They all passed, Chivers covering their scattered ascent as a shepherd scales a hillside with his flock; but it became evident during the manœuvre that Cora Prodmore was quite out of tune. She had been standing beyond and rather behind Captain Yule; but she now moved quickly round and reached her new friend’s right. “Mrs. Gracedew, may _I_ speak to you?”
Her father, before the reply could come, had taken up the place. “_After_ Captain Yule, my dear.” He was in a state of positively polished lucidity. “You must make the most--don’t you see?--of the opportunity of the others!”
He waved her to the staircase as one who knew what he was about, but, while the young man, turning his back, moved consciously and nervously away, the girl renewed her effort to provoke Mrs. Gracedew to detain her. It happened, to her sorrow, that this lady appeared for the moment, to the detriment of any free attention, to be absorbed in Captain Yule’s manner; so that Cora could scarce disengage her without some air of invidious reference to it. Recognising as much, she could only for two seconds, but with great yearning, parry her own antagonist. “She’ll _help_ me, I think, papa!”
“That’s exactly what strikes me, love!” he cheerfully replied. “But _I’ll_ help you too!” He gave her, toward the stairs, a push proportioned both to his authority and to her weight; and while she reluctantly climbed in the wake of the visitors, he laid on Mrs. Gracedew’s arm, with a portentous glance at Captain Yule, a hand of commanding significance. “Just pile it on!”
Her attention came back--she seemed to see. “He doesn’t like it?”
“Not half enough. Bring him round.”
Her eyes rested again on their companion, who had fidgeted further away and who now, with his hands in his pockets and unaware of this private passage, stood again in the open doorway and gazed into the grey court. Something in the sight determined her. “I’ll bring him round.”
But at this moment Cora, pausing half-way up, sent down another entreaty. “Mrs. Gracedew, will you see _me_?”
The charming woman looked at her watch. “In ten minutes,” she smiled back.
Mr. Prodmore, bland and assured, looked at his own. “You could put him through in five--but I’ll allow you twenty. There!” he decisively cried to his daughter, whom he quickly rejoined and hustled on her course. Mrs. Gracedew kissed after her a hand of vague comfort.
IV
The silence that reigned between the pair might have been registered as embarrassing had it lasted a trifle longer. Yule had continued to turn his back, but he faced about, though he was distinctly grave, in time to avert an awkwardness. “How do you come to know so much about my house?”
She was as distinctly not grave. “How do _you_ come to know so little?”
“It’s not my fault,” he said very gently. “A particular combination of misfortunes has forbidden me, till this hour, to come within a mile of it.”
These words evidently struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that such a felicity of misery could only quicken her interest. He was plainly as good in his way as the old butler--the particular combination of misfortunes corresponded to the lifelong service. Her interest, none the less, in its turn, could only quicken her pity, and all her emotions, we have already seen, found prompt enough expression. What could any expression do indeed now but mark the romantic reality? “Why, you poor thing!”--she came toward him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least you’ll stay.” Their intercourse must pitch itself--so far as she was concerned--in some key that would make up for things. “Do make yourself comfortable. Don’t mind me.”
Yule looked a shade less serious. “That’s exactly what I wanted to say to _you_!”
She was struck with the way it came in. “Well, if you _had_ been haughty, I shouldn’t have been quite crushed, should I?”
The young man’s gravity, at this, completely yielded. “I’m never haughty--oh, no!”
She seemed even more amused. “Fortunately then, as _I’m_ never crushed. I don’t think,” she added, “that I’m really as crushable as you.”
The smile with which he received this failed to conceal completely that it was something of a home thrust. “Aren’t we really _all_ crushable--by the right thing?”
She considered a little. “Don’t you mean rather by the wrong?”
He had got, clearly, a trifle more accustomed to her being extraordinary. “Are you sure we always know them apart?”
She weighed the responsibility. “I always do. Don’t you?”
“Not quite every time!”
“Oh,” she replied, “I don’t think, thank goodness, we have positively ‘every time’ to distinguish.”
“Yet we must always act,” he objected.
She turned this over; then with her wonderful living look, “I’m glad to hear it,” she exclaimed, “because, I fear, I always _do_! You’ll certainly think,” she added with more gravity, “that I’ve taken a line today!”
“Do you mean that of mistress of the house? Yes--you do seem in possession!”
“_You_ don’t!” she honestly answered; after which, as to attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look”--she was very serious--“as I want you to.”
It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. “How do you ‘want’ me to look?”
She endeavoured, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at _me_, you’re all right!” she sighed. It was an obstacle to her lesson, and she cast her eyes about. “Look at that chimneypiece.”
“Well----?” he inquired as his eyes came back from it.
“You mean to say it isn’t lovely?”
He returned to it without passion--gave a vivid sign of mere disability. “I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t mean to say anything. I’m a rank outsider.”
It had an instant effect on her--she almost pounced upon him. “Then you must let me put you up!”
“Up to what?”
“Up to everything!”--his levity added to her earnestness. “You were smoking when you came in,” she said as she glanced about. “Where’s your cigarette?”
The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I mightn’t--here.”
“You may everywhere.”
He bent his head to the information. “Everywhere.”
She laughed at his docility, yet could only wish to presume upon it. “It’s a rule of the house!”
He took in the place with greater pleasure. “What delightful rules!”
“How could such a house have any others?”--she was already launched again in her brave relation to it. “I _may_ go up just once more--mayn’t I--to the long gallery?”
How could he tell? “The long gallery?”
With an added glow she remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full, on the spot, of the pride of showing it. “Come right up!”
Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. “There’s a party up.”
She remembered afresh. “So _we_ must be the party down? Well, you must give me a chance. That long gallery’s the principal thing I came over for.”
She was strangest of all when she explained. “Where in heaven’s name did you come over from?”
“Missoura Top, where I’m building--just in this style. I came for plans and ideas,” Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. “I felt I must look right _at_ you.”
“But what did you know about us?”
She kept it a moment as if it were too good to give him all at once. “Everything!”
He seemed indeed almost afraid to touch it. “At ‘Missoura Top’?”
“Why not? It’s a growing place--forty thousand the last census.” She hesitated; then as if her warrant should be slightly more personal: “My husband left it to me.”
The young man presently changed his posture. “You’re a widow?”
Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it--and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.”
Yule’s innocence made a movement. “Mine?”
Her smile reassured him; she nodded toward the main entrance. “A water colour I chanced on in Boston.”
“In Boston?”
She stared. “Haven’t you heard of Boston either?”
“Yes--but what has Boston heard of _me_?”
“It wasn’t ‘you,’ unfortunately--it was your divine south front. The drawing struck me so that I got you up--in the books.”
He appeared, however, rather comically, but half to make it out, or to gather at any rate that there was even more of it than he feared. “Are we in the books?”
“Did you never discover it?” Before his blankness, the dim apprehension in his fine amused and troubled face of how much there was of it, her frank, gay concern for him sprang again to the front. “Where in heaven’s name, Captain Yule, have _you_ come over from?”
He looked at her very kindly, but as if scarce expecting her to follow. “The East End of London.”
She had followed perfectly, he saw the next instant, but she had by no means equally accepted. “What were you doing there?”
He could only put it, though a little over-consciously, very simply. “Working, you see. When I left the army--it was much too slow, unless one was personally a whirlwind of war--I began to make out that, for a fighting man----”