The silence that reigned between the pair might have been registered
as embarrassing had it lasted a trifle longer. Yule had continued to
turn his back, but he faced about, though he was distinctly grave, in
time to avert an awkwardness. “How do you come to know so much about
my house?”
She was as distinctly not grave. “How do _you_ come to know so
little?”
“It’s not my fault,” he said very gently. “A particular
combination of misfortunes has forbidden me, till this hour, to come
within a mile of it.”
These words evidently struck her as so exactly the right ones to
proceed from the lawful heir that such a felicity of misery could only
quicken her interest. He was plainly as good in his way as the old
butler--the particular combination of misfortunes corresponded to the
lifelong service. Her interest, none the less, in its turn, could only
quicken her pity, and all her emotions, we have already seen, found
prompt enough expression. What could any expression do indeed now but
mark the romantic reality? “Why, you poor thing!”--she came toward
him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least
you’ll stay.” Their intercourse must pitch itself--so far as she
was concerned--in some key that would make up for things. “Do make
yourself comfortable. Don’t mind me.”
Yule looked a shade less serious. “That’s exactly what I wanted to
say to _you_!”
She was struck with the way it came in. “Well, if you _had_ been
haughty, I shouldn’t have been quite crushed, should I?”
The young man’s gravity, at this, completely yielded. “I’m never
haughty--oh, no!”
She seemed even more amused. “Fortunately then, as _I’m_ never
crushed. I don’t think,” she added, “that I’m really as
crushable as you.”
The smile with which he received this failed to conceal completely
that it was something of a home thrust. “Aren’t we really _all_
crushable--by the right thing?”
She considered a little. “Don’t you mean rather by the wrong?”
He had got, clearly, a trifle more accustomed to her being
extraordinary. “Are you sure we always know them apart?”
She weighed the responsibility. “I always do. Don’t you?”
“Not quite every time!”
“Oh,” she replied, “I don’t think, thank goodness, we have
positively ‘every time’ to distinguish.”
“Yet we must always act,” he objected.
She turned this over; then with her wonderful living look, “I’m
glad to hear it,” she exclaimed, “because, I fear, I always
_do_! You’ll certainly think,” she added with more gravity, “that
I’ve taken a line today!”
“Do you mean that of mistress of the house? Yes--you do seem in
possession!”
“_You_ don’t!” she honestly answered; after which, as to
attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably
look it, I mean. You don’t look”--she was very serious--“as I
want you to.”
It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. “How do you
‘want’ me to look?”
She endeavoured, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed
only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. “When you look
at _me_, you’re all right!” she sighed. It was an obstacle to her
lesson, and she cast her eyes about. “Look at that chimneypiece.”
“Well----?” he inquired as his eyes came back from it.
“You mean to say it isn’t lovely?”
He returned to it without passion--gave a vivid sign of mere
disability. “I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t mean to say
anything. I’m a rank outsider.”
It had an instant effect on her--she almost pounced upon him. “Then
you must let me put you up!”
“Up to what?”
“Up to everything!”--his levity added to her earnestness. “You
were smoking when you came in,” she said as she glanced
about. “Where’s your cigarette?”
The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I
mightn’t--here.”
“You may everywhere.”
He bent his head to the information. “Everywhere.”
She laughed at his docility, yet could only wish to presume upon
it. “It’s a rule of the house!”
He took in the place with greater pleasure. “What delightful
rules!”
“How could such a house have any others?”--she was already
launched again in her brave relation to it. “I _may_ go up just once
more--mayn’t I--to the long gallery?”
How could he tell? “The long gallery?”
With an added glow she remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen
it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full, on the
spot, of the pride of showing it. “Come right up!”
Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg
nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. “There’s
a party up.”
She remembered afresh. “So _we_ must be the party down? Well, you
must give me a chance. That long gallery’s the principal thing I came
over for.”
She was strangest of all when she explained. “Where in heaven’s
name did you come over from?”
“Missoura Top, where I’m building--just in this style. I came for
plans and ideas,” Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. “I felt I must
look right _at_ you.”
“But what did you know about us?”
She kept it a moment as if it were too good to give him all at
once. “Everything!”
He seemed indeed almost afraid to touch it. “At ‘Missoura
Top’?”
“Why not? It’s a growing place--forty thousand the last census.”
She hesitated; then as if her warrant should be slightly more personal:
“My husband left it to me.”
The young man presently changed his posture. “You’re a widow?”
Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A
very lone woman.” Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long
distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to
hold it--and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see,
I had your picture.”
Yule’s innocence made a movement. “Mine?”
Her smile reassured him; she nodded toward the main entrance. “A
water colour I chanced on in Boston.”
“In Boston?”
She stared. “Haven’t you heard of Boston either?”
“Yes--but what has Boston heard of _me_?”
“It wasn’t ‘you,’ unfortunately--it was your divine south
front. The drawing struck me so that I got you up--in the books.”
He appeared, however, rather comically, but half to make it out,
or to gather at any rate that there was even more of it than he
feared. “Are we in the books?”
“Did you never discover it?” Before his blankness, the dim
apprehension in his fine amused and troubled face of how much
there was of it, her frank, gay concern for him sprang again to the
front. “Where in heaven’s name, Captain Yule, have _you_ come over
from?”
He looked at her very kindly, but as if scarce expecting her to
follow. “The East End of London.”
She had followed perfectly, he saw the next instant, but she had by no
means equally accepted. “What were you doing there?”
He could only put it, though a little over-consciously, very
simply. “Working, you see. When I left the army--it was much too
slow, unless one was personally a whirlwind of war--I began to make out
that, for a fighting man----”
“There’s always,” she took him up, “somebody or other to go
for?”
