II

Mr. Prodmore, in Chivers’s absence, remained staring as if

at a sudden image of something rather fine. His child had left

with him the sense of a quick irradiation, and he failed to see

why, at the worst, such lightnings as she was thus able to dart

shouldn’t strike somewhere. If he had spoken to her of her best

manner perhaps _that_ was her best manner. He heard steps and voices,

however, and immediately invited to his aid his own, which was simply

magnificent. Chivers, returning, announced solemnly “Captain Yule!”

and ushered in a tall young man in a darkish tweed suit and a red

necktie, attached in a sailor’s knot, who, as he entered, removed

a soft brown hat. Mr. Prodmore, at this, immediately saluted him by

uncovering. “Delighted at last to see you here!”

It was the young man who first, in his comparative simplicity,

put out a hand. “If I’ve not come before, Mr. Prodmore, it

was--very frankly speaking--from the dread of seeing _you_!”

His speech contradicted, to some extent, his gesture, but Clement

Yule’s was an aspect in which contradictions were rather remarkably

at home. Erect and slender, but as strong as he was straight, he was

set up, as the phrase is, like a soldier, and yet finished, in certain

details--matters of expression and suggestion only indeed--like a man

in whom sensibility had been recklessly cultivated. He was hard and

fine, just as he was sharp and gentle, just as he was frank and shy,

just as he was serious and young, just as he looked, though you could

never have imitated it, distinctly “kept up” and yet considerably

reduced. His features were thoroughly regular, but his complete

shaving might have been designed to show that they were, after all,

not absurd. The face Mr. Prodmore offered him fairly glowed, on this

new showing, with instant pride of possession, and there was that in

Captain Yule’s whole air which justified such a sentiment without

consciously rewarding it.

“Ah, surely,” said the elder man, “my presence is not without

a motive!”

“It’s just the motive,” Captain Yule returned, “that makes me

wince at it! Certainly I’ve no illusions,” he added, “about the

ground of our meeting. Your thorough knowledge of what you’re about

has placed me at your mercy--you hold me in the hollow of your hand.”

It was vivid in every inch that Mr. Prodmore’s was a nature to expand

in the warmth, or even in the chill, of any tribute to his financial

subtlety. “Well, I won’t, on my side, deny that when, in general,

I go in deep I don’t go in for nothing. I make it pay double!” he

smiled.

“You make it pay so well--‘double’ surely doesn’t do you

justice!--that, if I’ve understood you, you can do quite as you like

with this preposterous place. Haven’t you brought me down exactly

that I may _see_ you do it?”

“I’ve certainly brought you down that you may open your eyes!”

This, apparently, however, was not what Mr. Prodmore himself had

arrived to do with his own. These fine points of expression literally

contracted with intensity. “Of course, you know, you can always clear

the property. You can pay off the mortgages.”

Captain Yule, by this time, had, as he had not done at first, looked

up and down, round about and well over the scene, taking in, though

at a mere glance, it might have seemed, more particularly, the row,

high up, of strenuous ancestors. But Mr. Prodmore’s last words rang

none the less on his ear, and he met them with mild amusement. “Pay

off----? What can I pay off with?”

“You can always raise money.”

“What can I raise it on?”

Mr. Prodmore looked massively gay. “On your great political

future.”

“Oh, I’ve not taken--for the short run at least--the lucrative

line,” the young man said, “and I know what you think of _that_.”

Mr. Prodmore’s blandness confessed, by its instant increase, to

this impeachment. There was always the glory of intimacy in Yule’s

knowing what he thought. “I hold that you keep, in public, very

dangerous company; but I also hold that you’re extravagant mainly

because you’ve nothing at stake. A man has the right opinions,” he

developed with pleasant confidence, “as soon as he has something to

lose by having the wrong. Haven’t I already hinted to you how to set

your political house in order? You drop into the lower regions because

you keep the best rooms empty. You’re a firebrand, in other words my

dear Captain, simply because you’re a bachelor. That’s one of the

early complaints we all pass through, but it’s soon over, and the

treatment for it quite simple. I have your remedy.”

The young man’s eyes, wandering again about the house, might have

been those of an auditor of the fiddling before the rise of the

curtain. “A remedy worse than the disease?”

