He could give her every assurance. “Oh, yes--everything in life!”
It did her much good, brought back the rest of her brightness. “Wasn’t it just of the question of the honour of things that we talked awhile ago--and of the difficulty of sometimes keeping our sense of it clear? There’s no more to be said therefore,” she went on with the faintest soft sigh about it, “except that I leave you to your ancient glory as I leave you to your strict duty.” She had these things there before her; they might have been a well-spread board from which she turned away fasting. “I hope you’ll do justice to dear old Covering in spite of its weak points, and I hope above all you’ll not be incommoded----”
As she hesitated here he was too intent. “Incommoded----?”
She saw it better than she could express it. “Well, by such a rage----!”
He challenged this description with a strange gleam. “You suppose it will be a rage?”
She laughed out at his look. “Are you afraid of the love that kills?”
He grew singularly grave. “_Will_ it kill----?”
“Great passions _have_!”--she was highly amused.
But he could only stare. “Is it a great passion?”
“Surely--when so many feel it!”
He was fairly bewildered. “But how many----?”
She reckoned them up. “Let’s see. If you count them all----”
“‘All’?” Clement Yule gasped.
She looked at him, in turn, slightly mystified. “I see. You knock off some. About half?”
It was too obscure--he broke down. “Whom on earth are you talking about?”
“Why, the electors----”
“Of Gossage?”--he leaped at it. “Oh!”
“I got the whole thing up--there are six thousand. It’s such a fine figure!” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He had sharply passed from her, to cover his mistake, and it carried him half round the hall. Then, as if aware that this pause itself compromised him, he came back confusedly and with her last words in his ear. “_Has_ she a fine figure?”
But her own thoughts were off. “‘She’?”
He blushed and recovered himself. “Aren’t we talking----”
“Of Gossage? Oh, yes--she has every charm! Good-bye,” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He pulled, at this, the longest face, but was kept dumb a moment by the very decision with which she again began to gather herself. It held him helpless, and there was finally real despair in his retarded protest. “You don’t mean to say you’re going?”
“You don’t mean to say you’re surprised at it? Haven’t I done,” she luminously asked, “what I told you I had been so mystically moved to come for?” She recalled to him by her renewed supreme survey the limited character of this errand, which she then in a brisk familiar word expressed to the house itself. “You dear old thing--you’re saved!”
Clement Yule might on the other hand, by his simultaneous action, have given himself out for lost. “For God’s sake,” he cried as he circled earnestly round her, “don’t go till I can come back to thank you!” He pulled out his watch. “I promised to return immediately to Prodmore.”
This completely settled his visitor. “Then don’t let me, for a moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots”--it went almost without saying--“to talk comfortably over.”
The young man’s embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his assent was entire. “I certainly feel, you know, that I must see him again.” He rambled even to the open door and looked with incoherence into the court. “Yes, decidedly, I _must_!”
“Is he out there?” Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked.
He turned short round. “No--I left him in the long gallery.”
“You _saw_ that, then?”--she flashed back into eagerness. “Isn’t it lovely?”
Clement Yule rather wondered. “I didn’t notice it. How _could_ I?”
His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. “How _couldn’t_ you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!”
He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped again. “Will you wait for me?”
