She was silent in a way that made their talk more of a discussion than if she had spoken. “What _is_ behind them?” she presently asked.
“Why, my whole political history. Everything I’ve said, everything I’ve done. My scorching addresses and letters, reproduced in all the papers. I needn’t go into details, but I’m a pure, passionate, pledged Radical.”
Mrs. Gracedew looked him full in the face. “Well, what if you _are_?”
He broke into mirth at her tone. “Simply this--that I can’t therefore, from one day to the other, pop up at Gossage in the purple pomp of the opposite camp. There’s a want of transition. It may be timid of me--it may be abject. But I can’t.”
If she was not yet prepared to contest she was still less prepared to surrender it, and she confined herself for the instant to smoothing down with her foot the corner of an old rug. “Have you thought very much about it?”
He was vague. “About what?”
“About what Mr. Prodmore wants you to do.”
He flushed up. “Oh, then, you know it’s _he_?”
“I’m not,” she said, still gravely enough, “of an intelligence absolutely infantile.”
“You’re the cleverest Tory I’ve ever met!” he laughed. “I didn’t mean to mention my friend’s name, but since _you’ve_ done so----!” He gave up with a shrug his scruple.
Oh, she had already cleared the ground of it! “It’s he who’s the devouring wolf? It’s he who holds your mortgages?”
The very lucidity of her interest just checked his assent. “He holds plenty of others, and he treats me very handsomely.”
She showed of a sudden an inconsequent face. “Do you call _that_ handsome--such a condition?”
He shed surprise. “Why, I thought it was just the condition you could meet.”
She measured her inconsistency, but was not abashed. “We’re not talking of what _I_ can meet.” Yet she found also a relief in dropping the point. “Why doesn’t he stand himself?”
“Well, like other devouring wolves, he’s not personally adored.”
“Not even,” she asked, “when he offers such liberal terms?”
Clement Yule had to explain. “I dare say he doesn’t offer them to everyone.”
“Only to you?”--at this she quite sprang. “You _are_ personally adored; you will be still more if you stand; and that, you poor lamb, is why he wants you!”
The young man, obviously pleased to find her after all more at one with him, accepted gracefully enough the burden her sympathy imposed. “I’m the bearer of my name, I’m the representative of my family; and to my family and my name--since you’ve led me to it--this countryside has been for generations indulgently attached.”
She listened to him with a sentiment in her face that showed how now, at last, she felt herself deal with the lawful heir. She seemed to perceive it with a kind of passion. “You do of course what you will with the countryside!”
“Yes”--he went with her--“if we do it as genuine Yules. I’m obliged of course to grant you that your genuine Yule’s a Tory of Tories. It’s Mr. Prodmore’s belief that I should carry Gossage in that character, but in that character only. They won’t look at me in any other.”
It might have taxed a spectator to say in what character Mrs. Gracedew, on this, for a little, considered him. “Don’t be too sure of people’s not looking at you!”
He blushed again, but he laughed. “We must leave out my personal beauty.”
“We can’t!” she replied with decision. “Don’t we take in Mr. Prodmore’s?”
Captain Yule was not prepared. “You call him beautiful?”
“Hideous.” She settled it; then pursued her investigation. “What’s the extraordinary interest that he attaches----?”
“To the return of a Tory?” Here the young man _was_ prepared. “Oh, his desire is born of his fear--his terror on behalf of Property, which he sees, somehow, with an intensely Personal, with a quite colossal ‘P.’ He has a great deal of that article, and very little of anything else.”
Mrs. Gracedew, accepting provisionally his demonstration, had one of her friendly recalls. “Do you call that nice daughter ‘very little’?”
The young man looked quite at a loss. “Is she very big? I really didn’t notice her--and moreover she’s just a part of the Property. He thinks things are going too far.”
She sat straight down on a stiff chair; on which, with high distinctness: “Well, they _are_!”
He stood before her in the discomposure of her again thus appearing to fail him. “Aren’t you then a lover of justice?”
