“My daughter’s not here?” he demanded from the threshold.
“Your daughter’s not here.” She had rapidly got under arms.
“But it’s a convenience to me, Mr. Prodmore, that _you_ are,
for I’ve something very particular to ask you.”
Her interlocutor crossed straight to the morning-room. “I shall be
delighted to answer your question, but I must first put my hand on Miss
Prodmore.” This hand the next instant stayed itself on the latch, and
he appealed to the amiable visitor. “Unless indeed she’s occupied
in there with Captain Yule?”
The amiable visitor met the appeal. “I don’t think she’s
occupied--anywhere--with Captain Yule.”
Mr. Prodmore came straight away from the door. “Then where the deuce
_is_ Captain Yule?”
The amiable visitor turned a trifle less direct. “His absence, for
which I’m responsible, is just what renders the inquiry I speak of
to you possible.” She had already assumed a most inquiring air, yet
it was soon clear that she needed every advantage her manner could give
her. “What will you take----? what will you take----?”
It had the sound, as she faltered, of a general question, and
Mr. Prodmore raised his eyebrows. “Take? Nothing, thank you--I’ve
just had a cup of tea.” Then suddenly, as if on the broad hint:
“Won’t _you_ have one?”
“Yes, with pleasure--but not yet.” She looked about her again; she
was now at close quarters and, concentrated, anxious, pressed her hand
a moment to her brow.
This struck her companion. “Don’t you think you’d be better for
it immediately?”
“No.” She was positive. “No.” Her eyes consciously wandered.
“I want to know how you’d value----”
He took her, as his own followed them, more quickly up, expanding in
the presence of such a tribute from a real connoisseur. “One of these
charming old things that take your fancy?”
She looked at him straight now. “They _all_ take my fancy!”
“All?” He enjoyed it as the joke of a rich person--the kind of joke
he sometimes made himself.
“Every single one!” said Mrs. Gracedew. Then with still a finer
shade of the familiar: “Should you be willing to treat, Mr. Prodmore,
for your interest in this property?”
He threw back his head: she had scattered over the word “interest”
such a friendly, faded colour. She was either _not_ joking or was rich
indeed; and there was a place always kept in his conversation for the
arrival of money, as there is always a box in a well-appointed theatre
for that of royalty. “Am I to take it from you then that you _know_
about my interest----?”
“Everything!” said Mrs. Gracedew with a world of wit.
“Excuse me, madam!”--he himself was now more reserved. “You
don’t know everything if you don’t know that my interest--considerable
as it might well have struck you--has just ceased to exist.
I’ve given it up”--Mr. Prodmore softened the blow--“for
a handsome equivalent.”
The blow fell indeed light enough. “You mean for a handsome
son-in-law?”
“It will be by some such description as the term you use that I
shall doubtless, in the future, permit myself, in the common course,
to allude to Captain Yule. Unless indeed I call him----” But
Mr. Prodmore dropped the bolder thought. “It will depend on what he
calls _me_.”
Mrs. Gracedew covered him a moment with the largeness of her
charity. “Won’t it depend a little on what your daughter herself
calls him?”
Mr. Prodmore seriously considered. “No. That,” he declared with
delicacy, “will be between the happy pair.”
“Am I to take it from you then--I adopt your excellent phrase,”
Mrs. Gracedew said--“that Miss Prodmore has already accepted him?”
Her companion, with his head still in the air, seemed to signify that
he simply put it down on the table and that she could take it or not
as she liked. “Her character--formed by my assiduous care--enables me
to locate her, I may say even to _time_ her, from moment to moment.”
His massive watch, as he opened it, further sustained him in this
process. “It’s my assured conviction that she’s accepting him
while we stand here.”
Mrs. Gracedew was so affected by his assured conviction that, with
an odd, inarticulate sound, she forbore to stand longer--she rapidly
moved away, taking one of the brief excursions of step and sense that
had been for her, from the first, under the noble roof, so many dumb
but decisive communions. But it was soon over, and she floated back on
a wave that showed her to be, since she had let herself go, by this
time quite in the swing and describing a considerable curve. “Dear
Mr. Prodmore, why are you so imprudent as to make your daughter
afraid of you? You should have taught her to confide in you. She has
clearly shown me,” she almost soothingly pursued, “that she _can_
confide.”
Mr. Prodmore, however, suddenly starting, looked far from
soothed. “She confides in _you_?”
“You may take it from me!” Mrs. Gracedew laughed. “Let me suggest
that, as fortune has thrown us together a minute, you follow her good
example.” She put out a reassuring hand--she could perfectly show
him the way. “Tell me, for instance, the ground of your objection
to poor Mr. Pegg. I mean Mr. Pegg of Bellborough, Mr. Hall Pegg, the
godson of your daughter’s grandmother and the associate of his father
in their flourishing house; to whom (as _he_ is to _it_ and to _her_)
Miss Prodmore’s devotedly attached.”
