Mr. Prodmore, somewhat ambiguously, took up the sound. “Melancholy?”--he just balanced. That well might be, even a little _should_ be--yet agreement might depreciate.
“Musty, mouldy;” then with a poke of his stick at a gap in the stuff with which an old chair was covered, “mangy!” Captain Yule responded. “Is this the character throughout?”
Mr. Prodmore fixed a minute the tell-tale tatter. “You must judge for yourself--you must go over the house.” He hesitated again; then his indecision vanished--the right line was clear. “It does look a bit run down, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do it up for you--neatly: I’ll throw _that_ in!”
His young friend turned on him an eye that, though markedly enlivened by his offer, was somehow only the more inscrutable. “Will you put in the electric light?”
Mr. Prodmore’s own twinkle--at this touch of a spring he had not expected to work--was, on the other hand, temporarily veiled. “Well, if you’ll meet me half-way! We’re dealing here”--he backed up his gravity--“with fancy-values. Don’t you feel,” he appealed, “as you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?”
Clement Yule gazed awhile at one of the pompous quarterings in the faded old glass that, in tones as of late autumn, crowned with armorial figures the top of the great hall-window; then with abruptness he turned away. “Perhaps I _don’t_ take it all in; but what I do feel is--since you mention it--a sort of stiffening of the spine! The whole thing is too queer--too cold--too cruel.”
“Cruel?”--Mr. Prodmore’s demur was virtuous.
“Like the face of some stuck-up distant relation who won’t speak first. I see in the stare of the old dragon, I taste in his very breath, all the helpless mortality he has tucked away!”
“Lord, sir--you _have_ fancies!” Mr. Prodmore was almost scandalised.
But the young man’s fancies only multiplied as he moved, not at all critical, but altogether nervous, from object to object. “I don’t know what’s the matter--but there _is_ more here than meets the eye.” He tried as for his amusement or his relief to figure it out. “I miss the old presences. I feel the old absences. I hear the old voices. I see the old ghosts.”
This last was a profession that offered some common ground. “The old ghosts, Captain Yule,” his companion promptly replied, “are worth so much a dozen, and with no reduction, I must remind you--with the price indeed rather raised--for the quantity taken!” Feeling then apparently that he had cleared the air a little by this sally, Mr. Prodmore proceeded to pat his interlocutor on a back that he by no means wished to cause to be put to the wall. “Look about you, at any rate, a little more.” He crossed with his toes well out the line that divides encouragement from patronage. “Do make yourself at home.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Prodmore. May I light a cigarette?” his visitor asked.
“In your own house, Captain?”
“That’s just the question: it seems so much less my own house than before I had come into it!” The Captain offered Mr. Prodmore a cigarette which that gentleman, also taking a light from him, accepted; then he lit his own and began to smoke. “As I understand you,” he went on, “you _lump_ your two conditions? I mean I must accept both or neither?”
Mr. Prodmore threw back his shoulders with a high recognition of the long stride represented by this question. “You _will_ accept both, for, by doing so, you’ll clear the property at a stroke. The way I put it is--see?--that if you’ll stand for Gossage, you’ll get returned for Gossage.”
“And if I get returned for Gossage, I shall marry your daughter. Accordingly,” the young man pursued, “if I marry your daughter----”
“I’ll burn up, before your eyes,” said this young lady’s proprietor, “every scratch of your pen. It will be a bonfire of signatures. There won’t be a penny to pay--there’ll only be a position to take. You’ll take it with peculiar grace.”
“Peculiar, Mr. Prodmore--very!”
The young man had assented more than he desired, but he was not deterred by it from completing the picture. “You’ll settle down here in comfort and honour.”
Clement Yule took several steps; the effect of his host was the reverse of soothing; yet the latter watched his irritation as if it were the working of a charm. “Are you very sure of the ‘honour’ if I turn my political coat?”
“You’ll only be turning it back again to the way it was always worn. Gossage will receive you with open arms and press you to a heaving Tory bosom. That bosom”--Mr. Prodmore followed himself up--“has never heaved but to sound Conservative principles. The cradle, as I’ve called it,--or at least the rich, warm coverlet,--of your race, Gossage was the political property, so to speak, of generations of your family. Stand therefore in the good old interest and you’ll stand like a lion.”
