The young man, meanwhile, had approached in surprise. “He’s
gone? I’ve been looking for him!”
Mrs. Gracedew was out of breath; there was a disturbed whiteness of
bosom in her which needed time to subside and which she might have
appeared to retreat before him on purpose to veil. “I don’t think,
you know, that you need him--now.”
Clement Yule was mystified. “Now?”
She recovered herself enough to explain--made an effort at least to
be plausible. “I mean that--if you don’t mind--you must deal with
_me_. I’ve arranged with Mr. Prodmore to take it over.”
Oh, he gave her no help! “Take what over?”
She looked all about as if not quite thinking what it could be called;
at last, however, she offered with a smile a sort of substitute for a
name. “Why, your debt.”
But he was only the more bewildered. “_Can_ you--without arranging
with _me_?”
She turned it round, but as if merely to oblige him. “That’s
precisely what I want to do.” Then, more brightly, as she thought
further: “That is, I mean, I want you to arrange with _me_. Surely
you will,” she said encouragingly.
His own processes, in spite of a marked earnestness, were much less
rapid. “But if I arrange with anybody----”
“Yes?” She cheerfully waited.
“How do I perform my engagement?”
“The one to Mr. Prodmore?”
He looked surprised at her speaking as if he had half-a-dozen.
“Yes--that’s the worst.”
“Certainly--the worst!” And she gave a happy laugh that made him
stare.
He broke into quite a different one. “You speak as if its being the
worst made it the best!”
“It does--for me. You don’t,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “perform any
engagement.”
He required a moment to take it in; then something extraordinary leaped
into his face. “He lets me off?”
Ah, she could ring out now! “He lets you off.”
It lifted him high, but only to drop him with an audible thud. “Oh,
I see--I lose my house!”
“Dear, no--_that_ doesn’t follow!” She spoke as if the absurdity
he indicated were the last conceivable, but there was a certain want of
sharpness of edge in her expression of the alternative. “You arrange
with _me_ to keep it.”
There was quite a corresponding want, clearly, in the image presented
to the Captain--of which, for a moment, he seemed with difficulty to
follow the contour. “How do I arrange?”
“Well, we must think,” said Mrs. Gracedew; “we must wait.”
She spoke as if this were a detail for which she had not yet had
much attention; only bringing out, however, the next instant in an
encouraging cry and as if it were by itself almost a solution: “We
must find some way!” She might have been talking to a reasonable
child.
But even reasonable children ask too many questions. “Yes--and what
way _can_ we find?” Clement Yule, glancing about him, was so struck
with the absence of ways that he appeared to remember with something of
regret how different it had been before. “With Prodmore it was simple
enough. You see I could marry his daughter.”
Mrs. Gracedew was silent just long enough for her soft ironic smile to
fill the cup of the pause. “_Could_ you?”
It was as if he had tasted in the words the wine at the brim; for he
gave, under the effect of them, a sudden headshake and an awkward
laugh. “Well, never perhaps _that_ exactly--when it came to the
point. But I had to, you see----” It was difficult to say just what.
She took advantage of it, looking hard, but not seeing at all. “You
had to----?”
“Well,” he repeated ruefully, “think a lot about it. You didn’t
suspect that?”
Oh, if he came to suspicions she could only break off! “Don’t ask
me too many questions.”
He looked an instant as if he wondered why. “But isn’t this just
the moment for them?” He fronted her, with a quickness he tried to
dissimulate, from the other side. “What _did_ you suppose?”
She looked everywhere but into his face. “Why, I supposed you were
in distress.”
He was very grave. “About his terms?”
“About his terms of course!” she laughed. “Not about his
religious opinions.”
His gratitude was too great for gaiety. “You really, in your
beautiful sympathy, _guessed_ my fix?”
But she declined to be too solemn. “Dear Captain Yule, it all quite
stuck out of you!”
“You mean I floundered like a drowning man----?”
Well, she consented to have meant that. “Till I plunged in!”
