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.
To what further appreciation this might have prompted the lady herself
was not, however, just then manifest; for the return of Chivers had
been almost simultaneous with the advance of the Prodmores, and it had
taken place with forms that made it something of a circumstance. There
was positive pomp in the way he preceded several persons of both sexes,
not tourists at large, but simple sightseers of the half-holiday order,
plain provincial folk already, on the spot, rather awestruck. The old
man, with suppressed pulls and prayers, had drawn them up in a broken
line, and the habit of more peopled years, the dull drone of the dead
lesson, sounded out in his prompt beginning. The party stood close,
in this manner, on one side of the apartment, while the master of the
house and his little circle were grouped on the other. But as Chivers,
guiding his squad, reached the centre of the space, Mrs. Gracedew,
markedly moved, quite unreservedly engaged, came slowly forward to
meet him. “This, ladies and gentlemen,” he mechanically quavered,
“is perhaps the most important feature--the grand old feudal,
baronial ’all. Being, from all accounts, the most ancient portion of
the edifice, it was erected in the very earliest ages.” He paused a
moment, to mark his effect, then gave a little cough which had become,
obviously, in these great reaches of time, an essential part of the
trick. “Some do say,” he dispassionately remarked, “in the course
of the fifteenth century.”
Mrs. Gracedew, who had visibly thrown herself into the working of the
charm, following him with vivid sympathy and hanging on his lips, took
the liberty, at this, of quite affectionately pouncing on him. “_I_
say in the fourteenth, my dear--you’re robbing us of a hundred
years!”
Her victim yielded without a struggle. “I do seem, in them dark
old centuries, sometimes to trip a little.” Yet the interruption of
his ancient order distinctly discomposed him, all the more that his
audience, gaping with a sense of the importance of the fine point,
moved in its mass a little nearer. Thus put upon his honour, he
endeavoured to address the group with a dignity undiminished. “The
Gothic roof is much admired, but the west gallery is a modern
addition.”
His discriminations had the note of culture, but his candour, all too
promptly, struck Mrs. Gracedew as excessive. “What in the name of
Methuselah do you call ‘modern’? It was here at the visit of James
the First, in 1611, and is supposed to have served, in the charming
detail of its ornament, as a model for several that were constructed
in his reign. The great fireplace,” she handsomely conceded, “_is_
Jacobean.”
She had taken him up with such wondrous benignant authority--as if,
for her life, if they _were_ to have it, she couldn’t help taking
care that they had it out; she had interposed with an assurance that
so converted her--as by the wave of a great wand, the motion of one of
her own free arms--from mere passive alien to domesticated dragon, that
poor Chivers could only assent with grateful obeisances. She so plunged
into the old book that he had quite lost his place. The two gentlemen
and the young lady, moreover, were held there by the magic of her
manner. His own, as he turned again to his cluster of sightseers, took
refuge in its last refinement. “The tapestry on the left Italian--the
elegant wood-work Flemish.”
Mrs. Gracedew was upon him again. “Excuse me if I just deprecate a
misconception. The elegant wood-work Italian--the tapestry on the left
Flemish.” Suddenly she put it to him before them all, pleading as
familiarly and gaily as she had done when alone with him, and looking
now at the others, all round, gentry and poor folk alike, for sympathy
and support. She had an idea that made her dance. “Do you really
mind if _I_ just do it? Oh, I know how: I can do quite beautifully
the housekeeper last week at Castle Gaunt.” She fraternised with
the company as if it were a game they must play with her, though
this first stage sufficiently hushed them. “How do you do? Ain’t
it thrilling?” Then with a laugh as free as if, for a disguise,
she had thrown her handkerchief over her head or made an apron of her
tucked-up skirt, she passed to the grand manner. “Keep well together,
please--we’re not doing puss-in-the-corner. I’ve my duty to all
parties--I can’t be partial to one!”
The contingent from Gossage had, after all, like most contingents, its
spokesman--a very erect little personage in a very new suit and a very
green necktie, with a very long face and upstanding hair. It was on
an evident sense of having been practically selected for encouragement
that he, in turn, made choice of a question which drew all eyes. “How
many parties, now, can you manage?”
