The elder answered. “Then I’ll join my daughter.” He gained the morning-room door, whence he repeated with an appropriate gesture--that of offering proudly, with light, firm fingers, a flower of his own celebrated raising--his happy formula of Miss Prodmore’s state. “The rose on its stem!” Scattering petals, diffusing fragrance, he thus passed out.
Chivers, meanwhile, had rather pointlessly settled once more in its place some small object that had not strayed; to whom Clement Yule, absently watching him, abruptly broke out. “I say, my friend, what colour is the rose?”
The old man looked up with a dimness that presently glimmered. “The rose, sir?” He turned to the open door and the shining day. “Rather a brilliant----”
“A brilliant----?” Yule was interested.
“Kind of old-fashioned red.” Chivers smiled with the pride of being thus able to testify, but the next instant his smile went out. “It’s the only one left--on the old west wall.”
His visitor’s mirth, at this, quickly enough revived. “My dear fellow, I’m not alluding to the sole ornament of the garden, but to the young lady at present in the morning-room. Do you happen to have noticed if she’s pretty?”
Chivers stood queerly rueful. “Laws, sir--it’s a matter I mostly notice; but isn’t it, at the same time, sir, a matter--like--of taste?”
“Pre-eminently. That’s just why I appeal with such confidence to yours.”
The old man acknowledged with a flush of real embarrassment a responsibility he had so little invited. “Well, sir,--mine was always a sort of fancy for something more merry-like.”
“She isn’t merry-like then, poor Miss Prodmore?” Captain Yule’s attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an “Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn’t signify,” he went on. “What are _you_?” he more sociably demanded.
Chivers clearly had to think a bit. “Well, sir, I’m not quite _that_. Whatever has there been to make me, sir?” he asked in dim extenuation.
“How in the world do _I_ know? I mean to whom do you belong?”
Chivers seemed to scan impartially the whole field. “If you could just only _tell_ me, sir! I quite seem to waste away--for someone to take an order of.”
Clement Yule, by this time, had become aware he was amusing. “Who pays your wages?”
“No one at all, sir,” said the old man very simply.
His friend, fumbling an instant in a waistcoat pocket, produced something that his hand, in obedience to a little peremptory gesture and by a trick of which he had unlearned, through scant custom, the neatness, though the propriety was instinctive, placed itself in a shy practical relation to. “Then there’s a sovereign. And I haven’t many!” the young man, turning away resignedly, threw after it.
Chivers, for an instant, intensely studied him. “Ah, then, shouldn’t it stay in the family?”
Clement Yule wheeled round, first struck, then, at the sight of the figure made by his companion in this offer, visibly touched. “I think it does, old boy.”
Chivers kept his eyes on him now. “I’ve served your house, sir.”
“How long?”
“All my life.”
So, for a time, they faced each other, and something in Chivers made Yule at last speak. “Then I won’t give _you_ up!”
“Indeed, sir, I hope you won’t give up anything.”
The Captain took up his hat. “It remains to be seen.” He looked over the place again; his eyes wandered to the open door. “Is that the garden?”
“It _was_!”--and the old man’s sigh was like the creak of the wheel of time. “Shall I show you how it used to be?”
“It’s just as it _is_, alas, that I happen to require it!” Captain Yule reached the door and stood looking beyond. “Don’t come,” he then said; “I want to think.” With which he walked out.
Chivers, left alone, appeared to wonder at it, and his wonder, like that of most old people, lay near his lips. “What does he want, poor dear, to think about?” This speculation, however, was immediately checked by a high, clear voice that preceded the appearance on the stairs, before she had reached the middlemost landing, of the wonderful figure of a lady, a lady who, with the almost trumpeted cheer of her peremptory but friendly call--“Housekeeper, Butler, old Family Servant!”--fairly waked the sleeping echoes. Chivers gazed up at her in quick remembrance, half dismayed, half dazzled, of a duty neglected. She appeared now; she shone at him out of the upper dusk; reaching the middle, she had begun to descend, with beautiful laughter and rustling garments; and though she was alone she gave him the sense of coming in a crowd and with music. “Oh, I should have told him of _her_!”