He had such an air of proposing a bargain, of making the wait a condition, that she had to look it well in the face. The result of her doing so, however, was apparently a strong sense that she could give him no pledge. Her silence, after a moment, expressed that; but, for a further emphasis, moving away, she sank suddenly into the chair she had already occupied and in which, serious again and very upright, she continued to withhold her promise. “Go up to him!” she simply repeated. He obeyed, with an abrupt turn, mounting briskly enough several steps, but pausing midway and looking back at her as if he were after all irresolute. He was in fact so much so that, at the sight of her still in her chair and alone by his cold hearth, he descended a few steps again and seemed, with too much decidedly on his mind, on the point of breaking out. She had sat a minute in such thought, figuring him clearly as gone, that at the sound of his return she sprang up with a protest. This checked him afresh, and he remained where he had paused, still on the ascent and exchanging with her a look to which neither party was inspired, oddly enough, to contribute a word. It struck him, without words, at all events, as enough, and he now took his upward course at such a pace that he presently disappeared. She listened awhile to his retreating tread; then her own, on the old flags of the hall, became rapid, though, it may perhaps be added, directed to no visible end. It conveyed her, in the great space, from point to point, but she now for the first time moved there without attention and without joy, her course determined by a series of such inward throbs as might have been the suppressed beats of a speech. A real observer, had such a monster been present, would have followed this tacit evolution from sign to sign and from shade to shade. “Why didn’t he tell me _all_?--But it was none of my business!--What does he mean to do?--What should he do but what he _has_ done?--And what _can_ he do, when he’s so deeply committed, when he’s practically engaged, when he’s just the same as married--and buried?--The thing for _me_ to ‘do’ is just to pull up short and bundle out: to remove from the scene they encumber the numerous fragments--well, of what?”
Her thought was plainly arrested by the sight of Cora Prodmore, who, returning from the garden, reappeared first in the court and then in the open doorway. Mrs. Gracedew’s was a thought, however, that, even when desperate, was never quite vanquished, and it found a presentable public solution in the pieces of the vase smashed by Chivers and just then, on the table where he had laid them, catching her eye. “Of my old Chelsea pot!” Her gay, sad headshake as she took one of them up pronounced for Cora’s benefit its funeral oration. She laid the morsel thoughtfully down, while her visitor seemed with simple dismay to read the story.
VI
“Has he been _breaking_----?” the girl asked in horror.
Mrs. Gracedew laughingly tapped her heart. “Yes, we’ve had a scene! He went up again to your father.”
Cora was disconcerted. “Papa’s not there. He just came down to me by the other way.”
“Then he can join you here,” said Mrs. Gracedew with instant resignation. “I’m going.”
“Just when I’ve come back to you--at the risk,” Cora made bold to throw off, “of again interrupting, though I really hoped he had gone, your conversation with Captain Yule?”
But Mrs. Gracedew let the ball quite drop. “I’ve nothing to say to Captain Yule.”
Cora picked it up for another toss. “You had a good deal to say a few minutes ago!”
“Well, I’ve said it, and it’s over. I’ve nothing more to say at all,” Mrs. Gracedew insisted. But her announcement of departure left her on this occasion, as each of its predecessors had done, with a last, with indeed a fresh, solicitude. “What has become of my delightful ‘party’?”
“They’ve been dismissed, through the grounds, by the other door. But they mentioned,” the girl pursued, “the probable arrival of a fresh lot.”
Mrs. Gracedew showed on this such a revival of interest as fairly amounted to yearning. “Why, what times you have! _You_,” she nevertheless promptly decreed, “must take the fresh lot--since the house is now practically yours!”
Poor Cora looked blank. “Mine?”
Her companion matched her stare. “Why, if you’re going to marry Captain Yule.”
Cora coloured, in a flash, to the eyes. “I’m _not_ going to marry Captain Yule!”
Her friend as quickly paled again. “Why on earth then did you tell me only ten minutes ago that you were?”
Cora could only look bewildered at the charge. “I told you nothing of the sort. I only told you”--she was almost indignantly positive--“that he had been ordered me!”
It sent Mrs. Gracedew off; she moved away to indulge an emotion that presently put on the form of extravagant mirth. “Like a dose of medicine or a course of baths?”
The girl’s gravity and lucidity sustained themselves. “As a remedy for the single life.” Oh, she had mastered the matter now! “But I won’t take him!”
“Ah, then, why didn’t you let me know?” Mrs. Gracedew panted.
“I was on the very point of it when he came in and interrupted us.” Cora clearly felt she might be wicked, but was at least not stupid. “It’s just to let you know that I’m here now.”