Mrs. Gracedew was superbly definite. “Two. The party up and the
party down.” Chivers gasped at the way she dealt with this liberty,
and his impression was conspicuously deepened as she pointed to
one of the escutcheons in the high hall-window. “Observe in the
centre compartment the family arms.” She did take his breath
away, for before he knew it she had crossed with the lightest but
surest of gestures to the black old portrait, on the opposite wall,
of a long-limbed gentleman in white trunk-hose. “And observe the
family legs!” Her method was wholly her own, irregular and broad;
she flew, familiarly, from the pavement to the roof and then dropped
from the roof to the pavement as if the whole air of the place were an
element in which she floated. “Observe the suit of armour worn at
Tewkesbury--observe the tattered banner carried at Blenheim.” They
bobbed their heads wherever she pointed, but it would have come home
to any spectator that they saw her alone. This was the case quite as
much with the opposite trio--the case especially with Clement Yule,
who indeed made no pretence of keeping up with her signs. It was the
signs themselves he looked at--not at the subjects indicated. But he
never took his eyes from her, and it was as if, at last, she had been
peculiarly affected by a glimpse of his attention. All her own, for
a moment, frankly went back to him and was immediately determined by
it. “Observe, above all, that you’re in one of the most interesting
old houses, of its type, in England; for which the ages have been
tender and the generations wise: letting it change so slowly that
there’s always more left than taken--living their lives in it, but
letting it shape their lives!”
Though this pretty speech had been unmistakeably addressed to the
younger of the temporary occupants of Covering End, it was the elder
who, on the spot, took it up. “A most striking and appropriate
tribute to a real historical monument!” Mr. Prodmore had a natural
ease that could deal handsomely with compliments, and he manifestly,
moreover, like a clever man, saw even more in such an explosion of them
than fully met the ear. “You do, madam, bring the whole thing out!”
The visitor who had already with such impunity ventured had, on
this, a loud renewal of boldness, but for the benefit of a near
neighbour. “Doesn’t she indeed, Jane, bring it out?”
Mrs. Gracedew, with a friendly laugh, caught the words in their
passage. “But who in the world wants to keep it _in_? It isn’t
a secret--it isn’t a strange cat or a political party!” The
housekeeper, as she talked, had already dropped from her; her sense of
the place was too fresh for control, though instead of half an hour
it might have taken six months to become so fond. She soared again,
at random, to the noble spring of the roof. “Just look at those
lovely lines!” They all looked, all but Clement Yule, and several
of the larger company, subdued, overwhelmed, nudged each other with
strange sounds. Wherever she turned Mrs. Gracedew appeared to find a
pretext for breaking out. “Just look at the tone of that glass, and
the gilding of that leather, and the cutting of that oak, and the dear
old flags of the very floor.” It came back, came back easily, her
impulse to appeal to the lawful heir, and she seemed, with her smile
of universal intelligence, just to demand the charity of another moment
for it. “To look, in this place, is to love!”
A voice from the party she had in hand took it up with an artless
guffaw that resounded more than had doubtless been meant and that, at
any rate, was evidently the accompaniment of some private pinch applied
to one of the ladies. “I _say_--to love!”
It was one of the ladies who very properly replied. “It depends on
who you look at!”
Mr. Prodmore, in the geniality of the hour, made his profit of the
simple joke. “Do you hear _that_, Captain? You must look at the right
person!”
Mrs. Gracedew certainly had not been looking at the wrong one. “I
don’t think Captain Yule cares. He doesn’t do justice----!”
Though her face was still gay, she had faltered, which seemed to strike
the young man even more than if she had gone on. “To what, madam?”
Well, on the chance she let him have it. “To the value of your
house.”
He took it beautifully. “I like to hear _you_ express it!”
“I _can’t_ express it!” She once more looked all round, and so
much more gravely than she had yet done that she might have appeared
in trouble. She tried but, with a sigh, broke down. “It’s too
inexpressible!”
This was a view of the case to which Mr. Prodmore, for his own reasons,
was not prepared to assent. Expression and formulation were what he
naturally most desired, and he had just encountered a fountain of these
things that he couldn’t prematurely suffer to fail him. “Do what
you can for it, madam. It would bring it quite home.”
Thus excited, she gave with sudden sombre clearness another
try. “Well--the value’s a fancy value!”
Mr. Prodmore, receiving it as more than he could have hoped, turned
triumphant to his young friend. “Exactly what I told you!”
Mrs. Gracedew explained indeed as if Mr. Prodmore’s triumph was
not perhaps exactly what she had argued for. Still, the truth was too
great. “When a thing’s unique, it’s unique!”
That was every bit Mr. Prodmore required. “It’s unique!”
This met, moreover, the perception of the gentleman in the
green necktie. “It’s unique!” They all, in fact, demonstratively--almost
vociferously now--caught the point.
Mrs. Gracedew, finding herself so sustained, and still with her eyes
on the lawful heirs, put it yet more strongly. “It’s worth anything
you like.”
What was this but precisely what Mr. Prodmore had always striven to
prove? “Anything you like!” he richly reverberated.
The pleasant discussion and the general interest seemed to bring them
all together. “Twenty thousand now?” one of the gentlemen from
Gossage archly inquired--a very young gentleman with an almost coaxing
voice, who blushed immensely as soon as he had spoken.
