looked all about as if not quite thinking what it could be called; at last, however, she offered with a smile a sort of substitute for a name. “Why, your debt.”

But he was only the more bewildered. “_Can_ you--without arranging with _me_?”

She turned it round, but as if merely to oblige him. “That’s precisely what I want to do.” Then, more brightly, as she thought further: “That is, I mean, I want you to arrange with _me_. Surely you will,” she said encouragingly.

His own processes, in spite of a marked earnestness, were much less rapid. “But if I arrange with anybody----”

“Yes?” She cheerfully waited.

“How do I perform my engagement?”

“The one to Mr. Prodmore?”

He looked surprised at her speaking as if he had half-a-dozen. “Yes--that’s the worst.”

“Certainly--the worst!” And she gave a happy laugh that made him stare.

He broke into quite a different one. “You speak as if its being the worst made it the best!”

“It does--for me. You don’t,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “perform any engagement.”

He required a moment to take it in; then something extraordinary leaped into his face. “He lets me off?”

Ah, she could ring out now! “He lets you off.”

It lifted him high, but only to drop him with an audible thud. “Oh, I see--I lose my house!”

“Dear, no--_that_ doesn’t follow!” She spoke as if the absurdity he indicated were the last conceivable, but there was a certain want of sharpness of edge in her expression of the alternative. “You arrange with _me_ to keep it.”

There was quite a corresponding want, clearly, in the image presented to the Captain--of which, for a moment, he seemed with difficulty to follow the contour. “How do I arrange?”

“Well, we must think,” said Mrs. Gracedew; “we must wait.” She spoke as if this were a detail for which she had not yet had much attention; only bringing out, however, the next instant in an encouraging cry and as if it were by itself almost a solution: “We must find some way!” She might have been talking to a reasonable child.

But even reasonable children ask too many questions. “Yes--and what way _can_ we find?” Clement Yule, glancing about him, was so struck with the absence of ways that he appeared to remember with something of regret how different it had been before. “With Prodmore it was simple enough. You see I could marry his daughter.”

Mrs. Gracedew was silent just long enough for her soft ironic smile to fill the cup of the pause. “_Could_ you?”

It was as if he had tasted in the words the wine at the brim; for he gave, under the effect of them, a sudden headshake and an awkward laugh. “Well, never perhaps _that_ exactly--when it came to the point. But I had to, you see----” It was difficult to say just what.

She took advantage of it, looking hard, but not seeing at all. “You had to----?”

“Well,” he repeated ruefully, “think a lot about it. You didn’t suspect that?”

Oh, if he came to suspicions she could only break off! “Don’t ask me too many questions.”

He looked an instant as if he wondered why. “But isn’t this just the moment for them?” He fronted her, with a quickness he tried to dissimulate, from the other side. “What _did_ you suppose?”

She looked everywhere but into his face. “Why, I supposed you were in distress.”

He was very grave. “About his terms?”

“About his terms of course!” she laughed. “Not about his religious opinions.”

His gratitude was too great for gaiety. “You really, in your beautiful sympathy, _guessed_ my fix?”

But she declined to be too solemn. “Dear Captain Yule, it all quite stuck out of you!”

“You mean I floundered like a drowning man----?”

Well, she consented to have meant that. “Till I plunged in!”

He appeared there for a few seconds, to see her again take the jump and to listen again to the splash; then, with an odd, sharp impulse, he turned his back. “You saved me.”

She wouldn’t deny it--on the contrary. “What a pity, now, _I_ haven’t a daughter!”

On this he slowly came round again. “What should I do with her?”

“You’d treat her, I hope, better than you’ve treated Miss Prodmore.”

The young man positively coloured. “But I haven’t been bad----?”

The sight of this effect of her small joke produced on Mrs. Gracedew’s part an emotion less controllable than any she had yet felt. “Oh, you delightful goose!” she irrepressibly dropped.

She made his blush deepen, but the aggravation was a relief. “Of course--I’m all right, and there’s only one pity in the matter. I’ve nothing--nothing whatever, not a scrap of service nor a thing you’d care for--to offer you in compensation.”

She looked at him ever so kindly. “I’m not, as they say, ‘on the make.’” Never had he been put right with a lighter hand. “I didn’t do it for payment.”

“Then what did you do it for?”

For something, it might have seemed, as her eyes dropped and strayed, that had got brushed into a crevice of the old pavement. “Because I hated Mr. Prodmore.”

He conscientiously demurred. “So much as all that?”

“Oh, well,” she replied impatiently, “of course you also know how much I like the house. My hates and my likes,” she subtly explained, “can never live together. I get one of them out. The one this time was that man.”

He showed a candour of interest. “Yes--you got him out. Yes--I saw him go.” And his inner vision appeared to attend for some moments Mr. Prodmore’s departure. “But how did you do it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Women----!” Mrs. Gracedew but vaguely sketched it.

A touch or two, however, for that subject, could of course almost always suffice. “Precisely--women. May I smoke again?” Clement Yule abruptly asked.

“Certainly. But I managed Mr. Prodmore,” she laughed as he re-lighted, “without cigarettes.”

Her companion puffed. “_I_ couldn’t manage him.”

“So I saw!”

“_I_ couldn’t get him out.”

“So _he_ saw!”