He considered her, while he smoked, with more confidence; as if she
might after all understand. “The enemy, yes--everywhere in force. I
went for _him_: misery and ignorance and vice--injustice and privilege
and wrong. Such as you see me----”
“You’re a rabid reformer?”--she understood beautifully. “I wish
we had you at Missoura Top!”
He literally, for a moment, in the light of her beauty and familiarity,
appeared to measure his possible use there; then, looking round him
again, announced with a sigh that, predicament for predicament, his own
would do. “I fear my work is nearer home. I hope,” he continued,
“since you’re so good as to seem to care, to perform a part of that
work in the next House of Commons. My electors have wanted me----”
“And you’ve wanted _them_,” she lucidly put in, “and that has
been why you couldn’t come down.”
“Yes, for all this last time. And before that, from my childhood up,
there was another reason.” He took a few steps away and brought it
out as rather a shabby one. “A family feud.”
She proved to be quite delighted with it. “Oh, I’m so glad--I
_hoped_ I’d strike a ‘feud’! That rounds it off, and spices it
up, and, for the heartbreak with which I take leave of you, just neatly
completes the fracture!” Her reference to her going seemed suddenly,
on this, to bring her back to a sense of proportion and propriety, and
she glanced about once more for some wrap or reticule. This, in turn,
however, was another recall. “Must I really wait--to go up?”
He had watched her movement, had changed colour, had shifted his place,
had tossed away, plainly unwitting, a cigarette but half smoked; and
now he stood in her path to the staircase as if, still unsatisfied,
he abruptly sought a way to turn the tables. “Only till you tell me
this: if you absolutely meant, awhile ago, that this old thing is so
precious.”
She met his doubt with amazement and his density with compassion. “Do
you literally need I should _say_ it? Can you stand here and not feel
it?” If he had the misfortune of bandaged eyes, she could at least
rejoice in her own vision, which grew intenser with her having to speak
for it. She spoke as with a new rush of her impression. “It’s a
place to love----” Yet to say the whole thing was not easy.
“To love----?” he impatiently insisted.
“Well, as you’d love a person!” If that was saying the whole
thing, saying the whole thing could only be to go. A sound from the
“party up” came down at that moment, and she took it so clearly
as a call that, for a sign of separation, she passed straight to the
stairs. “Good-bye!”
The young man let her reach the foot, but then, though the greatest
width of the hall now divided them, spoke, anxiously and nervously, as
if the point she had just made brought them still more together. “I
think I ‘feel’ it, you know; but it’s simply you--your presence,
as I may say, and the remarkable way you put it--that make me. I’m
afraid that in your absence----” He struck a match to smoke again.
It gave her time apparently to make out something to pause for. “In
my absence?”
He lit his cigarette. “I may come back----”
“Come back?” she took him almost sharply up. “I should like to
see you _not_!”
He smoked a moment. “I mean to my old idea----”
She had quite turned round on him now. “Your old idea----?”
He faced her over the width still between them. “Well--that one
_could_ give it up.”
Her stare, at this, fairly filled the space. “Give up Covering? How
in the world--or why?”
“Because I can’t afford to keep it.”
It brought her straight back, but only half-way: she pulled up short as
at a flash. “Can’t you let it?”
Again he smoked before answering. “Let it to _you_?”
She gave a laugh, and her laugh brought her nearer. “I’d take it in
a minute!”
Clement Yule remained grave. “I shouldn’t have the face to charge
you a rent that would make it worth one’s while, and I think
even you, dear lady”--his voice just trembled as he risked that
address--“wouldn’t have the face to offer me one.” He paused,
but something in his aspect and manner checked in her now any impulse
to read his meaning too soon. “My lovely inheritance is Dead Sea
fruit. It’s mortgaged for all it’s worth and I haven’t the
means to pay the interest. If by a miracle I could scrape the money
together, it would leave me without a penny to live on.” He puffed
his cigarette profusely. “So if I find the old home at last--I lose
it by the same luck!”
Mrs. Gracedew had hung upon his words, and she seemed still to wait,
in visible horror, for something that would improve on them. But when
she had to take them for his last, “I never heard of anything
so awful!” she broke out. “Do you mean to say you can’t
arrange----?”
“Oh, yes,” he promptly replied, “an arrangement--if that be the
name to give it--has been definitely proposed to me.”
“What’s the matter, then?”--she had dropped into relief. “For
heaven’s sake, you poor thing, definitely accept it!”
He laughed, though with little joy, at her sweet simplifications.
“I’ve made up my mind in the last quarter of an hour that
I can’t. It’s such a peculiar case.”
Mrs. Gracedew frankly wondered; her bias was clearly sceptical.
“_How_ peculiar----?”
He found the measure difficult to give. “Well--more peculiar than
most cases.”
Still she was not satisfied. “More peculiar than mine?”
“Than yours?”--Clement Yule knew nothing about that.
Something, at this, in his tone, his face--it might have been his
“British” density--seemed to pull her up. “I forgot--you don’t
know mine. No matter. What _is_ yours?”
He took a few steps in thought. “Well, the fact that I’m asked to
change.”
“To change what?”
He wondered how he could put it; then at last, on his own side,
simplified. “My attitude.”
“Is that all?”--she was relieved again. “Well, you’re not a
statue.”
“No, I’m not a statue; but on the other hand, don’t you
see? I’m not a windmill.” There was good-humour, none the less, in
his rigour. “The mortgages I speak of have all found their way, like
gregarious silly sheep, into the hands of one person--a devouring wolf,
a very rich, a very sharp man of money. He holds me in this manner
at his mercy. He consents to make things comfortable for me, but he
requires that, in return, I shall do something for him that--don’t
you know?--rather sticks in my crop.”
