“She won’t!” Mrs. Gracedew more distinctly repeated.
“She _shall_!” returned her adversary, making for the staircase with the evident sense of where reinforcement might be most required.
Mrs. Gracedew, however, with a spring, was well before him. “She shan’t!” She spoke with positive passion and practically so barred the way that he stood arrested and bewildered, and they faced each other, for a flash, like enemies. But it all went out, on her part, in a flash too--in a sudden wonderful smile. “Now tell me how much!”
Mr. Prodmore continued to glare--the sweat was on his brow. But while he slowly wiped it with a pocket-handkerchief of splendid scarlet silk, he remained so silent that he would have had for a spectator the effect of meeting in a manner her question. More formally to answer it he had at last to turn away. “How can I tell you anything so preposterous?”
She was all ready to inform him. “Simply by computing the total amount to which, for your benefit, this unhappy estate is burdened.” He listened with his back presented, but that appeared to strike her, as she fixed this expanse, as an encouragement to proceed. “If I’ve troubled you by showing you that your speculation is built on the sand, let me atone for it by my eagerness to take off your hands an investment from which you derive so little profit.”
He at last gave her his attention, but quite as if there were nothing in it. “And pray what profit will _you_ derive----?”
“Ah, that’s my own secret!” She would show him as well no glimpse of it--her laugh but rattled the box. “I want this house!”
“So do I, damn me!” he roundly returned; “and that’s why I’ve practically paid for it!” He stuffed away his pocket-handkerchief.
There was nevertheless something in her that could hold him, and it came out, after an instant, quietly and reasonably enough. “I’ll practically pay for it, Mr. Prodmore--if you’ll only tell me your figure.”
“My figure?”
“Your figure.”
Mr. Prodmore waited--then removed his eyes from her face. He appeared to have waited on purpose to let her hope of a soft answer fall from a greater height. “My figure would be quite my own!”
“Then it will match, in that respect,” Mrs. Gracedew laughed, “this overture, which is quite _my_ own! As soon as you’ve let me know it I cable to Missoura Top to have the money sent right out to you.”
Mr. Prodmore surveyed in a superior manner this artless picture of a stroke of business. “You imagine that having the money sent right out to me will make you owner of this place?”
She herself, with her head on one side, studied her sketch and seemed to twirl her pencil. “No--not quite. But I’ll settle the rest with Captain Yule.”
Her companion looked, over his white waistcoat, at his large tense shoes, the patent-leather shine of which so flashed propriety back at him that he became, the next moment, doubly erect on it. “Captain Yule has nothing to sell.”
She received the remark with surprise. “Then what have you been trying to buy?”
She had touched in himself even a sharper spring. “Do you mean to say,” he cried, “you want to buy _that_?” She stared at his queer emphasis, which was intensified by a queer grimace; then she turned from him with a change of colour and an ejaculation that led to nothing more, after a few seconds, than a somewhat conscious silence--a silence of which Mr. Prodmore made use to follow up his unanswered question with another. “Is your proposal that I should transfer my investment to you for the mere net amount of it your conception of a fair bargain?”
This second inquiry, however, she could, as she slowly came round, substantially meet. “Pray, then, what is yours?”
“Mine would be, not that I should simply get my money back, but that I should get the effective value of the house.”
Mrs. Gracedew considered it. “But isn’t the effective value of the house just what your money expresses?”
The lid of his hard left eye, the harder of the two, just dipped with the effect of a wink. “No, madam. It’s just what _yours_ does. It’s moreover just what your lips have already expressed so distinctly!”
She clearly did her best to follow him. “To those people--when I showed the place off?”
Mr. Prodmore laughed. “You seemed to be _taking_ bids then!”
She was candid, but earnest. “Taking them?”
“Oh, like an auctioneer! You ran it up high!” And Mr. Prodmore laughed again.
She turned a little pale, but it added to her brightness. “I certainly did, if saying it was charming----”
“Charming?” Mr. Prodmore broke in. “You said it was magnificent. You said it was unique. That was your very word. You said it was the _perfect_ specimen of its class in England.” He was more than accusatory, he was really crushing. “Oh, you got in deep!”