Mr. Prodmore had in the course of this speech availed himself of the
support of the nearest chair, where, in spite of his subsidence, he
appeared in his amazement twice his natural size. “It has gone so far
as _that_?”
She rose before him as if in triumph. “It has gone so far that you
had better let it go the rest of the way!”
He had lost breath, but he had positively gained dignity. “It’s too
monstrous, to have plotted to keep me in the dark!”
“Why, it’s only when you’re kept in the dark that your daughter’s
kept in the light!” She argued it with a candour that might
have served for brilliancy. “It’s at her own earnest request
that I plead to you for her liberty of choice. She’s an honest
girl--perhaps even a peculiar girl; and she’s not a baby. You
over-do, I think, the nursing. She has a perfect right to her
preference.”
Poor Mr. Prodmore couldn’t help taking it from her, and, this being
the case, he still took it in the most convenient way. “And pray
haven’t I a perfect right to mine?” he asked from his chair.
She fairly seemed to serve it up to him--to put down the dish with a
flourish. “Not at her expense. You expect her to give up too much.”
“And what has she,” he appealed, “expected _me_ to give up? What
but the desire of my heart and the dream of my life? Captain Yule
announced to me but a few minutes since his intention to offer her his
hand.”
She faced him on it as over the table. “Well, if he does, I think
he’ll simply find----”
“Find what?” They looked at each other hard.
“Why, that she won’t have it.”
Oh, Mr. Prodmore now sprang up. “She _will_!”
“She won’t!” Mrs. Gracedew more distinctly repeated.
“She _shall_!” returned her adversary, making for the staircase
with the evident sense of where reinforcement might be most required.
Mrs. Gracedew, however, with a spring, was well before him. “She
shan’t!” She spoke with positive passion and practically so barred
the way that he stood arrested and bewildered, and they faced each
other, for a flash, like enemies. But it all went out, on her part, in
a flash too--in a sudden wonderful smile. “Now tell me how much!”
Mr. Prodmore continued to glare--the sweat was on his brow. But while
he slowly wiped it with a pocket-handkerchief of splendid scarlet
silk, he remained so silent that he would have had for a spectator the
effect of meeting in a manner her question. More formally to answer
it he had at last to turn away. “How can I tell you anything so
preposterous?”
She was all ready to inform him. “Simply by computing the total
amount to which, for your benefit, this unhappy estate is burdened.”
He listened with his back presented, but that appeared to strike her,
as she fixed this expanse, as an encouragement to proceed. “If
I’ve troubled you by showing you that your speculation is built on
the sand, let me atone for it by my eagerness to take off your hands an
investment from which you derive so little profit.”
He at last gave her his attention, but quite as if there were nothing
in it. “And pray what profit will _you_ derive----?”
“Ah, that’s my own secret!” She would show him as well no glimpse
of it--her laugh but rattled the box. “I want this house!”
“So do I, damn me!” he roundly returned; “and that’s why I’ve
practically paid for it!” He stuffed away his pocket-handkerchief.
There was nevertheless something in her that could hold him, and it
came out, after an instant, quietly and reasonably enough. “I’ll
practically pay for it, Mr. Prodmore--if you’ll only tell me your
figure.”
“My figure?”
“Your figure.”
Mr. Prodmore waited--then removed his eyes from her face. He appeared
to have waited on purpose to let her hope of a soft answer fall from a
greater height. “My figure would be quite my own!”
“Then it will match, in that respect,” Mrs. Gracedew laughed,
“this overture, which is quite _my_ own! As soon as you’ve let me
know it I cable to Missoura Top to have the money sent right out to
you.”
Mr. Prodmore surveyed in a superior manner this artless picture of a
stroke of business. “You imagine that having the money sent right out
to me will make you owner of this place?”
She herself, with her head on one side, studied her sketch and seemed
to twirl her pencil. “No--not quite. But I’ll settle the rest with
Captain Yule.”
Her companion looked, over his white waistcoat, at his large tense
shoes, the patent-leather shine of which so flashed propriety back at
him that he became, the next moment, doubly erect on it. “Captain
Yule has nothing to sell.”
She received the remark with surprise. “Then what have you been
trying to buy?”
She had touched in himself even a sharper spring. “Do you mean to
say,” he cried, “you want to buy _that_?” She stared at his
queer emphasis, which was intensified by a queer grimace; then she
turned from him with a change of colour and an ejaculation that led to
nothing more, after a few seconds, than a somewhat conscious silence--a
silence of which Mr. Prodmore made use to follow up his unanswered
question with another. “Is your proposal that I should transfer my
investment to you for the mere net amount of it your conception of a
fair bargain?”
