“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.