It appeared on this light showing to stick for a moment even in
Mrs. Gracedew’s. “Do you mean something wrong?”
He had not a moment’s hesitation. “Exceedingly so!”
She turned it over as if pricing a Greek Aldus. “Anything immoral?”
“Yes--I may literally call it immoral.”
She courted, however, frankly enough, the strict truth. “Too bad to
tell?”
He indulged in another pensive fidget, then left her to judge. “He
wants me to give up----” Yet again he faltered.
“To give up what?” What could it be, she appeared to ask, that was
barely nameable?
He quite blushed to her indeed as he came to the point. “My
fundamental views.”
She was disappointed--she had waited for more. “Nothing but
_them_?”
He met her with astonishment. “Surely they’re quite enough,
when one has unfortunately”--he rather ruefully smiled--“so very
many!”
She laughed aloud; this was frankly so odd a plea. “Well, _I’ve_ a
neat collection too, but I’d ‘swap,’ as they say in the West, the
whole set----!” She looked about the hall for something of equivalent
price; after which she pointed, as it caught her eye, to the great cave
of the fireplace. “I’d take _that_ set!”
The young man scarcely followed. “The fire-irons?”
“For the whole fundamental lot!” She gazed with real yearning at
the antique group. “_They’re_ three hundred years old. Do you mean
to tell me your wretched ‘views’----?”
“Have anything like that age? No, thank God,” Clement Yule
laughed, “my views--wretched as you please!--are quite in their
prime! They’re a hungry little family that has got to be fed. They
keep me awake at night.”
“Then you must make up your sleep!” Her impatience grew with her
interest. “Listen to _me_!”
“That would scarce be the way!” he returned. But he added
more sincerely: “You must surely see a fellow can’t chuck his
politics.”
“‘Chuck’ them----?”
“Well--sacrifice them.”
“I’d sacrifice mine,” she cried, “for that old fire-back with
your arms!” He glanced at the object in question, but with such a
want of intelligence that she visibly resented it. “See how it has
stood!”
“See how _I’ve_ stood!” he answered with spirit. “I’ve glowed
with a hotter fire than anything in any chimney, and the warmth and
light I diffuse have attracted no little attention. How can I consent
to reduce them to the state of that desolate hearth?”
His companion, freshly struck with the fine details of the desolation,
had walked over to the chimney-corner, where, lost in her deeper
impression, she lingered and observed. At last she turned away with her
impatience controlled. “It’s magnificent!”
“The fire-back?”
“Everything--everywhere. I don’t understand your haggling.”
He hesitated. “That’s because you’re ignorant.” Then seeing
in the light of her eye that he had applied to her the word in the
language she least liked, he hastened to attenuate. “I mean of
what’s behind my reserves.”
She was silent in a way that made their talk more of a discussion than
if she had spoken. “What _is_ behind them?” she presently asked.
“Why, my whole political history. Everything I’ve said, everything
I’ve done. My scorching addresses and letters, reproduced in all
the papers. I needn’t go into details, but I’m a pure, passionate,
pledged Radical.”
Mrs. Gracedew looked him full in the face. “Well, what if you
_are_?”
He broke into mirth at her tone. “Simply this--that I can’t
therefore, from one day to the other, pop up at Gossage in the purple
pomp of the opposite camp. There’s a want of transition. It may be
timid of me--it may be abject. But I can’t.”
If she was not yet prepared to contest she was still less prepared to
surrender it, and she confined herself for the instant to smoothing
down with her foot the corner of an old rug. “Have you thought very
much about it?”
He was vague. “About what?”
“About what Mr. Prodmore wants you to do.”
He flushed up. “Oh, then, you know it’s _he_?”
“I’m not,” she said, still gravely enough, “of an intelligence
absolutely infantile.”
“You’re the cleverest Tory I’ve ever met!” he laughed. “I
didn’t mean to mention my friend’s name, but since _you’ve_ done
so----!” He gave up with a shrug his scruple.
Oh, she had already cleared the ground of it! “It’s he who’s the
devouring wolf? It’s he who holds your mortgages?”
The very lucidity of her interest just checked his assent. “He holds
plenty of others, and he treats me very handsomely.”
She showed of a sudden an inconsequent face. “Do you call _that_
handsome--such a condition?”
He shed surprise. “Why, I thought it was just the condition you could
meet.”
She measured her inconsistency, but was not abashed. “We’re
not talking of what _I_ can meet.” Yet she found also a relief in
dropping the point. “Why doesn’t he stand himself?”
“Well, like other devouring wolves, he’s not personally adored.”
“Not even,” she asked, “when he offers such liberal terms?”
Clement Yule had to explain. “I dare say he doesn’t offer them to
everyone.”
“Only to you?”--at this she quite sprang. “You _are_ personally
adored; you will be still more if you stand; and that, you poor lamb,
is why he wants you!”
The young man, obviously pleased to find her after all more at
one with him, accepted gracefully enough the burden her sympathy
imposed. “I’m the bearer of my name, I’m the representative of my
family; and to my family and my name--since you’ve led me to it--this
countryside has been for generations indulgently attached.”
She listened to him with a sentiment in her face that showed how now,
at last, she felt herself deal with the lawful heir. She seemed to
perceive it with a kind of passion. “You do of course what you will
with the countryside!”
