Mrs. Gracedew addressed their visitor in a very different tone, though with the full authority of her benevolence. “You won’t, my dear man.” To Mr. Prodmore also she continued bland. “I happen to know she has gone for a walk.”
“A walk--alone?” Mr. Prodmore gasped.
“No--not alone.” Mrs. Gracedew looked at Chivers with a vague smile of appeal for help, but he could only give her, from under his bent old brow, the blank decency of his wonder. It seemed to make her feel afresh that she was, after all, alone--so that in her loneliness, which had also its fine sad charm, she risked another brush with their formidable friend. “Cora has gone with Mr. Pegg.”
“Pegg has _been_ here?”
It was like a splash in a full basin, but she launched the whole craft. “He walked with her from the station.”
“When she arrived?” Mr. Prodmore rose like outraged Neptune. “That’s why she was so late?”
Mrs. Gracedew assented. “Why I got here first. I get everywhere first!” she bravely laughed.
Mr. Prodmore looked round him in purple dismay--it was so clearly a question for him where _he_ should get, and what! “In which direction did they go?” he imperiously asked.
His rudeness was too evident to be more than lightly recognised. “I think I must let you ascertain for yourself!”
All he could do then was to shout it to Chivers. “Call my carriage, you ass!” After which, as the old man melted into the vestibule, he dashed about blindly for his hat, pounced upon it and seemed, furious but helpless, on the point of hurling it at his contradictress as a gage of battle. “So you abetted and protected this wicked, low intrigue?”
She had something in her face now that was indifferent to any violence. “You’re too disappointed to see your real interest: oughtn’t I therefore in common charity to point it out to you?”
He faced her question so far as to treat it as one. “What do _you_ know of my disappointment?”
There was something in his very harshness that even helped her, for it added at this moment to her sense of making out in his narrowed glare a couple of tears of rage. “I know everything.”
“What do you know of my real interest?” he went on as if he had not heard her.
“I know enough for my purpose--which is to offer you a handsome condition. I think it’s not I who have protected the happy understanding that you call by so ugly a name; it’s the happy understanding that has put me”--she gained confidence--“well, in a position. Do drive after them, if you like--but catch up with them only to forgive them. If you’ll do that, I’ll pay your price.”
The particular air with which, a minute after Mrs. Gracedew had spoken these words, Mr. Prodmore achieved a transfer of his attention to the inside of his hat--this special shade of majesty would have taxed the descriptive resources of the most accomplished reporter. It is none the less certain that he appeared for some time absorbed in that receptacle--appeared at last to breathe into it hard. “What do you call my price?”
“Why, the sum you just mentioned--fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew feverishly quavered.
He looked at her as if stupefied. “_That’s_ not my price--and it never for a moment was!” If derision can be dry, Mr. Prodmore’s was of the driest. “Besides,” he rang out, “my price is up!”
She caught it with a long wail. “Up?”
Oh, he let her have it now! “Seventy thousand.”
She turned away overwhelmed, but still with voice for her despair. “Oh, deary me!”
Mr. Prodmore was already at the door, from which he launched his ultimatum. “It’s to take or to leave!”
She would have had to leave it, perhaps, had not something happened at this moment to nerve her for the effort of staying him with a quick motion. Captain Yule had come into sight on the staircase and, after just faltering at what he himself saw, had marched resolutely enough down. She watched him arrive--watched him with an attention that visibly and responsively excited his own; after which she passed nearer to their companion. “Seventy thousand, then!”--it gleamed between them, in her muffled hiss, as if she had planted a dagger.
Mr. Prodmore, to do him justice, took his wound in front. “Seventy thousand--done!” And, without another look at Yule, he was presently heard to bang the outer door after him for a sign.
VIII
The young man, meanwhile, had approached in surprise. “He’s gone? I’ve been looking for him!”
Mrs. Gracedew was out of breath; there was a disturbed whiteness of bosom in her which needed time to subside and which she might have appeared to retreat before him on purpose to veil. “I don’t think, you know, that you need him--now.”
Clement Yule was mystified. “Now?”