He appeared there for a few seconds, to see her again take the jump
and to listen again to the splash; then, with an odd, sharp impulse,
he turned his back. “You saved me.”
She wouldn’t deny it--on the contrary. “What a pity, now, _I_
haven’t a daughter!”
On this he slowly came round again. “What should I do with her?”
“You’d treat her, I hope, better than you’ve treated Miss
Prodmore.”
The young man positively coloured. “But I haven’t been bad----?”
The sight of this effect of her small joke produced on Mrs.
Gracedew’s part an emotion less controllable than any she had
yet felt. “Oh, you delightful goose!” she irrepressibly dropped.
She made his blush deepen, but the aggravation was a relief. “Of
course--I’m all right, and there’s only one pity in the
matter. I’ve nothing--nothing whatever, not a scrap of service nor a
thing you’d care for--to offer you in compensation.”
She looked at him ever so kindly. “I’m not, as they say, ‘on
the make.’” Never had he been put right with a lighter hand. “I
didn’t do it for payment.”
“Then what did you do it for?”
For something, it might have seemed, as her eyes dropped and strayed,
that had got brushed into a crevice of the old pavement. “Because I
hated Mr. Prodmore.”
He conscientiously demurred. “So much as all that?”
“Oh, well,” she replied impatiently, “of course you also know how
much I like the house. My hates and my likes,” she subtly explained,
“can never live together. I get one of them out. The one this time
was that man.”
He showed a candour of interest. “Yes--you got him out. Yes--I saw
him go.” And his inner vision appeared to attend for some moments
Mr. Prodmore’s departure. “But how did you do it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Women----!” Mrs. Gracedew but vaguely sketched
it.
A touch or two, however, for that subject, could of course almost
always suffice. “Precisely--women. May I smoke again?” Clement Yule
abruptly asked.
“Certainly. But I managed Mr. Prodmore,” she laughed as he
re-lighted, “without cigarettes.”
Her companion puffed. “_I_ couldn’t manage him.”
“So I saw!”
“_I_ couldn’t get him out.”
“So _he_ saw!”
Captain Yule, for a little, lost himself in his smoke. “Where is he
gone?”
“I haven’t the least idea. But I meet him again,” she hastened to
add--“very soon.”
“And when do you meet _me_?”
“Why, whenever you’ll come to see me.” For the twentieth time
she gathered herself as if the words she had just spoken were quite her
last hand. “At present, you see, I _have_ a train to catch.”
Absorbed in the trivial act that engaged him, he gave her no help. “A
train?”
“Surely. I didn’t walk.”
“No; but even trains----!” His eyes clung to her now. “You
fly?”
“I try to. Good-bye.”
He had got between her and the door of departure quite as, on her
attempt to quit him half an hour before, he had anticipated her
approach to the stairs; and in this position he took no notice of her
farewell. “I said just now that I had nothing to offer you. But of
course I’ve the house itself.”
“The house?” She stared. “Why, I’ve _got_ it?”
“Got it?”
“All in my head, I mean. That’s all I want.” She had not yet,
save to Mr. Prodmore, made quite so light of it.
This had its action in his markedly longer face. “Why, I thought you
loved it so!”
Ah, she was perfectly consistent. “I love it far too much to deprive
_you_ of it.”
Yet Clement Yule could in a fashion meet her. “Oh, it wouldn’t be
depriving----!”
She altogether protested. “Not to turn you out----?”
“Dear lady, I’ve never been _in_!”
Oh, she was none the less downright. “You’re in _now_--I’ve put
you, and you must stay.” He looked round so woefully, however, that
she presently attenuated. “I don’t mean _all_ the while, but long
enough----!”
“Long enough for what?”
“For me to feel you’re here.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Well, you think me very fast--but sometimes I’m slow. I told
you just now, at any rate,” she went on, “that I had arranged you
should lose nothing. Is the very next thing I do, then, to make you
lose everything?”