“Yes”--he went with her--“if we do it as genuine Yules. I’m
obliged of course to grant you that your genuine Yule’s a Tory of
Tories. It’s Mr. Prodmore’s belief that I should carry Gossage in
that character, but in that character only. They won’t look at me in
any other.”
It might have taxed a spectator to say in what character Mrs. Gracedew,
on this, for a little, considered him. “Don’t be too sure of
people’s not looking at you!”
He blushed again, but he laughed. “We must leave out my personal
beauty.”
“We can’t!” she replied with decision. “Don’t we take in
Mr. Prodmore’s?”
Captain Yule was not prepared. “You call him beautiful?”
“Hideous.” She settled it; then pursued her investigation.
“What’s the extraordinary interest that he attaches----?”
“To the return of a Tory?” Here the young man _was_ prepared.
“Oh, his desire is born of his fear--his terror on behalf
of Property, which he sees, somehow, with an intensely Personal, with
a quite colossal ‘P.’ He has a great deal of that article, and very
little of anything else.”
Mrs. Gracedew, accepting provisionally his demonstration, had one
of her friendly recalls. “Do you call that nice daughter ‘very
little’?”
The young man looked quite at a loss. “Is she very big? I really
didn’t notice her--and moreover she’s just a part of the
Property. He thinks things are going too far.”
She sat straight down on a stiff chair; on which, with high
distinctness: “Well, they _are_!”
He stood before her in the discomposure of her again thus appearing to
fail him. “Aren’t you then a lover of justice?”
“A passionate one!” She sat there as upright as if she held the
scales. “Where’s the justice of your losing this house?” Generous
as well as strenuous, all her fairness thrown out by her dark old
high-backed seat, she put it to him as from the judicial bench. “To
keep Covering, you must carry Gossage!”
The odd face he made at it might have betrayed a man dazzled. “As
a renegade?”
“As a genuine Yule. What business have you to be anything
else?” She had already arranged it all. “You must close with
Mr. Prodmore--you must stand in the Tory interest.” She hung fire
a moment; then as she got up: “If you will, I’ll conduct your
canvass!”
He stared at the distracting picture. “That puts the temptation
high!”
But she brushed the mere picture away. “Ah, don’t look at me as if
_I_ were the temptation! Look at this sweet old human home, and feel
all its gathered memories. Do you want to know what they do to me?”
She took the survey herself again, as if to be really sure. “They
speak to me for Mr. Prodmore.”
He followed with a systematic docility the direction of her eyes,
but as if with the result only of its again coming home to him that
there was no accounting for what things might do. “Well, there are
others than these, you know,” he good-naturedly pleaded--“things
for which I’ve spoken, repeatedly and loudly, to others than you.”
The very manner of his speaking on such occasions appeared, for that
matter, now to come back to him. “One’s ‘human home’ is all
very well, but the rest of one’s humanity is better!” She gave,
at this, a droll soft wail; she turned impatiently away. “I see
you’re disgusted with me, and I’m sorry; but one must take one’s
self as circumstances and experience have made one, and it’s not my
fault, don’t you know? if they’ve made me a very modern man. I see
something else in the world than the beauty of old show-houses and the
glory of old show-families. There are thousands of people in England
who can show no houses at all, and I don’t feel it utterly shameful
to share their poor fate!”
She had moved away with impatience, and it was the advantage of this
for her that the back she turned prevented him from seeing how intently
she listened. She seemed to continue to listen even after he had
stopped; but if that gave him a sense of success, he might have been
checked by the way she at last turned round with a sad and beautiful
headshake. “We share the poor fate of humanity whatever we do, and
we do something to help and console when we’ve something precious to
show. What on earth is more precious than what the ages have slowly
wrought? They’ve trusted us, in such a case, to keep it--to do
something, in our turn, for _them_.” She shone out at him as if
her contention had the evidence of the noonday sun, and yet in her
generosity she superabounded and explained. “It’s such a virtue,
in anything, to have lasted; it’s such an honour, for anything, to
have been spared. To all strugglers from the wreck of time hold out a
pitying hand!”
Yule, on this argument,--of a strain which even a good experience of
debate could scarce have prepared him to meet,--had not a congruous
rejoinder absolutely pat, and his hesitation unfortunately gave him
time to see how soon his companion made out that what had touched
him most in it was her particular air in presenting it. She would
manifestly have preferred he should have been floored by her mere moral
reach; yet he was aware that his own made no great show as he took
refuge in general pleasantry. “What a plea for looking backward, dear
lady, to come from Missoura Top!”
“We’re making a Past at Missoura Top as fast as ever we can, and
I should like to see you lay your hand on an hour of the one we’ve
made! It’s a tight fit, as yet, I grant,” she said, “and that’s
just why I like, in yours, to find room, don’t you see? to turn
round. You’re _in_ it, over here, and you can’t get out; so just
make the best of that and treat the thing as part of the fun!”
“The whole of the fun, to me,” the young man replied, “is in
hearing you defend it! It’s like your defending hereditary gout or
chronic rheumatism and sore throat--the things I feel aching in every
old bone of these walls and groaning in every old draught that, I’m
sure, has for centuries blown through them.”
Mrs. Gracedew looked as if no woman could be shaken who was so prepared
to be just all round. “If there be aches--there may be--you’re here
to soothe them, and if there be draughts--there _must_ be!--you’re
here to stop them up. And do you know what _I’m_ here for? If I’ve
come so far and so straight, I’ve almost wondered myself. I’ve felt
with a kind of passion--but now I see _why_ I’ve felt.” She moved
about the hall with the excitement of this perception, and, separated
from him at last by a distance across which he followed her discovery
with a visible suspense, she brought out the news. “I’m here for an
act of salvation--I’m here to avert a sacrifice!”