“There’s nothing worse, that I’ve ever heard of,” Mr. Prodmore

sharply replied, “than your particular fix. Least of all a heap of

gold----”

“A heap of gold?” His visitor idly settled, as if the curtain were

going up.

Mr. Prodmore raised it bravely. “In the lap of a fine fresh

lass! Give pledges to fortune, as somebody says--_then_ we’ll

talk. You want money--that’s what you want. Well, marry it!”

Clement Yule, for a little, never stirred, save that his eyes yet again

strayed vaguely. At last they stopped with a smile. “Of course I

could do that in a moment!”

“It’s even just my own danger from you,” his companion returned.

“I perfectly recognise that any woman would now jump----”

“I don’t like jumping women,” Captain Yule threw in; “but that

perhaps is a detail. It’s more to the point that I’ve yet to see

the woman whom, by an advance of my own----”

“You’d care to keep in the really attractive position----?”

“Which can never, of course, be anything”--Yule took his friend up

again--“but that of waiting quietly.”

“Never, never anything!” Mr. Prodmore, most assentingly, banished

all other thought. “But I haven’t asked you, you know, to make an

advance.”

“You’ve only asked me to receive one?”

Mr. Prodmore waited a little. “Well, I’ve asked you--I asked you a

month ago--to think it all over.”

“I _have_ thought it all over,” Clement Yule said; “and the

strange sequel seems to be that my eyes have got accustomed to my

darkness. I seem to make out, in the gloom of my meditations, that, at

the worst, I can let the whole thing slide.”

“The property?”--Mr. Prodmore jerked back as if it were about to

start.

“Isn’t it the property,” his visitor inquired, “that positively

throws me up? If I can afford neither to live on it nor to disencumber

it, I can at least let it save its own bacon and pay its own debts. I

can say to you simply: ‘Take it, my dear sir, and the devil take

_you_!’”

Mr. Prodmore gave a quick, strained smile. “You wouldn’t be so

shockingly rude!”

“Why not--if I’m a firebrand and a keeper of low company and a

general nuisance? Sacrifice for sacrifice, that might very well be the

least!”

This was put with such emphasis that Mr. Prodmore was for a moment

arrested. He could stop very short, however, and yet talk as still

going. “How do you know, if you haven’t compared them? It’s just

to make the comparison--in all the proper circumstances--that you’re

here at this hour.” He took, with a large, though vague, exhibitory

gesture, a few turns about. “Now that you stretch yourself--for an

hour’s relaxation and rocked, as it were, by my friendly hand--in the

ancient cradle of your race, can you seriously entertain the idea of

parting with such a venerable family relic?”

It was evident that, as he decorously embraced the scene, the young

man, in spite of this dissuasive tone, was entertaining ideas. It

might have appeared at the moment to a spectator in whom fancy was

at all alert that the place, becoming in a manner conscious of the

question, felt itself on its honour, and that its honour could make

no compromise. It met Clement Yule with no grimace of invitation,

with no attenuation of its rich old sadness. It was as if the two

hard spirits, the grim _genius loci_ and the quick modern conscience,

stood an instant confronted. “The cradle of my race bears, for me,

Mr. Prodmore, a striking resemblance to its tomb.” The sigh that

dropped from him, however, was not quite void of tenderness. It

might, for that matter, have been a long, sad creak, portending

collapse, of some immemorial support of the Yules. “Heavens, how

melancholy----!”

Mr. Prodmore, somewhat ambiguously, took up the sound. “Melancholy?”--he

just balanced. That well might be, even a little _should_

be--yet agreement might depreciate.

“Musty, mouldy;” then with a poke of his stick at a gap in the

stuff with which an old chair was covered, “mangy!” Captain Yule

responded. “Is this the character throughout?”

Mr. Prodmore fixed a minute the tell-tale tatter. “You must judge

for yourself--you must go over the house.” He hesitated again; then

his indecision vanished--the right line was clear. “It does look a

bit run down, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do it up for

you--neatly: I’ll throw _that_ in!”

His young friend turned on him an eye that, though markedly enlivened

by his offer, was somehow only the more inscrutable. “Will you put in

the electric light?”

Mr. Prodmore’s own twinkle--at this touch of a spring he had not

expected to work--was, on the other hand, temporarily veiled. “Well,

if you’ll meet me half-way! We’re dealing here”--he backed up his

gravity--“with fancy-values. Don’t you feel,” he appealed, “as

you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?”