She recovered herself enough to explain--made an effort at least to be plausible. “I mean that--if you don’t mind--you must deal with _me_. I’ve arranged with Mr. Prodmore to take it over.”
Oh, he gave her no help! “Take what over?”
She looked all about as if not quite thinking what it could be called; at last, however, she offered with a smile a sort of substitute for a name. “Why, your debt.”
But he was only the more bewildered. “_Can_ you--without arranging with _me_?”
She turned it round, but as if merely to oblige him. “That’s precisely what I want to do.” Then, more brightly, as she thought further: “That is, I mean, I want you to arrange with _me_. Surely you will,” she said encouragingly.
His own processes, in spite of a marked earnestness, were much less rapid. “But if I arrange with anybody----”
“Yes?” She cheerfully waited.
“How do I perform my engagement?”
“The one to Mr. Prodmore?”
He looked surprised at her speaking as if he had half-a-dozen. “Yes--that’s the worst.”
“Certainly--the worst!” And she gave a happy laugh that made him stare.
He broke into quite a different one. “You speak as if its being the worst made it the best!”
“It does--for me. You don’t,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “perform any engagement.”
He required a moment to take it in; then something extraordinary leaped into his face. “He lets me off?”
Ah, she could ring out now! “He lets you off.”
It lifted him high, but only to drop him with an audible thud. “Oh, I see--I lose my house!”
“Dear, no--_that_ doesn’t follow!” She spoke as if the absurdity he indicated were the last conceivable, but there was a certain want of sharpness of edge in her expression of the alternative. “You arrange with _me_ to keep it.”
There was quite a corresponding want, clearly, in the image presented to the Captain--of which, for a moment, he seemed with difficulty to follow the contour. “How do I arrange?”
“Well, we must think,” said Mrs. Gracedew; “we must wait.” She spoke as if this were a detail for which she had not yet had much attention; only bringing out, however, the next instant in an encouraging cry and as if it were by itself almost a solution: “We must find some way!” She might have been talking to a reasonable child.
But even reasonable children ask too many questions. “Yes--and what way _can_ we find?” Clement Yule, glancing about him, was so struck with the absence of ways that he appeared to remember with something of regret how different it had been before. “With Prodmore it was simple enough. You see I could marry his daughter.”
Mrs. Gracedew was silent just long enough for her soft ironic smile to fill the cup of the pause. “_Could_ you?”
It was as if he had tasted in the words the wine at the brim; for he gave, under the effect of them, a sudden headshake and an awkward laugh. “Well, never perhaps _that_ exactly--when it came to the point. But I had to, you see----” It was difficult to say just what.
She took advantage of it, looking hard, but not seeing at all. “You had to----?”
“Well,” he repeated ruefully, “think a lot about it. You didn’t suspect that?”
Oh, if he came to suspicions she could only break off! “Don’t ask me too many questions.”
He looked an instant as if he wondered why. “But isn’t this just the moment for them?” He fronted her, with a quickness he tried to dissimulate, from the other side. “What _did_ you suppose?”
She looked everywhere but into his face. “Why, I supposed you were in distress.”
He was very grave. “About his terms?”
“About his terms of course!” she laughed. “Not about his religious opinions.”
His gratitude was too great for gaiety. “You really, in your beautiful sympathy, _guessed_ my fix?”
But she declined to be too solemn. “Dear Captain Yule, it all quite stuck out of you!”
“You mean I floundered like a drowning man----?”
Well, she consented to have meant that. “Till I plunged in!”
He appeared there for a few seconds, to see her again take the jump and to listen again to the splash; then, with an odd, sharp impulse, he turned his back. “You saved me.”
She wouldn’t deny it--on the contrary. “What a pity, now, _I_ haven’t a daughter!”
On this he slowly came round again. “What should I do with her?”
“You’d treat her, I hope, better than you’ve treated Miss Prodmore.”
The young man positively coloured. “But I haven’t been bad----?”
The sight of this effect of her small joke produced on Mrs. Gracedew’s part an emotion less controllable than any she had yet felt. “Oh, you delightful goose!” she irrepressibly dropped.