“There have repeatedly been people here!” Mr. Prodmore complacently interrupted.
“As you say, sir--to be shown over. With the master himself never shown!” Chivers dismally commented.
“He _shall_ be, so that nobody can miss him!” Mr. Prodmore, for his own reassurance as well, hastened to retort.
His companion risked a tiny explanation. “It will be a mercy indeed to look on him; but I meant that he has not been taken round.”
“That’s what I meant too. _I’ll_ take him--round and round: it’s exactly what I’ve come for!” Mr. Prodmore rang out; and his eyes made the lower circuit again, looking as pleased as such a pair of eyes could look with nobody as yet quite good enough either to terrify or to tickle. “He can’t fail to be affected, though he _has_ been up to his neck in such a different class of thing.”
Chivers clearly wondered awhile what class of thing it could be. Then he expressed a timid hope. “In nothing, I dare say, but what’s right, sir----?”
“In everything,” Mr. Prodmore distinctly informed him, “that’s wrong! But here he is!” that gentleman added with elation as the doorbell again sounded. Chivers, under the double agitation of the appeal and the disclosure, proceeded to the front as fast as circumstances allowed; while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, would have been observed--had not his solitude been so bleak--to recover a degree of cheerfulness. Cheerfulness in solitude at Covering End was certainly not irresistible, but particular feelings and reasons had pitched, for their campaign, the starched, if now somewhat ruffled, tent of his large white waistcoat. If they had issued audibly from that pavilion, they would have represented to us his consciousness of the reinforcement he might bring up for attack should Captain Yule really resist the house. The sound he next heard from the front caused him none the less, for that matter, to articulate a certain drop. “Only Cora?--Well,” he added in a tone somewhat at variance with his “only,” “he shan’t, at any rate, resist _her_!” This announcement would have quickened a spectator’s interest in the young lady whom Chivers now introduced and followed, a young lady who straightway found herself the subject of traditionary discipline. “I’ve waited. What do you mean?”
Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great deal more--a bold variety of kinds--in the extremely high pitch of her new, smart clothes, meant, on the whole, it was easy to see, very little, and met this challenge with still less show of support either from the sources I have mentioned or from any others. A dull, fresh, honest, overdressed damsel of two-and-twenty, she was too much out of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer: “Waited, papa? Oh, I’m sorry!”
Her regret appeared to strike her father still more as an impertinence than as a vanity. “Would you then, if I had not had patience for you, have wished not to find me? Why the dickens are you so late?”
Agitated, embarrassed, the girl was at a loss. “I’ll tell you, papa!” But she followed up her pledge with an air of vacuity and then, dropping into the nearest seat, simply closed her eyes to her danger. If she desired relief, she had caught at the one way to get it. “I feel rather faint. Could I have some tea?”
Mr. Prodmore considered both the idea and his daughter’s substantial form. “Well, as I shall expect you to put forth _all_ your powers--yes!” He turned to Chivers. “Some tea.”
The old man’s eyes had attached themselves to Miss Prodmore’s symptoms with more solicitude than those of her parent. “I did think it might be required!” Then as he gained the door of the morning-room: “I’ll lay it out here.”
The young lady, on his withdrawal, recovered herself sufficiently to rise again. “It was my train, papa--so very awfully behind. I walked up, you know, also, from the station--there’s such a lovely footpath across the park.”
“You’ve been roaming the country then alone?” Mr. Prodmore inquired.
The girl protested with instant eagerness against any such picture. “Oh, dear no, not _alone_!” She spoke, absurdly, as if she had had a train of attendants; but it was an instant before she could complete the assurance. “There were ever so many people about.”
“Nothing is more possible than that there should be _too_ many!” said her father, speaking as for his personal convenience, but presenting that as enough. “But where, among them all,” he demanded, “is your trusty maid?”
Cora’s reply made up in promptitude what it lacked in felicity. “I didn’t bring her.” She looked at the old portraits as if to appeal to them to help her to remember why. Apparently indeed they gave a sign, for she presently went on: “She was so extremely unwell.”