So they stood a little, with more, for the minute, passing between them
than either really could say. She might have flung down a glove that
he decided on the whole, passing his hand over his head as the seat of
some confusion, not to pick up. Again, but flushed as well as smiling,
he sought the easiest cover. “You’re here, I think, madam, to be a
memory for all my future!”
Well, she was willing, she showed as she came nearer, to take it,
at the worst, for that. “You’ll be one for mine, if I can see
you by that hearth. Why do you make such a fuss about changing your
politics? If you’d come to Missoura Top, you’d change them quick
enough!” Then, as she saw further and struck harder, her eyes grew
deep, her face even seemed to pale, and she paused, splendid and
serious, with the force of her plea. “What do politics amount to,
compared with religions? Parties and programmes come and go, but a
duty like this abides. There’s nothing you can break with”--she
pressed him closer, ringing out--“that would be like breaking
_here_. The very words are violent and ugly--as much a sacrilege as
if you had been trusted with the key of the temple. This _is_ the
temple--don’t profane it! Keep up the old altar kindly--you can’t
set up a new one as good. You _must_ have beauty in your life, don’t
you see?--that’s the only way to make sure of it for the lives of
others. Keep leaving it to _them_, to all the poor others,” she
went on with her bright irony, “and heaven only knows what will
become of it! Does it take one of _us_ to feel that?--to preach you
the truth? Then it’s good, Captain Yule, we come right over--just to
see, you know, what you may happen to be about. We know,” she went on
while her sense of proportion seemed to play into her sense of humour,
“what we haven’t got, worse luck; so that if you’ve happily got
it you’ve got it also for _us_. You’ve got it in trust, you see,
and oh! we have an eye on you. You’ve had it so for me, all these
dear days that I’ve been drinking it in, that, to be grateful, I’ve
wanted regularly to _do_ something.” With which, as if in the rich
confidence of having convinced him, she came so near as almost to touch
him. “Tell me now I shall have done it--I shall have kept you at your
post!”
If he moved, on this, immediately further, it was with the oddest air
of seeking rather to study her remarks at his ease than to express an
independence of them. He kept, to this end, his face averted--he was
so completely now in intelligent possession of her own. The sacrifice
in question carried him even to the door of the court, where he once
more stood so long engaged that the persistent presentation of his back
might at last have suggested either a confession or a request.
Mrs. Gracedew, meanwhile, a little spent with her sincerity, seated
herself again in the great chair, and if she sought, visibly enough,
to read a meaning into his movement, she had as little triumph for
one possible view of it as she had resentment for the other. The
possibility that he yielded left her after all as vague in respect to
a next step as the possibility that he merely wished to get rid of
her. The moments elapsed without her abdicating; and indeed when he
finally turned round his expression was an equal check to any power to
feel she might have won. “You have,” he queerly smiled at her, “a
standpoint quite your own and a style of eloquence that the few scraps
of parliamentary training I’ve picked up don’t seem at all to fit
me to deal with. Of course I don’t pretend, you know, that I don’t
_care_ for Covering.”
That, at all events, she could be glad to hear, if only perhaps for the
tone in it that was so almost comically ingenuous. But her relief was
reasonable and her exultation temperate. “You haven’t even seen it
yet.” She risked, however, a laugh. “Aren’t you a bit afraid?”
He took a minute to reply, then replied--as if to make it up--with a
grand collapse. “Yes; awfully. But if I am,” he hastened in decency
to add, “it isn’t only Covering that makes me.”
This left his friend apparently at a loss. “What else is it?”
“Everything. But it doesn’t in the least matter,” he loosely
pursued. “You may be quite correct. When we talk of the house your
voice comes to me somehow as the wind in its old chimneys.”
Her amusement distinctly revived. “I hope you don’t mean I roar!”
He blushed again; there was no doubt he was confused. “No--nor yet
perhaps that you whistle! I don’t believe the wind does either,
here. It only whispers,” he sought gracefully to explain; “and it
sighs----”
“And I hope,” she broke in, “that it sometimes laughs!”
The sound she gave only made him, as he looked at her, more
serious. “Whatever it does, it’s all right.”
“All right?”--they were sufficiently together again for her to lay
her hand straight on his arm. “Then you promise?”
“Promise what?”
He had turned as pale as if she hurt him, and she took her hand
away. “To meet Mr. Prodmore.”
“Oh, dear, no; not yet!”--he quite recovered himself. “I must
wait--I must think.”
She looked disappointed, and there was a momentary silence. “When
have you to answer him?”
“Oh, he gives me time!” Clement Yule spoke very much as he might
have said, “Oh, in two minutes!”
“_I_ wouldn’t give you time,” Mrs. Gracedew cried with force--“I’d
give you a shaking! For God’s sake, at any rate”--and she
really tried to push him off--“go upstairs!”
“And literally _find_ the dreadful man?” This was so little his
personal idea that, distinctly dodging her pressure, he had already
reached the safe quarter.
But it befell that at the same moment she saw Cora reappear on
the upper landing--a circumstance that promised her a still better
conclusion. “He’s coming down!”
Cora, in spite of this announcement, came down boldly enough without
him and made directly for Mrs. Gracedew, to whom her eyes had attached
themselves with an undeviating glare. Her plain purpose of treating
this lady as an isolated presence allowed their companion perfect
freedom to consider her arrival with sharp alarm. His disconcerted
stare seemed for a moment to balance; it wandered, gave a wild glance
at the open door, then searched the ascent of the staircase, in which,
apparently, it now found a coercion. “I’ll go up!” he gasped; and
he took three steps at a time.