It was indeed an indictment, and her smile was perhaps now rather set. “Possibly. But taunting me with my absurd high spirits and the dreadful liberties I took doesn’t in the least tell me how deep _you’re_ in!”
“For you, Mrs. Gracedew?” He took a few steps, looking at his shoes again and as if to give her time to plead--since he wished to be quite fair--that it was _not_ for her. “I’m in to the tune of fifty thousand.”
She was silent, on this announcement, so long that he once more faced her; but if what he showed her in doing so at last made her speak, it also took the life from her tone. “That’s a great deal of money, Mr. Prodmore.”
The tone didn’t matter, but only the truth it expressed, which he so thoroughly liked to hear. “So I’ve often had occasion to say to myself!”
“If it’s a large sum for you, then,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “it’s a still larger one for me.” She sank into a chair with a vague melancholy; such a mass loomed huge, and she sat down before it as a solitary herald, resigning himself with a sigh to wait, might have leaned against a tree before a besieged city. “We women”--she wished to conciliate--“have more modest ideas.”
But Mr. Prodmore would scarce condescend to parley. “Is it as a ‘modest idea’ that you describe your extraordinary intrusion----?”
His question scarce reached her; she was so lost for the moment in the sense of innocent community with her sex. “I mean I think we measure things often rather more exactly.”
There would have been no doubt of Mr. Prodmore’s very different community as he rudely replied: “Then you measured _this_ thing exactly half an hour ago!”
It was a long way to go back, but Mrs. Gracedew, in her seat, musingly made the journey, from which she then suddenly returned with a harmless, indeed quite a happy, memento. “Was I _very_ grotesque?”
He demurred. “Grotesque?”
“I mean--_did_ I go on about it?”
Mr. Prodmore would have no general descriptions; he was specific, he was vivid. “You banged the desk. You raved. You shrieked.”
This was a note she appeared indulgently, almost tenderly, to recognise. “We _do_ shriek at Missoura Top!”
“I don’t know what you do at Missoura Top, but I know what you did at Covering End!”
She warmed at last to his tone. “So do _I_ then! I surprised you. You weren’t at all prepared----”
He took her briskly up. “No--and I’m not prepared yet!”
Mrs. Gracedew could quite see it. “Yes, you’re too astonished.”
“My astonishment’s my own affair,” he retorted--“not less so than my memory!”
“Oh, I yield to your memory,” said the charming woman, “and I confess my extravagance. But quite, you know, _as_ extravagance.”
“I don’t at all know,”--Mr. Prodmore shook it off,--“nor what you _call_ extravagance.”
“Why, banging the desk. Raving. Shrieking. I over-did it,” she exclaimed; “I wanted to please you!”
She had too happy a beauty, as she sat in her high-backed chair, to have been condemned to say that to any man without a certain effect. The effect on Mr. Prodmore was striking. “So you said,” he sternly inquired, “what you didn’t believe?”
She flushed with the avowal. “Yes--for you.”
He looked at her hard. “For _me_?”
Under his eye--for her flush continued--she slowly got up. “And for those good people.”
“Oh!”--he sounded most sarcastic. “Should you like me to call them back?”
“No.” She was still gay enough, but very decided. “I took them in.”
“And now you want to take _me_?”
“Oh, Mr. Prodmore!” she almost pitifully, but not quite adequately, moaned.
He appeared to feel he had gone a little far. “Well, if we’re not what you say----”
“Yes?”--she looked up askance at the stroke.
“Why the devil do you want us?” The question rang out and was truly for the poor lady, as the quick suffusion of her eyes showed, a challenge it would take more time than he left her properly to pick up. He left her in fact no time at all before he went on: “Why the devil did you say you’d offer fifty?”
She looked quite wan and seemed to wonder. “_Did_ I say that?” She could only let his challenge lie. “It was a figure of speech!”
“Then that’s the kind of figure we’re talking about!” Mr. Prodmore’s sharpness would have struck an auditor as the more effective that, on the heels of this thrust, seeing the ancient butler reappear, he dropped the victim of it as comparatively unimportant and directed his fierceness instantly to Chivers, who mildly gaped at him from the threshold of the court. “Have you seen Miss Prodmore? If you haven’t, find her!”