Mr. Prodmore met this with reprobation. “Wasn’t she to understand from the first that we don’t permit----”
“Anything of that sort?”--the girl recalled it at least as a familiar law. “Oh, yes, papa--I _thought_ she did.”
“But she doesn’t?”--Mr. Prodmore pressed the point. Poor Cora, at a loss again, appeared to wonder if the point had better be a failure of brain or of propriety, but her companion continued to press. “What on earth’s the matter with her?”
She again communed with their silent witnesses. “I really don’t quite know, but I think that at Granny’s she eats too much.”
“I’ll soon put an end to _that_!” Mr. Prodmore returned with decision. “You expect then to pursue your adventures quite into the night--to return to Bellborough as you came?”
The girl had by this time begun a little to find her feet. “Exactly as I came, papa dear,--under the protection of a new friend I’ve just made, a lady whom I met in the train and who is also going back by the 6.19. She was, like myself, on her way to this place, and I expected to find her here.”
Mr. Prodmore chilled on the spot any such expectations. “What does she want at this place?”
Cora was clearly stronger for her new friend than for herself. “She wants to see it.”
Mr. Prodmore reflected on this complication. “Today?” It was practically presumptuous. “Today won’t do.”
“So I suggested,” the girl declared. “But do you know what she said?”
“How should I know,” he coldly demanded, “what a nobody says?”
But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his daughter could categorically meet him. “She’s not a nobody. She’s an American.”
Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place, instinctively, in a flash of calculation. “An American?”
“Yes, and she’s wild----”
He knew all about that. “Americans mostly _are_!”
“I mean,” said Cora, “to see this place. ‘Wild’ was what she herself called it--and I think she also said she was ‘mad.’”
“She gave”--Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair--“a fine account of herself! But she won’t do.”
The effect of her new acquaintance on his companion had been such that she could, after an instant, react against this sentence. “Well, when I told her that this particular day perhaps wouldn’t, she said it would just _have_ to.”
“Have to do?” Mr. Prodmore showed again, through a chink, his speculative eye. “For _what_, then, with such grand airs?”
“Why, I suppose, for what Americans want.”
He measured the quantity. “They want everything.”
“Then I wonder,” said Cora, “that she hasn’t arrived.”
“When she does arrive,” he answered, “I’ll tackle her; and I shall thank you, in future, not to take up, in trains, with indelicate women of whom you know nothing.”
“Oh, I did know something,” his daughter pleaded; “for I saw her yesterday at Bellborough.”
Mr. Prodmore contested even this freedom. “And what was she doing at Bellborough?”
“Staying at the Blue Dragon, to see the old abbey. She says she just loves old abbeys. It seems to be the same feeling,” the girl went on, “that brought her over, today, to see this old house.”
“She ‘just loves’ old houses? Then why the deuce didn’t she accompany you properly, since she is so pushing, to the door?”
“Because she went off in a fly,” Cora explained, “to see, first, the old hospital. She just loves old hospitals. She asked me if this isn’t a show-house. I told her”--the girl was anxious to disclaim responsibility--“that I hadn’t the least idea.”
“It _is_!” Mr. Prodmore cried almost with ferocity. “I wonder, on such a speech, what she thought of _you_!”
Miss Prodmore meditated with distinct humbleness. “I know. She told me.”
He had looked her up and down. “That you’re really a hopeless frump?”
Cora, oddly enough, seemed almost to court this description. “That I’m not, as she rather funnily called it, a show-girl.”
“Think of your having to be reminded--by the very strangers you pick up,” Mr. Prodmore groaned, “of what my daughter should pre-eminently be! Your friend, all the same,” he bethought himself, “is evidently loud.”
“Well, when she comes,” the girl again so far agreed as to reply, “you’ll certainly hear her. But don’t judge her, papa, till you do. She’s tremendously clever,” she risked--“there seems to be nothing she doesn’t know.”
“And there seems to be nothing you do! You’re _not_ tremendously clever,” Mr. Prodmore pursued; “so you’ll permit me to demand of you a slight effort of intelligence.” Then, as for the benefit of the listening walls themselves, he struck the high note. “I’m expecting Captain Yule.”