V
The girl threw herself, in her flushed eagerness, straight upon the
wonderful lady. “I’ve come back to you--I want to speak to you!”
The need had been a rapid growth, but it was clearly immense. “May I
confide in you?”
Her instant overflow left Mrs. Gracedew both astonished and
amused. “You too?” she laughed. “Why it _is_ good we come
over!”
“It is, indeed!” Cora gratefully echoed. “You were so very kind
to me and seemed to think me so curious.”
The mirth of her friend redoubled. “Well, I loved you for it, and it
was nothing moreover to what you thought _me_!”
Miss Prodmore found, for this, no denial--she only presented her frank
high colour. “I loved _you_. But I’m the worst!” she generously
added. “And I’m solitary.”
“Ah, so am I!” Mrs. Gracedew declared with gaiety, but with
emphasis. “A _very_ queer thing always _is_ solitary! But, since we
have that link, by all means confide.”
“Well, I was met here by tremendous news.” Cora produced it with a
purple glow. “He wants me to marry him!”
Mrs. Gracedew looked amiably receptive, but as if she failed as yet to
follow. “‘He’ wants you?”
“Papa, of course. He has settled it!”
Mrs. Gracedew was still vague. “Settled what?”
“Why, the whole question. That I must take him.”
Mrs. Gracedew seemed to frown at her own scattered wits. “But, my
dear, take _whom_?”
The girl looked surprised at this lapse of her powers. “Why, Captain
Yule, who just went up.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Gracedew with a full stare. “Oh!” she repeated,
looking straight away.
“I thought you would know,” Cora gently explained.
Her friend’s eyes, with a kinder light now, came back to her. “I
didn’t know.” Mrs. Gracedew looked, in truth, as if that had been
sufficiently odd, and seemed also to wonder at two or three things
more. It all, however, broke quickly into a question. “Has Captain
Yule asked you?”
“No, but he _will_”--Cora was clear as a bell. “He’ll do it
to keep the house. It’s mortgaged to papa, and Captain Yule buys it
back.”
Her friend had an illumination that was rapid for the way it
spread. “By marrying you?” she quavered.
Cora, under further parental instruction, had plainly mastered the
subject. “By giving me his name and his position. They’re awfully
great, and they’re the price, don’t you see?” she modestly
mentioned. “_My_ price. Papa’s price. Papa wants them.”
Mrs. Gracedew had caught hold; yet there were places where her grasp
was weak, and she had, strikingly, begun again to reflect. “But
his name and his position, great as they may be, are his dreadful
politics!”
Cora threw herself with energy into this advance. “You _know_ about
his dreadful politics? He’s to change them,” she recited, “to get
_me_. And if he gets me----”
“He keeps the house?”--Mrs. Gracedew snatched it up.
Cora continued to show her schooling. “I go _with_ it--he’s to have
us both. But only,” she admonishingly added, “if he changes. The
question is--_will_ he change?”
Mrs. Gracedew appeared profoundly to entertain it. “I see. _Will_
he change?”
Cora’s consideration of it went even further. “_Has_ he changed?”
It went--and the effect was odd--a little too far for her companion, in
whom, just discernibly, it had touched the spring of impatience. “My
dear child, how in the world should _I_ know?”
But Cora knew exactly how anyone would know. “He hasn’t seemed to
care enough for the house. _Does_ he care?”
Mrs. Gracedew moved away, passed over to the fireplace, and stood a
moment looking at the old armorial fire-back she had praised to its
master--yet not, it must be added, as if she particularly saw it. Then
as she faced about: “You had better ask him!”
They stood thus confronted, with the fine old interval between them,
and the girl’s air was for a moment that of considering such a
course. “If he does care,” she said at last, “he’ll propose.”
Mrs. Gracedew, from where she stood in relation to the stairs, saw at
this point the subject of their colloquy restored to view: Captain Yule
was just upon them--he had turned the upper landing. The sight of him
forced from her in a flash an ejaculation that she tried, however,
to keep private--“He does care!” She passed swiftly, before he
reached them, back to the girl and, in a quick whisper, but with full
conviction, let her have it: “He’ll propose!”
Her movement had made her friend aware, and the young man, hurrying
down, was now in the hall. Cora, at his hurry, looked dismay--“Then I
fly!” With which, casting about for a direction, she reached the door
to the court.
Captain Yule, however, at this result of his return, expressed instant
regret. “I drive Miss Prodmore away!”
Mrs. Gracedew, more quickly still, eased off the situation. “It’s
all right!” She had embraced both parties with a smile, but it was
most liberal now for Cora. “Do you mind, one moment?”--it conveyed,
unmistakeably, a full intelligence and a fine explanation. “I’ve
something to say to Captain Yule.”
Cora stood in the doorway, robust against the garden-light, and looking
from one to the other. “Yes--but I’ve also something more to say
to _you_.”
“Do you mean now?” the young man asked.
It was the first time he had spoken to her, and her hesitation might
have signified a maidenly flutter. “No--but before she goes.”
Mrs. Gracedew took it amiably up. “Come back, then; I’m not
going.” And there was both dismissal and encouragement in the way
that, as on the occasion of the girl’s former retreat, she blew her
a familiar kiss. Cora, still with her face to them, waited just enough
to show that she took it without a response; then, with a quick turn,
dashed out, while Mrs. Gracedew looked at their visitor in vague
surprise. “What’s the matter with her?”