“It isn’t a question of what I lose,” the young man anxiously
cried; “it’s a question of what I _do_! What _have_ I done to
find it all so plain?” Fate was really--fate reversed, improved, and
unnatural--too much for him, and his heated young face showed honest
stupefaction. “I haven’t lifted a finger. It’s you who have done
all.”
“Yes, but if you’re just where you were before, how in the world
are you saved?” She put it to him with still superior lucidity.
“By my life’s being my own again--to do what I want.”
“What you ‘want’”--Mrs. Gracedew’s handsome uplifted head had
it all there, every inch of it--“is to keep your house.”
“Ah, but only,” he perfectly assented, “if, as you said, you find
a way!”
“I _have_ found a way--and there the way is: for _me_ just simply not
to touch the place. What you ‘want,’” she argued more closely,
“is what made you give in to Prodmore. What you ‘want’ is these
walls and these acres. What you ‘want’ is to take the way I first
showed you.”
Her companion’s eyes, quitting for the purpose her face, looked
to the quarter marked by her last words as at an horizon now
remote. “Why, the way you first showed me was to marry Cora!”
She had to admit it, but as little as possible. “Practically--yes.”
“Well, it’s just ‘practically’ that I can’t!”
“I didn’t know that then,” said Mrs. Gracedew. “You didn’t
tell me.”
He passed, with an approach to a grimace, his hand over the back of his
head. “I felt a delicacy!”
“I didn’t even know _that_.” She spoke it almost sadly.
“It didn’t strike you that I might?”
She thought a moment. “No.” She thought again. “No. But don’t
quarrel with me about it _now_!”
“Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement.
She laughed, but she had changed colour. “Cora, at any rate, felt no
delicacy. Cora told me.”
Clement Yule fairly gaped. “Then she did know----?”
“She knew all; and if her father said she didn’t, he simply
told you what was not.” She frankly gave him this, but the next
minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped
to reassurance. “It was quite right of her. She would have refused
you.”
The young man stared. “Oh!” He was quick, however, to show--by
an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done--that he felt no personal
wound. “Do you call that quite right?”
Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. “For _her_--yes; and for
Prodmore.”
“Oh, for Prodmore”--his laugh grew more grim--“with all my
heart!”
This, then,--her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,--was all she
meant. “To stay at your post--_that_ was the way I showed you.”
He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he
smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough
gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new
predicament. “How can I take any way at all, dear lady----?”
“If I only stick here in your path?” She had taken him straight up,
and with spirit; and the same spirit bore her to the end. “I won’t
stick a moment more! Haven’t I been trying this age to leave you?”
Clement Yule, for all answer, caught her sharply, in her passage, by
the arm. “You surrender your rights?” He was for an instant almost
terrible.
She quite turned pale with it. “Weren’t you ready to surrender
_yours_?”
“I hadn’t any, so it was deuced easy. I hadn’t paid for them.”
Oh that, she let him see,--even though with his continued grasp he
might hurt her,--had nothing in it! “Your ancestors had paid: it’s
the same thing.” Erect there in the brightness of her triumph and
the force of her logic, she must yet, to anticipate his return, take a
stride--like a sudden dip into a gully and the scramble up on the other
bank--that put her dignity to the test. “You’re just, in a manner,
my tenant.”
“But how can I treat that as such a mere detail? I’m your tenant on
what terms?”
“Oh, _any_ terms--choose them for yourself!” She made an attempt to
free her arm--gave it a small vain shake. Then, as if to bribe him to
let her go: “You can write me about them.”
He appeared to consider it. “To Missoura Top?”
She fully assented. “I go right back.” As if it had put him off his
guard she broke away. “Farewell!”
She broke away, but he broke faster, and once more, nearer the door,
he had barred her escape. “Just one little moment, please. If
you won’t tell me your own terms, you must at least tell me
Prodmore’s.”
Ah, the fiend--she could never squeeze past _that_! All she could do,
for the instant, was to reverberate foolishly “Prodmore’s?”