Captain Yule, for a little, lost himself in his smoke. “Where is he gone?”

“I haven’t the least idea. But I meet him again,” she hastened to add--“very soon.”

“And when do you meet _me_?”

“Why, whenever you’ll come to see me.” For the twentieth time she gathered herself as if the words she had just spoken were quite her last hand. “At present, you see, I _have_ a train to catch.”

Absorbed in the trivial act that engaged him, he gave her no help. “A train?”

“Surely. I didn’t walk.”

“No; but even trains----!” His eyes clung to her now. “You fly?”

“I try to. Good-bye.”

He had got between her and the door of departure quite as, on her attempt to quit him half an hour before, he had anticipated her approach to the stairs; and in this position he took no notice of her farewell. “I said just now that I had nothing to offer you. But of course I’ve the house itself.”

“The house?” She stared. “Why, I’ve _got_ it?”

“Got it?”

“All in my head, I mean. That’s all I want.” She had not yet, save to Mr. Prodmore, made quite so light of it.

This had its action in his markedly longer face. “Why, I thought you loved it so!”

Ah, she was perfectly consistent. “I love it far too much to deprive _you_ of it.”

Yet Clement Yule could in a fashion meet her. “Oh, it wouldn’t be depriving----!”

She altogether protested. “Not to turn you out----?”

“Dear lady, I’ve never been _in_!”

Oh, she was none the less downright. “You’re in _now_--I’ve put you, and you must stay.” He looked round so woefully, however, that she presently attenuated. “I don’t mean _all_ the while, but long enough----!”

“Long enough for what?”

“For me to feel you’re here.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Well, you think me very fast--but sometimes I’m slow. I told you just now, at any rate,” she went on, “that I had arranged you should lose nothing. Is the very next thing I do, then, to make you lose everything?”

“It isn’t a question of what I lose,” the young man anxiously cried; “it’s a question of what I _do_! What _have_ I done to find it all so plain?” Fate was really--fate reversed, improved, and unnatural--too much for him, and his heated young face showed honest stupefaction. “I haven’t lifted a finger. It’s you who have done all.”

“Yes, but if you’re just where you were before, how in the world are you saved?” She put it to him with still superior lucidity.

“By my life’s being my own again--to do what I want.”

“What you ‘want’”--Mrs. Gracedew’s handsome uplifted head had it all there, every inch of it--“is to keep your house.”

“Ah, but only,” he perfectly assented, “if, as you said, you find a way!”

“I _have_ found a way--and there the way is: for _me_ just simply not to touch the place. What you ‘want,’” she argued more closely, “is what made you give in to Prodmore. What you ‘want’ is these walls and these acres. What you ‘want’ is to take the way I first showed you.”

Her companion’s eyes, quitting for the purpose her face, looked to the quarter marked by her last words as at an horizon now remote. “Why, the way you first showed me was to marry Cora!”

She had to admit it, but as little as possible. “Practically--yes.”

“Well, it’s just ‘practically’ that I can’t!”

“I didn’t know that then,” said Mrs. Gracedew. “You didn’t tell me.”

He passed, with an approach to a grimace, his hand over the back of his head. “I felt a delicacy!”

“I didn’t even know _that_.” She spoke it almost sadly.

“It didn’t strike you that I might?”

She thought a moment. “No.” She thought again. “No. But don’t quarrel with me about it _now_!”

“Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement.

She laughed, but she had changed colour. “Cora, at any rate, felt no delicacy. Cora told me.”

Clement Yule fairly gaped. “Then she did know----?”

“She knew all; and if her father said she didn’t, he simply told you what was not.” She frankly gave him this, but the next minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped to reassurance. “It was quite right of her. She would have refused you.”

The young man stared. “Oh!” He was quick, however, to show--by an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done--that he felt no personal wound. “Do you call that quite right?”

Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. “For _her_--yes; and for Prodmore.”

“Oh, for Prodmore”--his laugh grew more grim--“with all my heart!”

This, then,--her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,--was all she meant. “To stay at your post--_that_ was the way I showed you.”

He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new predicament. “How can I take any way at all, dear lady----?”

“If I only stick here in your path?” She had taken him straight up, and with spirit; and the same spirit bore her to the end. “I won’t stick a moment more! Haven’t I been trying this age to leave you?”

Clement Yule, for all answer, caught her sharply, in her passage, by the arm. “You surrender your rights?” He was for an instant almost terrible.

She quite turned pale with it. “Weren’t you ready to surrender _yours_?”

“I hadn’t any, so it was deuced easy. I hadn’t paid for them.”

Oh that, she let him see,--even though with his continued grasp he might hurt her,--had nothing in it! “Your ancestors had paid: it’s the same thing.” Erect there in the brightness of her triumph and the force of her logic, she must yet, to anticipate his return, take a stride--like a sudden dip into a gully and the scramble up on the other bank--that put her dignity to the test. “You’re just, in a manner, my tenant.”

“But how can I treat that as such a mere detail? I’m your tenant on what terms?”

“Oh, _any_ terms--choose them for yourself!” She made an attempt to free her arm--gave it a small vain shake. Then, as if to bribe him to let her go: “You can write me about them.”

He appeared to consider it. “To Missoura Top?”

She fully assented. “I go right back.” As if it had put him off his guard she broke away. “Farewell!”