She had turned away as soon as she spoke, moving as far from him as
she had moved a few moments before from Cora. The silence that, as he
watched her, followed her question would have been seen by a spectator
to be a hard one for either to break. “I don’t know what’s
the matter with her,” he said at last; “I’m afraid I only know
what’s the matter with _me_. It will doubtless give you pleasure to
learn,” he added, “that I’ve closed with Mr. Prodmore.”
It was a speech that, strangely enough, seemed but half to dissipate
the hush. Mrs. Gracedew reached the great chimney again; again she
stood there with her face averted; and when she finally replied it
was in other words than he might have supposed himself naturally to
inspire. “I thought you said he gave you time.”
“Yes; but you produced just now so deep an effect on me that I
thought best not to take any.” He appeared to listen to a sound from
above, and, for a moment, under this impulse, his eyes travelled about
almost as if he were alone. Then he completed, with deliberation, his
statement. “I came upon him right there, and I burnt my ships.”
Mrs. Gracedew continued not to meet his face. “You do what he
requires?”
The young man was markedly, consciously caught. “I do what he
requires. I felt the tremendous force of all you said to me.”
She turned round on him now, as if perhaps with a slight sharpness, the
face of responsibility--even, it might be, of reproach. “So did I--or
I shouldn’t have said it!”
It was doubtless this element of justification in her tone that drew
from him a laugh a tiny trifle dry. “You’re perhaps not aware that
you wield an influence of which it’s not too much to say----”
But he paused at the important point so long that she took him
up. “To say what?”
“Well, that it’s practically irresistible!”
It sounded a little as if it had not been what he first meant;
but it made her, none the less, still graver and just faintly
ironical. “You’ve given me the most flattering proof of my
influence that I’ve ever enjoyed in my life!”
He fixed her very hard, now distinctly so mystified that he could only
wonder what different recall of her previous attitude she would have
looked for. “This was inevitable, dear madam, from the moment you had
converted me--and in about three minutes too!--into the absolute echo
of your raptures.”
Nothing was, indeed, more extraordinary than her air of having suddenly
forgotten them. “My ‘raptures’?”
He was amazed. “Why, about my home.”
He might look her through and through, but she had no eyes for himself,
though she had now quitted the fireplace and finally recognised this
allusion. “Oh, yes--your home!” From where had she come back to
it? “It’s a nice tattered, battered old thing.” This account
of it was the more shrunken that her observation, even as she spoke,
freshly went the rounds. “It has defects of course”--with this
renewed attention they appeared suddenly to strike her. They had
popped out, conspicuous, and for a little it might have been a matter
of conscience. However, her conscience dropped. “But it’s no use
mentioning them now!”
They had half an hour earlier been vividly present to himself, but
to see her thus oddly pulled up by them was to forget on the spot the
ground he had taken. “I’m particularly sorry,” he returned with
some spirit, “that you didn’t mention them before!”
At this imputation of inconsequence, of a levity not, after all,
without its excuse, Mrs. Gracedew was reduced, in keeping her
resentment down, to an effort not quite successfully disguised. It
was in a tone, nevertheless, all the more mild in intention that she
reminded him of where he had equally failed. “If you had really gone
over the house, as I almost went on my knees to you to do, you might
have discovered some of them yourself!”
“How can you say that,” the young man asked with heat, “when
I was precisely in the very act of it? It was just _because_ I was
that the first person I met above was Mr. Prodmore; on which, feeling
that I must come to it sooner or later, I simply gave in to him on the
spot--yielded him, to have it well over, the whole of his point.”
She listened to this account of the matter as she might have gazed,
from afar, at some queer object that was scarce distinguishable. It
left her a moment in the deepest thought, but she presently recovered
her tone. “Let me then congratulate you on at last knowing what you
want!”
But there were, after all, he instantly showed, no such great reasons
for that. “I only know it so far as _you_ know it! I struck while the
iron was hot--or at any rate while the hammer was.”
“Of course I recognise”--she adopted his image with her restored
gaiety--“that it can rarely have been exposed to such a fire. I
blazed up, and I know that when I burn----”
She had pulled up with the foolish sense of this. “When you burn?”
“Well, I do it as Chicago does.”
He also could laugh out now. “Isn’t that usually down to the
ground?”
Meeting his laugh, she threw up her light arms. “As high as
the sky!” Then she came back, as with a scruple, to the real
question. “I suppose you’ve still formalities to go through.”
“With Mr. Prodmore?” Well, he would suppose it too if she
liked. “Oh, endless, tiresome ones, no doubt!”
This sketch of them made her wonder. “You mean they’ll take so
very, very long?”
He seemed after all to know perfectly what he meant. “Every hour,
every month, that I can possibly make them last!”
She was with him here, however, but to a certain point. “You
mustn’t drag them out _too_ much--must you? Won’t he think in that
case you may want to retract?”
Yule apparently tried to focus Mr. Prodmore under this delusion, and
with a success that had a quick, odd result. “I shouldn’t be so
terribly upset by his mistake, you know, even if he did!”
His manner, with its slight bravado, left her proportionately
shocked. “Oh, it would never do to give him any colour whatever for
supposing you to have any doubt that, as one may say, you’ve pledged
your honour.”
He devoted to this proposition more thought than its simplicity
would have seemed to demand; but after a minute, at all events, his
intelligence triumphed. “Of course not--not when I _haven’t_ any
doubt!”
Though his intelligence had triumphed, she still wished to show she was
there to support it. “How can you _possibly_ have any--any more than
you can possibly have that one’s honour is everything in life?” And
her charming eyes expressed to him her need to feel that he was quite
at one with her on _that_ point.
He could give her every assurance. “Oh, yes--everything in life!”
It did her much good, brought back the rest of her brightness.