“I’m afraid you mean,” Captain Yule laughed, “that I must first roar like one.”
“Oh, _I’ll_ do the roaring!”--and Mr. Prodmore shook his mane. “Leave that to me.”
“Then why the deuce don’t you stand yourself?”
Mr. Prodmore knew so familiarly why! “Because I’m not a remarkably handsome young man with the grand old home and the right old name. Because I’m a different sort of matter altogether. But if I haven’t these advantages,” he went on, “you’ll do justice to my natural desire that my daughter at least shall have them.”
Clement Yule watched himself smoke a minute. “Doing justice to natural desires is just what, of late, I’ve tried to make a study of. But I confess I don’t quite grasp the deep attraction you appear to discover in so large a surrender of your interests.”
“My surrenders are my own affair,” Mr. Prodmore rang out, “and as for my interests, as I never, on principle, give anything for nothing, I dare say I may be trusted to know them when I see them. You come high--I don’t for a moment deny it; but when I look at you, in this pleasant, intimate way, my dear boy--if you’ll allow me so to describe things--I recognise one of those cases, unmistakeable when really met, in which one must put down one’s money. There’s not an article in the whole shop, if you don’t mind the comparison, that strikes me as better value. I intend you shall be, Captain,” Mr. Prodmore wound up in a frank, bold burst, “the true comfort of my life!”
The young man was as hushed for a little as if an organ-tone were still in the air. “May I inquire,” he at last returned, “if Miss Prodmore’s ideas of comfort are as well defined--and in her case, I may add, as touchingly modest--as her father’s? Is she a responsible party of this ingenious arrangement?”
Mr. Prodmore rendered homage--his appreciation was marked--to the elevated character of his young friend’s scruple. “Miss Prodmore, Captain Yule, may be perhaps best described as a large smooth sheet of blank, though gilt-edged, paper. No image of any tie but the true and perfect filial has yet, I can answer for it, formed itself on the considerable expanse. But for that image to be projected----”
“I’ve only, in person, to appear?” Yule asked with an embarrassment that he tried to laugh off.
“And, naturally, in person,” Mr. Prodmore intelligently assented, “do yourself, as well as the young lady, justice. Do you remember what you said when I first, in London, laid the matter before you?”
Clement Yule did remember, but his amusement increased. “I think I said it struck me I should first take a look at--what do you call it?--the _corpus delicti_.”
“You should first see for yourself what you had really come into? I was not only eager for that,” said Mr. Prodmore, “but I’m willing to go further: I’m quite ready to hear you say that you think you should also first see the young lady.”
Captain Yule continued to laugh. “There is something in that then, since you mention it!”
“I think you’ll find that there’s everything.” Mr. Prodmore again looked at his watch. “Which will you take first?”
“First?”
“The young lady or the house?”
His companion, at this, unmistakeably started. “Do you mean your daughter’s _here_?”
Mr. Prodmore glowed with consciousness. “In the morning-room.”
“Waiting for me?”
The tone showed a consternation that Mr. Prodmore’s was alert to soothe. “Ah, as long, you know, as you like!”
Yule’s alarm, however, was not assuaged; it appeared to grow as he stared, much discomposed, yet sharply thinking, at the door to which his friend had pointed. “Oh, longer than _this_, please!” Then as he turned away: “Do you mean she knows----?”
“That she’s here on view?” Mr. Prodmore hung fire a moment, but was equal to the occasion. “She knows nothing whatever. She’s as unconscious as the rose on its stem!”
His companion was visibly relieved. “That’s right--let her remain so! I’ll first take the house,” said Clement Yule.
“Shall I go round _with_ you?” Mr. Prodmore asked.
The young man’s reflection was brief. “Thank you. I’d rather, on the whole, go round alone.”
The old servant who had admitted the gentlemen came back at this crisis from the morning-room, looking from under a bent brow and with much limpid earnestness from one of them to the other. The one he first addressed had evidently, though quite unaware of it, inspired him with a sympathy from which he now took a hint. “There’s tea on, sir!” he persuasively jerked as he passed the younger man.