But there was nothing foolish, at last, about _him_. “How you did
it--how you managed him.” His feet were firm while he waited, though
he had to wait some time. “You bought him out?”
She made less of it than, clearly, he had ever heard made of a stroke
of business; it might have been a case of his owing her ninepence. “I
bought him out.”
He wanted at least the exact sum. “For how much?” Her silence
seemed to say that she had made no note of it, but his pressure only
increased. “I really must know.”
She continued to try to treat it as if she had merely paid for his
cab--she put even what she could of that suggestion into a tender,
helpless, obstinate headshake. “You shall never know!”
The only thing his own manner met was the obstinacy. “I’ll get it
from _him_!”
She repeated her headshake, but with a world of sadness added, “Get
it if you can!”
He looked into her eyes now as if it was the sadness that struck him
most. “He won’t say, because he _did_ you?”
They showed each other, on this, the least separated faces
yet. “He’ll never, never say.”
The confidence in it was so tender that it sounded almost like pity,
and the young man took it up with all the flush of the sense that
pity could be but for _him_. This sense broke full in her face. “The
scoundrel!”
“Not a bit!” she returned, with equal passion--“I was only too
clever for him!” The thought of it was again an exaltation in which
she pushed her friend aside. “So let me go!”
The push was like a jar that made the vessel overflow, and he was
before her now as if he stretched across the hall. “With the heroic
view of your power and the barren beauty of your sacrifice? You
pour out money, you move a mountain, and to let you ‘go,’ to
close the door fast behind you, is all I can figure out to do for
you?” His emotion trembled out of him with the stammer of a new
language, but it was as if in a minute or two he had thrown over all
consciousness. “You’re the most generous--you’re the noblest of
women! The wonderful chance that brought you here----!”
His own arm was grasped now--she knew better than he about the
wonderful chance. “It brought _you_ at the same happy hour! I’ve
done what I liked,” she went on very simply; “and the only way to
thank me is to believe it.”
“You’ve done it for a proud, poor man”--his answer was quite
as direct. “He has nothing--in the light of such a magic as
yours--either to give or to hope; but you’ve made him, in a little
miraculous hour, think of you----”
He stumbled with the rush of things, and if silence can, in its way,
be active, there was a collapse too, for an instant, on her closed
lips. These lips, however, she at last opened. “How have I made him
think of me?”
“As he has thought of no other woman!” He had personal possession
of her now, and it broke, as he pressed her, as he pleaded, the
helpless fall of his eloquence. “Mrs. Gracedew--don’t leave me.”
He jerked his head passionately at the whole place and the yellow
afternoon. “If you made me care----”
“It was surely that you had made _me_ first!” She laughed, and her
laugh disengaged her, so that before he could reply she had again put
space between them.
He accepted the space now--he appeared so sure of his point. “Then
let me go on caring. When I asked you awhile back for some possible
adjustment to my new source of credit, you simply put off the
question--told me I must trust to time for it. Well,” said Clement
Yule, “I’ve trusted to time so effectually that ten little minutes
have made me find it. I’ve found it because I’ve so quickly found
_you_. May I, Mrs. Gracedew, keep _all_ that I’ve found? I offer
you in return the only thing I have to give--I offer you my hand and
my life.”
She held him off, across the hall, for a time almost out of proportion
to the previous wait he had just made so little of. Then at last
also, when she answered, it might have passed for a plea for further
postponement, even for a plea for mercy. “Ah, Captain Yule----!”
But she turned suddenly off: the flower had been nipped in the bud by
the re-entrance of Chivers, at whom his master veritably glowered.
“What the devil is it?”
The old man showed the shock, but he had his duty. “Another party.”
Mrs. Gracedew, at this, wheeled round. “The ‘party up’!” It
brought back her voice--indeed, all her gaiety. And her gaiety was
always determinant. “Show them in.”