III
She was indeed an apparition, a presence requiring announcement and explanation just in the degree in which it seemed to show itself in a relation quite of its own to all social preliminaries. It evidently either assumed them to be already over or wished to forestall them altogether; what was clear at any rate was that it allowed them scant existence. She was young, tall, radiant, lovely, and dressed in a manner determined at once, obviously, by the fact and by the humour of her journey--it might have proclaimed her so a pilgrim or so set her up as a priestess. Most journeys, for this lady, at all events, were clearly a brush of Paris. “Did you think I had got snapped down in an old box like that poor girl--what’s her name? the one who was poking round too--in the celebrated poem? You dear, delightful man, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you, mum----?”
“Well, that you’re so perfectly--perfect! You’re ever so much better than anyone has ever said. Why, in the name of common sense, has nobody ever said _anything_? You’re everything in the world you ought to be, and not the shade of a shade of anything you oughtn’t!”
It was a higher character to be turned out with than poor Chivers had ever dreamed. “Well, mum, I try!” he gaped.
“Oh, no, you don’t--that’s just your charm! _I_ try,” cried his friend, “but you do nothing: here you simply _are_--you can’t help it!”
He stood overwhelmed. “Me, mum?”
She took him in at the eyes--she could take everything at once. “Yes, you too, you positive old picture! I’ve seen the old masters--but you’re the old master!”
“The master--I?” He fairly fell back.
“‘The good and faithful servant’--Rembrandt van Rhyn: with three stars. _That’s_ what you are!” Nothing would have been more droll to a spectator than her manner of meeting his humbleness, or more charming indeed than the practical sweetness of her want of imagination of it. “The house is a vision of beauty, and you’re simply worthy of the house. I can’t say more for you!”
“I find it a bit of a strain, mum,” Chivers candidly replied, “to keep up--fairly to call it--with what you _do_ say.”
“That’s just what everyone finds it!”--she broke into the happiest laugh. “Yet I haven’t come here to suffer in silence, you know--to suffer, I mean, from envy and despair.” She was in constant movement, from side to side, observing, comparing, returning, taking notes while she gossiped and gossiping, too, for remembrance. The intention of remembrance even had in it, however, some prevision of failure or some alloy of irritation. “You’re so fatally right and so deadly complete, all the same, that I can really scarcely bear it: with every fascinating feature that I had already heard of and thought I was prepared for, and ever so many others that, strange to say, I hadn’t and wasn’t, and that you just spring right _at_ me like a series of things going off. What do you call it,” she asked--“a royal salute, a hundred guns?”
Her enthusiasm had a bewildering form, but it had by this time warmed the air, and the old man rubbed his hands as over a fire to which the bellows had been applied. “I saw as soon as you arrived, mum, that you were looking for more things than ever _I_ heard tell of!”
“Oh, I had got you by heart,” she returned, “from books and drawings and photos; I had you in my pocket when I came: so, you see, as soon as you were so good as to give me my head and let me loose, I knew my way about. It’s all here, every inch of it,” she competently continued, “and now at last I can do what I want!”
A light of consternation, at this, just glimmered in Chivers’s face. “And pray, mum, what might that be?”
“Why, take you right back with me--to Missoura Top.”
This answer seemed to fix his bewilderment, but he was there for the general convenience.
“Do I understand you, mum, that you require to take _me_?”
Her particular convenience, on the spot, embraced him, so new and delightful a sense had he suddenly read into her words. “Do you mean to say you’d come--as the old Family Servant? Then _do_, you nice real thing: it’s just what I’m dying for--an old Family Servant! You’re somebody’s else, yes--but everything, over here, is somebody’s else, and I want, too, a first-rate second-hand one, all ready made, as you are, but not too much done up. You’re the best I’ve seen yet, and I wish I could have you packed--put up in paper and bran--as I shall have my old pot there.” She whisked about, remembering, recovering, eager: “Don’t let me _forget_ my precious pot!” Excited, with quick transitions, she quite sociably appealed to her companion, who shuffled sympathetically to where, out of harm, the object had been placed on a table. “Don’t you just love old crockery? That’s awfully sweet old Chelsea.”