“Wasn’t it just of the question of the honour of things
that we talked awhile ago--and of the difficulty of sometimes keeping
our sense of it clear? There’s no more to be said therefore,” she
went on with the faintest soft sigh about it, “except that I leave
you to your ancient glory as I leave you to your strict duty.” She
had these things there before her; they might have been a well-spread
board from which she turned away fasting. “I hope you’ll do justice
to dear old Covering in spite of its weak points, and I hope above all
you’ll not be incommoded----”
As she hesitated here he was too intent. “Incommoded----?”
She saw it better than she could express it. “Well, by such a
rage----!”
He challenged this description with a strange gleam. “You suppose it
will be a rage?”
She laughed out at his look. “Are you afraid of the love that
kills?”
He grew singularly grave. “_Will_ it kill----?”
“Great passions _have_!”--she was highly amused.
But he could only stare. “Is it a great passion?”
“Surely--when so many feel it!”
He was fairly bewildered. “But how many----?”
She reckoned them up. “Let’s see. If you count them all----”
“‘All’?” Clement Yule gasped.
She looked at him, in turn, slightly mystified. “I see. You knock off
some. About half?”
It was too obscure--he broke down. “Whom on earth are you talking
about?”
“Why, the electors----”
“Of Gossage?”--he leaped at it. “Oh!”
“I got the whole thing up--there are six thousand. It’s such a fine
figure!” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He had sharply passed from her, to cover his mistake, and it carried
him half round the hall. Then, as if aware that this pause itself
compromised him, he came back confusedly and with her last words in his
ear. “_Has_ she a fine figure?”
But her own thoughts were off. “‘She’?”
He blushed and recovered himself. “Aren’t we talking----”
“Of Gossage? Oh, yes--she has every charm! Good-bye,” said
Mrs. Gracedew.
He pulled, at this, the longest face, but was kept dumb a moment by
the very decision with which she again began to gather herself. It
held him helpless, and there was finally real despair in his retarded
protest. “You don’t mean to say you’re going?”
“You don’t mean to say you’re surprised at it? Haven’t I
done,” she luminously asked, “what I told you I had been so
mystically moved to come for?” She recalled to him by her renewed
supreme survey the limited character of this errand, which she then in
a brisk familiar word expressed to the house itself. “You dear old
thing--you’re saved!”
Clement Yule might on the other hand, by his simultaneous action,
have given himself out for lost. “For God’s sake,” he cried as
he circled earnestly round her, “don’t go till I can come back
to thank you!” He pulled out his watch. “I promised to return
immediately to Prodmore.”
This completely settled his visitor. “Then don’t let me, for a
moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots”--it
went almost without saying--“to talk comfortably over.”
The young man’s embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to
roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his
assent was entire. “I certainly feel, you know, that I must see him
again.” He rambled even to the open door and looked with incoherence
into the court. “Yes, decidedly, I _must_!”
“Is he out there?” Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked.
He turned short round. “No--I left him in the long gallery.”
“You _saw_ that, then?”--she flashed back into eagerness.
“Isn’t it lovely?”
Clement Yule rather wondered. “I didn’t notice it. How _could_
I?”
His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. “How _couldn’t_
you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!”
He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped
again. “Will you wait for me?”
He had such an air of proposing a bargain, of making the wait a
condition, that she had to look it well in the face. The result of
her doing so, however, was apparently a strong sense that she could
give him no pledge. Her silence, after a moment, expressed that; but,
for a further emphasis, moving away, she sank suddenly into the chair
she had already occupied and in which, serious again and very upright,
she continued to withhold her promise. “Go up to him!” she simply
repeated. He obeyed, with an abrupt turn, mounting briskly enough
several steps, but pausing midway and looking back at her as if he were
after all irresolute. He was in fact so much so that, at the sight of
her still in her chair and alone by his cold hearth, he descended a
few steps again and seemed, with too much decidedly on his mind, on the
point of breaking out. She had sat a minute in such thought, figuring
him clearly as gone, that at the sound of his return she sprang up
with a protest. This checked him afresh, and he remained where he had
paused, still on the ascent and exchanging with her a look to which
neither party was inspired, oddly enough, to contribute a word. It
struck him, without words, at all events, as enough, and he now took
his upward course at such a pace that he presently disappeared. She
listened awhile to his retreating tread; then her own, on the old flags
of the hall, became rapid, though, it may perhaps be added, directed
to no visible end. It conveyed her, in the great space, from point to
point, but she now for the first time moved there without attention and
without joy, her course determined by a series of such inward throbs as
might have been the suppressed beats of a speech. A real observer, had
such a monster been present, would have followed this tacit evolution
from sign to sign and from shade to shade. “Why didn’t he tell me
_all_?--But it was none of my business!--What does he mean to do?--What
should he do but what he _has_ done?--And what _can_ he do, when he’s
so deeply committed, when he’s practically engaged, when he’s just
the same as married--and buried?--The thing for _me_ to ‘do’ is
just to pull up short and bundle out: to remove from the scene they
encumber the numerous fragments--well, of what?”
Her thought was plainly arrested by the sight of Cora Prodmore, who,
returning from the garden, reappeared first in the court and then in
the open doorway. Mrs. Gracedew’s was a thought, however, that, even
when desperate, was never quite vanquished, and it found a presentable
public solution in the pieces of the vase smashed by Chivers and just
then, on the table where he had laid them, catching her eye. “Of
my old Chelsea pot!” Her gay, sad headshake as she took one of them
up pronounced for Cora’s benefit its funeral oration. She laid the
morsel thoughtfully down, while her visitor seemed with simple dismay
to read the story.