Clement Yule’s face fell while Chivers proceeded to obey. “You’ll
_have_ them?” he wailed across the hall.
“Ah! mayn’t I be proud of my house?” she tossed back at him.
At this, radiant, he had rushed at her. “Then you accept----?”
Her raised hand checked him. “Hush!”
He fell back--the party was there. Chivers ushered it as he had ushered
the other, making the most, this time, of more scanty material--four
persons so spectacled, satchelled, shawled, and handbooked that they
testified on the spot to a particular foreign origin and presented
themselves indeed very much as tourists who, at an hotel, casting up
the promise of comfort or the portent of cost, take possession, while
they wait for their keys, with expert looks and free sounds. Clement
Yule, who had receded, effacing himself, to the quarter opposed
to that of his companion, addressed to their visitors a covert but
dismayed stare and then, edging round, in his agitation, to the rear,
instinctively sought relief by escape through the open passage. One of
the invaders meanwhile--a broad-faced gentleman with long hair tucked
behind his ears and a ring on each forefinger--had lost no time in
showing he knew where to begin. He began at the top--the proper place,
and took in the dark pictures ranged above the tapestry. “Olt vamily
bortraits?”--he appealed to Chivers and spoke very loud.
Chivers rose to the occasion and, gracefully pawing the air, began
also at the beginning. “Dame Dorothy Yule--who lived to a hundred
and one.”
“A hundred and one--ach _so_!” broke, with a resigned absence of
criticism, from each of the interested group; another member of which,
however, indicated with a somewhat fatigued skip the central figure of
the series, the personage with the long white legs that Mrs. Gracedew
had invited the previous inquirers to remark. “Who’s dis?” the
present inquirer asked.
The question affected the lovely lady over by the fireplace as the
trumpet of battle affects a generous steed. She flashed on the instant
into the middle of the hall and into the friendliest and most familiar
relation with everyone and with everything. “John Anthony Yule,
sir,--who passed away, poor duck, in his flower!”
They met her with low salutations, a sweep of ugly shawls, and a brush
of queer German hats: she had issued, to their glazed convergence,
from the dusk of the Middle Ages and the shade of high pieces, and
now stood there, beautiful and human and happy, in a light that,
whatever it was for themselves, the very breadth of their attention,
the expression of their serious faces, converted straightway for her
into a new, and oh! into the right, one. To a detached observer of
the whole it would have been promptly clear that she found herself
striking these good people very much as the lawful heir had, half an
hour before, struck another stranger--that she produced in them, in
her setting of assured antiquity, quite the romantic vibration that
she had responded to in the presence of that personage. They read
her as she read _him_, and a bright and deepening cheer, reflected
dimly in their thick thoroughness, went out from her as she accepted
their reading. An impression was exchanged, for the minute, from side
to side--their grave admiration of the finest feature of the curious
house and the deep free radiance of her silent, grateful “Why not?”
It made a passage of some intensity and some duration, of which the
effect, indeed, the next minute, was to cause the only lady of the
party--a matron of rich Jewish type, with small nippers on a huge nose
and a face out of proportion to her little Freischütz hat--to break
the spell by an uneasy turn and a stray glance at one of the other
pictures. “Who’s _dat_?”
“That?” The picture chanced to be a portrait over the wide arch,
and something happened, at the very moment, to arrest Mrs. Gracedew’s
eyes rather above than below. What took place, in a word, was that
Clement Yule, already fidgeting in his impatience back from the
front, just occupied the arch, completed her thought, and filled her
vision. “Oh, that’s my future husband!” He caught the words,
but answered them only by a long look at her as he moved, with a
checked wildness of which she alone, of all the spectators, had a
sense, straight across the hall again and to the other opening. He
paused there as he had done before, then with a last dumb appeal to
her dropped into the court and passed into the garden. Mrs. Gracedew,
already so wonderful to their visitors, was, before she followed him,
wonderful with a greater wonder to poor Chivers. “You dear old
thing--I give it all back to you!”