He blushed still more at the way Mrs. Gracedew faced him. “I
wouldn’t _look_ at twenty thousand!”
Mr. Prodmore, on the other hand, was proportionately uplifted. “She
wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!” he announced with intensity to
the Captain.
The visitor who had been the first to speak gave a shrewder
guess. “Thirty, then, as it stands?”
Mrs. Gracedew looked more and more responsible; she communed afresh
with the place; but she too evidently had her conscience. “It would
be giving it away!”
Mr. Prodmore, at this, could scarcely contain himself. “It would be
giving it away!”
The second speaker had meanwhile conceived the design of showing that,
though still crimson, he was not ashamed. “You’d hold out for
forty----?”
Mrs. Gracedew required a minute to answer--a very marked minute during
which the whole place, pale old portraits and lurking old echoes and
all, might have made you feel how much depended on her; to the degree
that the consciousness in her face became finally a reason for her not
turning it to Gossage. “Fifty thousand, Captain Yule, is what I think
I should propose.”
If the place had seemed to listen it might have been the place that,
in admiring accents from the gentleman with the green tie, took up the
prodigious figure. “Fifty thousand pound!”
It was echoed in a high note from the lady he had previously
addressed. “Fifty thousand!”
Yet it was Mr. Prodmore who caught it up loudest and appeared to make
it go furthest. “Fifty thousand--fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew had
put him in such spirits that he found on the spot, indicating to her
his young friend, both the proper humour and the proper rigour for any
question of what anyone might “propose.” “He’ll never part with
the dear old home!”
Mrs. Gracedew could match at least the confidence. “Then I’ll go
over it again while I have the chance.” Her own humour enjoined that
she should drop into the housekeeper, in the perfect tone of which
character she addressed herself once more to the party. “We now pass
to the grand staircase.” She gathered her band with a brave gesture,
but before she had fairly impelled them to the ascent she heard herself
rather sharply challenged by Captain Yule, who, during the previous
scene, had uttered no sound, yet had remained as attentive as he was
impenetrable. “Please let them pass without you!”
She was taken by surprise. “And stay here with _you_?”
“If you’ll be so good. I want to speak to you.” Turning then to
Chivers and frowning on the party, he delivered himself for the first
time as a person in a position. “For God’s sake, remove them!”
The old man, at this blast of impatience, instantly fluttered
forward. “We now pass to the grand staircase.”
They all passed, Chivers covering their scattered ascent as a shepherd
scales a hillside with his flock; but it became evident during the
manœuvre that Cora Prodmore was quite out of tune. She had been
standing beyond and rather behind Captain Yule; but she now moved
quickly round and reached her new friend’s right. “Mrs. Gracedew,
may _I_ speak to you?”
Her father, before the reply could come, had taken up the
place. “_After_ Captain Yule, my dear.” He was in a state of
positively polished lucidity. “You must make the most--don’t you
see?--of the opportunity of the others!”
He waved her to the staircase as one who knew what he was about,
but, while the young man, turning his back, moved consciously and
nervously away, the girl renewed her effort to provoke Mrs. Gracedew
to detain her. It happened, to her sorrow, that this lady appeared for
the moment, to the detriment of any free attention, to be absorbed
in Captain Yule’s manner; so that Cora could scarce disengage her
without some air of invidious reference to it. Recognising as much,
she could only for two seconds, but with great yearning, parry her own
antagonist. “She’ll _help_ me, I think, papa!”
“That’s exactly what strikes me, love!” he cheerfully replied.
“But _I’ll_ help you too!” He gave her, toward the stairs,
a push proportioned both to his authority and to her weight;
and while she reluctantly climbed in the wake of the visitors, he laid
on Mrs. Gracedew’s arm, with a portentous glance at Captain Yule,
a hand of commanding significance. “Just pile it on!”
Her attention came back--she seemed to see. “He doesn’t like it?”
“Not half enough. Bring him round.”
Her eyes rested again on their companion, who had fidgeted further
away and who now, with his hands in his pockets and unaware of this
private passage, stood again in the open doorway and gazed into the
grey court. Something in the sight determined her. “I’ll bring him
round.”
But at this moment Cora, pausing half-way up, sent down another
entreaty. “Mrs. Gracedew, will you see _me_?”
The charming woman looked at her watch. “In ten minutes,” she
smiled back.
Mr. Prodmore, bland and assured, looked at his own. “You could
put him through in five--but I’ll allow you twenty. There!” he
decisively cried to his daughter, whom he quickly rejoined and hustled
on her course. Mrs. Gracedew kissed after her a hand of vague comfort.