This second inquiry, however, she could, as she slowly came round,
substantially meet. “Pray, then, what is yours?”
“Mine would be, not that I should simply get my money back, but that
I should get the effective value of the house.”
Mrs. Gracedew considered it. “But isn’t the effective value of the
house just what your money expresses?”
The lid of his hard left eye, the harder of the two, just dipped
with the effect of a wink. “No, madam. It’s just what _yours_
does. It’s moreover just what your lips have already expressed so
distinctly!”
She clearly did her best to follow him. “To those people--when I
showed the place off?”
Mr. Prodmore laughed. “You seemed to be _taking_ bids then!”
She was candid, but earnest. “Taking them?”
“Oh, like an auctioneer! You ran it up high!” And Mr. Prodmore
laughed again.
She turned a little pale, but it added to her brightness. “I
certainly did, if saying it was charming----”
“Charming?” Mr. Prodmore broke in. “You said it was magnificent.
You said it was unique. That was your very word. You said
it was the _perfect_ specimen of its class in England.” He was more
than accusatory, he was really crushing. “Oh, you got in deep!”
It was indeed an indictment, and her smile was perhaps now rather
set. “Possibly. But taunting me with my absurd high spirits and
the dreadful liberties I took doesn’t in the least tell me how deep
_you’re_ in!”
“For you, Mrs. Gracedew?” He took a few steps, looking at his
shoes again and as if to give her time to plead--since he wished to be
quite fair--that it was _not_ for her. “I’m in to the tune of fifty
thousand.”
She was silent, on this announcement, so long that he once more faced
her; but if what he showed her in doing so at last made her speak, it
also took the life from her tone. “That’s a great deal of money,
Mr. Prodmore.”
The tone didn’t matter, but only the truth it expressed, which he
so thoroughly liked to hear. “So I’ve often had occasion to say to
myself!”
“If it’s a large sum for you, then,” said Mrs. Gracedew,
“it’s a still larger one for me.” She sank into a chair with
a vague melancholy; such a mass loomed huge, and she sat down before
it as a solitary herald, resigning himself with a sigh to wait, might
have leaned against a tree before a besieged city. “We women”--she
wished to conciliate--“have more modest ideas.”
But Mr. Prodmore would scarce condescend to parley. “Is it
as a ‘modest idea’ that you describe your extraordinary
intrusion----?”
His question scarce reached her; she was so lost for the moment in the
sense of innocent community with her sex. “I mean I think we measure
things often rather more exactly.”
There would have been no doubt of Mr. Prodmore’s very different
community as he rudely replied: “Then you measured _this_ thing
exactly half an hour ago!”
It was a long way to go back, but Mrs. Gracedew, in her seat, musingly
made the journey, from which she then suddenly returned with a
harmless, indeed quite a happy, memento. “Was I _very_ grotesque?”
He demurred. “Grotesque?”
“I mean--_did_ I go on about it?”
Mr. Prodmore would have no general descriptions; he was specific, he
was vivid. “You banged the desk. You raved. You shrieked.”
This was a note she appeared indulgently, almost tenderly, to
recognise. “We _do_ shriek at Missoura Top!”
“I don’t know what you do at Missoura Top, but I know what you did
at Covering End!”
She warmed at last to his tone. “So do _I_ then! I surprised you. You
weren’t at all prepared----”
He took her briskly up. “No--and I’m not prepared yet!”
Mrs. Gracedew could quite see it. “Yes, you’re too astonished.”
“My astonishment’s my own affair,” he retorted--“not less so
than my memory!”
“Oh, I yield to your memory,” said the charming woman, “and I
confess my extravagance. But quite, you know, _as_ extravagance.”
“I don’t at all know,”--Mr. Prodmore shook it off,--“nor what
you _call_ extravagance.”
“Why, banging the desk. Raving. Shrieking. I over-did it,” she
exclaimed; “I wanted to please you!”
She had too happy a beauty, as she sat in her high-backed chair,
to have been condemned to say that to any man without a certain
effect. The effect on Mr. Prodmore was striking. “So you said,” he
sternly inquired, “what you didn’t believe?”
She flushed with the avowal. “Yes--for you.”
He looked at her hard. “For _me_?”
Under his eye--for her flush continued--she slowly got up. “And for
those good people.”
“Oh!”--he sounded most sarcastic. “Should you like me to call
them back?”
“No.” She was still gay enough, but very decided. “I took them
in.”
“And now you want to take _me_?”
“Oh, Mr. Prodmore!” she almost pitifully, but not quite adequately,
moaned.