Clement Yule gazed awhile at one of the pompous quarterings in the

faded old glass that, in tones as of late autumn, crowned with armorial

figures the top of the great hall-window; then with abruptness he

turned away. “Perhaps I _don’t_ take it all in; but what I do feel

is--since you mention it--a sort of stiffening of the spine! The whole

thing is too queer--too cold--too cruel.”

“Cruel?”--Mr. Prodmore’s demur was virtuous.

“Like the face of some stuck-up distant relation who won’t speak

first. I see in the stare of the old dragon, I taste in his very

breath, all the helpless mortality he has tucked away!”

“Lord, sir--you _have_ fancies!” Mr. Prodmore was almost

scandalised.

But the young man’s fancies only multiplied as he moved, not at

all critical, but altogether nervous, from object to object. “I

don’t know what’s the matter--but there _is_ more here than meets

the eye.” He tried as for his amusement or his relief to figure it

out. “I miss the old presences. I feel the old absences. I hear the

old voices. I see the old ghosts.”

This last was a profession that offered some common ground. “The

old ghosts, Captain Yule,” his companion promptly replied, “are

worth so much a dozen, and with no reduction, I must remind you--with

the price indeed rather raised--for the quantity taken!” Feeling

then apparently that he had cleared the air a little by this sally,

Mr. Prodmore proceeded to pat his interlocutor on a back that he by no

means wished to cause to be put to the wall. “Look about you, at any

rate, a little more.” He crossed with his toes well out the line that

divides encouragement from patronage. “Do make yourself at home.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Prodmore. May I light a cigarette?” his

visitor asked.

“In your own house, Captain?”

“That’s just the question: it seems so much less my own house

than before I had come into it!” The Captain offered Mr. Prodmore a

cigarette which that gentleman, also taking a light from him, accepted;

then he lit his own and began to smoke. “As I understand you,” he

went on, “you _lump_ your two conditions? I mean I must accept both

or neither?”

Mr. Prodmore threw back his shoulders with a high recognition of the

long stride represented by this question. “You _will_ accept both,

for, by doing so, you’ll clear the property at a stroke. The way

I put it is--see?--that if you’ll stand for Gossage, you’ll get

returned for Gossage.”

“And if I get returned for Gossage, I shall marry your daughter.

Accordingly,” the young man pursued, “if I marry your daughter----”

“I’ll burn up, before your eyes,” said this young lady’s

proprietor, “every scratch of your pen. It will be a bonfire of

signatures. There won’t be a penny to pay--there’ll only be a

position to take. You’ll take it with peculiar grace.”

“Peculiar, Mr. Prodmore--very!”

The young man had assented more than he desired, but he was not

deterred by it from completing the picture. “You’ll settle down

here in comfort and honour.”

Clement Yule took several steps; the effect of his host was the reverse

of soothing; yet the latter watched his irritation as if it were the

working of a charm. “Are you very sure of the ‘honour’ if I turn

my political coat?”

“You’ll only be turning it back again to the way it was always

worn. Gossage will receive you with open arms and press you to a

heaving Tory bosom. That bosom”--Mr. Prodmore followed himself

up--“has never heaved but to sound Conservative principles. The

cradle, as I’ve called it,--or at least the rich, warm coverlet,--of

your race, Gossage was the political property, so to speak, of

generations of your family. Stand therefore in the good old interest

and you’ll stand like a lion.”

“I’m afraid you mean,” Captain Yule laughed, “that I must first

roar like one.”

“Oh, _I’ll_ do the roaring!”--and Mr. Prodmore shook his

mane. “Leave that to me.”

“Then why the deuce don’t you stand yourself?”

Mr. Prodmore knew so familiarly why! “Because I’m not a

remarkably handsome young man with the grand old home and the right

old name. Because I’m a different sort of matter altogether. But if I

haven’t these advantages,” he went on, “you’ll do justice to my

natural desire that my daughter at least shall have them.”

Clement Yule watched himself smoke a minute. “Doing justice to

natural desires is just what, of late, I’ve tried to make a study

of. But I confess I don’t quite grasp the deep attraction you appear

to discover in so large a surrender of your interests.”