“A passionate one!” She sat there as upright as if she held the scales. “Where’s the justice of your losing this house?” Generous as well as strenuous, all her fairness thrown out by her dark old high-backed seat, she put it to him as from the judicial bench. “To keep Covering, you must carry Gossage!”
The odd face he made at it might have betrayed a man dazzled. “As a renegade?”
“As a genuine Yule. What business have you to be anything else?” She had already arranged it all. “You must close with Mr. Prodmore--you must stand in the Tory interest.” She hung fire a moment; then as she got up: “If you will, I’ll conduct your canvass!”
He stared at the distracting picture. “That puts the temptation high!”
But she brushed the mere picture away. “Ah, don’t look at me as if _I_ were the temptation! Look at this sweet old human home, and feel all its gathered memories. Do you want to know what they do to me?” She took the survey herself again, as if to be really sure. “They speak to me for Mr. Prodmore.”
He followed with a systematic docility the direction of her eyes, but as if with the result only of its again coming home to him that there was no accounting for what things might do. “Well, there are others than these, you know,” he good-naturedly pleaded--“things for which I’ve spoken, repeatedly and loudly, to others than you.” The very manner of his speaking on such occasions appeared, for that matter, now to come back to him. “One’s ‘human home’ is all very well, but the rest of one’s humanity is better!” She gave, at this, a droll soft wail; she turned impatiently away. “I see you’re disgusted with me, and I’m sorry; but one must take one’s self as circumstances and experience have made one, and it’s not my fault, don’t you know? if they’ve made me a very modern man. I see something else in the world than the beauty of old show-houses and the glory of old show-families. There are thousands of people in England who can show no houses at all, and I don’t feel it utterly shameful to share their poor fate!”
She had moved away with impatience, and it was the advantage of this for her that the back she turned prevented him from seeing how intently she listened. She seemed to continue to listen even after he had stopped; but if that gave him a sense of success, he might have been checked by the way she at last turned round with a sad and beautiful headshake. “We share the poor fate of humanity whatever we do, and we do something to help and console when we’ve something precious to show. What on earth is more precious than what the ages have slowly wrought? They’ve trusted us, in such a case, to keep it--to do something, in our turn, for _them_.” She shone out at him as if her contention had the evidence of the noonday sun, and yet in her generosity she superabounded and explained. “It’s such a virtue, in anything, to have lasted; it’s such an honour, for anything, to have been spared. To all strugglers from the wreck of time hold out a pitying hand!”
Yule, on this argument,--of a strain which even a good experience of debate could scarce have prepared him to meet,--had not a congruous rejoinder absolutely pat, and his hesitation unfortunately gave him time to see how soon his companion made out that what had touched him most in it was her particular air in presenting it. She would manifestly have preferred he should have been floored by her mere moral reach; yet he was aware that his own made no great show as he took refuge in general pleasantry. “What a plea for looking backward, dear lady, to come from Missoura Top!”
“We’re making a Past at Missoura Top as fast as ever we can, and I should like to see you lay your hand on an hour of the one we’ve made! It’s a tight fit, as yet, I grant,” she said, “and that’s just why I like, in yours, to find room, don’t you see? to turn round. You’re _in_ it, over here, and you can’t get out; so just make the best of that and treat the thing as part of the fun!”
“The whole of the fun, to me,” the young man replied, “is in hearing you defend it! It’s like your defending hereditary gout or chronic rheumatism and sore throat--the things I feel aching in every old bone of these walls and groaning in every old draught that, I’m sure, has for centuries blown through them.”
Mrs. Gracedew looked as if no woman could be shaken who was so prepared to be just all round. “If there be aches--there may be--you’re here to soothe them, and if there be draughts--there _must_ be!--you’re here to stop them up. And do you know what _I’m_ here for? If I’ve come so far and so straight, I’ve almost wondered myself. I’ve felt with a kind of passion--but now I see _why_ I’ve felt.” She moved about the hall with the excitement of this perception, and, separated from him at last by a distance across which he followed her discovery with a visible suspense, she brought out the news. “I’m here for an act of salvation--I’m here to avert a sacrifice!”