He appeared to feel he had gone a little far. “Well, if we’re not
what you say----”
“Yes?”--she looked up askance at the stroke.
“Why the devil do you want us?” The question rang out and was
truly for the poor lady, as the quick suffusion of her eyes showed,
a challenge it would take more time than he left her properly to pick
up. He left her in fact no time at all before he went on: “Why the
devil did you say you’d offer fifty?”
She looked quite wan and seemed to wonder. “_Did_ I say that?” She
could only let his challenge lie. “It was a figure of speech!”
“Then that’s the kind of figure we’re talking about!” Mr.
Prodmore’s sharpness would have struck an auditor as the more
effective that, on the heels of this thrust, seeing the ancient butler
reappear, he dropped the victim of it as comparatively unimportant and
directed his fierceness instantly to Chivers, who mildly gaped at him
from the threshold of the court. “Have you seen Miss Prodmore? If you
haven’t, find her!”
Mrs. Gracedew addressed their visitor in a very different tone, though
with the full authority of her benevolence. “You won’t, my dear
man.” To Mr. Prodmore also she continued bland. “I happen to know
she has gone for a walk.”
“A walk--alone?” Mr. Prodmore gasped.
“No--not alone.” Mrs. Gracedew looked at Chivers with a vague
smile of appeal for help, but he could only give her, from under his
bent old brow, the blank decency of his wonder. It seemed to make her
feel afresh that she was, after all, alone--so that in her loneliness,
which had also its fine sad charm, she risked another brush with their
formidable friend. “Cora has gone with Mr. Pegg.”
“Pegg has _been_ here?”
It was like a splash in a full basin, but she launched the whole
craft. “He walked with her from the station.”
“When she arrived?” Mr. Prodmore rose like outraged Neptune.
“That’s why she was so late?”
Mrs. Gracedew assented. “Why I got here first. I get everywhere
first!” she bravely laughed.
Mr. Prodmore looked round him in purple dismay--it was so clearly a
question for him where _he_ should get, and what! “In which direction
did they go?” he imperiously asked.
His rudeness was too evident to be more than lightly recognised. “I
think I must let you ascertain for yourself!”
All he could do then was to shout it to Chivers. “Call my carriage,
you ass!” After which, as the old man melted into the vestibule,
he dashed about blindly for his hat, pounced upon it and seemed,
furious but helpless, on the point of hurling it at his contradictress
as a gage of battle. “So you abetted and protected this wicked, low
intrigue?”
She had something in her face now that was indifferent to any
violence. “You’re too disappointed to see your real interest:
oughtn’t I therefore in common charity to point it out to you?”
He faced her question so far as to treat it as one. “What do _you_
know of my disappointment?”
There was something in his very harshness that even helped her, for it
added at this moment to her sense of making out in his narrowed glare a
couple of tears of rage. “I know everything.”
“What do you know of my real interest?” he went on as if he had not
heard her.
“I know enough for my purpose--which is to offer you a handsome
condition. I think it’s not I who have protected the happy
understanding that you call by so ugly a name; it’s the happy
understanding that has put me”--she gained confidence--“well, in a
position. Do drive after them, if you like--but catch up with them only
to forgive them. If you’ll do that, I’ll pay your price.”
The particular air with which, a minute after Mrs. Gracedew had spoken
these words, Mr. Prodmore achieved a transfer of his attention to the
inside of his hat--this special shade of majesty would have taxed
the descriptive resources of the most accomplished reporter. It is
none the less certain that he appeared for some time absorbed in that
receptacle--appeared at last to breathe into it hard. “What do you
call my price?”
“Why, the sum you just mentioned--fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew
feverishly quavered.
He looked at her as if stupefied. “_That’s_ not my price--and it
never for a moment was!” If derision can be dry, Mr. Prodmore’s was
of the driest. “Besides,” he rang out, “my price is up!”
She caught it with a long wail. “Up?”
Oh, he let her have it now! “Seventy thousand.”
She turned away overwhelmed, but still with voice for her
despair. “Oh, deary me!”
Mr. Prodmore was already at the door, from which he launched his
ultimatum. “It’s to take or to leave!”
She would have had to leave it, perhaps, had not something happened
at this moment to nerve her for the effort of staying him with a
quick motion. Captain Yule had come into sight on the staircase and,
after just faltering at what he himself saw, had marched resolutely
enough down. She watched him arrive--watched him with an attention that
visibly and responsively excited his own; after which she passed nearer
to their companion. “Seventy thousand, then!”--it gleamed between
them, in her muffled hiss, as if she had planted a dagger.
Mr. Prodmore, to do him justice, took his wound in front. “Seventy
thousand--done!” And, without another look at Yule, he was presently
heard to bang the outer door after him for a sign.