“My surrenders are my own affair,” Mr. Prodmore rang out, “and as

for my interests, as I never, on principle, give anything for nothing,

I dare say I may be trusted to know them when I see them. You come

high--I don’t for a moment deny it; but when I look at you, in

this pleasant, intimate way, my dear boy--if you’ll allow me so to

describe things--I recognise one of those cases, unmistakeable when

really met, in which one must put down one’s money. There’s not

an article in the whole shop, if you don’t mind the comparison,

that strikes me as better value. I intend you shall be, Captain,”

Mr. Prodmore wound up in a frank, bold burst, “the true comfort of

my life!”

The young man was as hushed for a little as if an organ-tone were

still in the air. “May I inquire,” he at last returned, “if Miss

Prodmore’s ideas of comfort are as well defined--and in her case, I

may add, as touchingly modest--as her father’s? Is she a responsible

party of this ingenious arrangement?”

Mr. Prodmore rendered homage--his appreciation was marked--to the

elevated character of his young friend’s scruple. “Miss Prodmore,

Captain Yule, may be perhaps best described as a large smooth sheet

of blank, though gilt-edged, paper. No image of any tie but the true

and perfect filial has yet, I can answer for it, formed itself on the

considerable expanse. But for that image to be projected----”

“I’ve only, in person, to appear?” Yule asked with an embarrassment

that he tried to laugh off.

“And, naturally, in person,” Mr. Prodmore intelligently assented,

“do yourself, as well as the young lady, justice. Do you remember

what you said when I first, in London, laid the matter before you?”

Clement Yule did remember, but his amusement increased. “I think

I said it struck me I should first take a look at--what do you call

it?--the _corpus delicti_.”

“You should first see for yourself what you had really come into? I

was not only eager for that,” said Mr. Prodmore, “but I’m willing

to go further: I’m quite ready to hear you say that you think you

should also first see the young lady.”

Captain Yule continued to laugh. “There is something in that then,

since you mention it!”

“I think you’ll find that there’s everything.” Mr. Prodmore

again looked at his watch. “Which will you take first?”

“First?”

“The young lady or the house?”

His companion, at this, unmistakeably started. “Do you mean your

daughter’s _here_?”

Mr. Prodmore glowed with consciousness. “In the morning-room.”

“Waiting for me?”

The tone showed a consternation that Mr. Prodmore’s was alert to

soothe. “Ah, as long, you know, as you like!”

Yule’s alarm, however, was not assuaged; it appeared to grow as he

stared, much discomposed, yet sharply thinking, at the door to which

his friend had pointed. “Oh, longer than _this_, please!” Then as

he turned away: “Do you mean she knows----?”

“That she’s here on view?” Mr. Prodmore hung fire a moment, but

was equal to the occasion. “She knows nothing whatever. She’s as

unconscious as the rose on its stem!”

His companion was visibly relieved. “That’s right--let her remain

so! I’ll first take the house,” said Clement Yule.

“Shall I go round _with_ you?” Mr. Prodmore asked.

The young man’s reflection was brief. “Thank you. I’d rather, on

the whole, go round alone.”

The old servant who had admitted the gentlemen came back at this crisis

from the morning-room, looking from under a bent brow and with much

limpid earnestness from one of them to the other. The one he first

addressed had evidently, though quite unaware of it, inspired him with

a sympathy from which he now took a hint. “There’s tea on, sir!”

he persuasively jerked as he passed the younger man.

The elder answered. “Then I’ll join my daughter.” He gained

the morning-room door, whence he repeated with an appropriate

gesture--that of offering proudly, with light, firm fingers, a flower

of his own celebrated raising--his happy formula of Miss Prodmore’s

state. “The rose on its stem!” Scattering petals, diffusing

fragrance, he thus passed out.

Chivers, meanwhile, had rather pointlessly settled once more in its

place some small object that had not strayed; to whom Clement Yule,

absently watching him, abruptly broke out. “I say, my friend, what

colour is the rose?”

The old man looked up with a dimness that presently glimmered. “The

rose, sir?” He turned to the open door and the shining day. “Rather

a brilliant----”

“A brilliant----?” Yule was interested.

“Kind of old-fashioned red.” Chivers smiled with the pride of

being thus able to testify, but the next instant his smile went

out. “It’s the only one left--on the old west wall.”

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_!”