She made his blush deepen, but the aggravation was a relief. “Of course--I’m all right, and there’s only one pity in the matter. I’ve nothing--nothing whatever, not a scrap of service nor a thing you’d care for--to offer you in compensation.”
She looked at him ever so kindly. “I’m not, as they say, ‘on the make.’” Never had he been put right with a lighter hand. “I didn’t do it for payment.”
“Then what did you do it for?”
For something, it might have seemed, as her eyes dropped and strayed, that had got brushed into a crevice of the old pavement. “Because I hated Mr. Prodmore.”
He conscientiously demurred. “So much as all that?”
“Oh, well,” she replied impatiently, “of course you also know how much I like the house. My hates and my likes,” she subtly explained, “can never live together. I get one of them out. The one this time was that man.”
He showed a candour of interest. “Yes--you got him out. Yes--I saw him go.” And his inner vision appeared to attend for some moments Mr. Prodmore’s departure. “But how did you do it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Women----!” Mrs. Gracedew but vaguely sketched it.
A touch or two, however, for that subject, could of course almost always suffice. “Precisely--women. May I smoke again?” Clement Yule abruptly asked.
“Certainly. But I managed Mr. Prodmore,” she laughed as he re-lighted, “without cigarettes.”
Her companion puffed. “_I_ couldn’t manage him.”
“So I saw!”
“_I_ couldn’t get him out.”
“So _he_ saw!”
Captain Yule, for a little, lost himself in his smoke. “Where is he gone?”
“I haven’t the least idea. But I meet him again,” she hastened to add--“very soon.”
“And when do you meet _me_?”
“Why, whenever you’ll come to see me.” For the twentieth time she gathered herself as if the words she had just spoken were quite her last hand. “At present, you see, I _have_ a train to catch.”
Absorbed in the trivial act that engaged him, he gave her no help. “A train?”
“Surely. I didn’t walk.”
“No; but even trains----!” His eyes clung to her now. “You fly?”
“I try to. Good-bye.”
He had got between her and the door of departure quite as, on her attempt to quit him half an hour before, he had anticipated her approach to the stairs; and in this position he took no notice of her farewell. “I said just now that I had nothing to offer you. But of course I’ve the house itself.”
“The house?” She stared. “Why, I’ve _got_ it?”
“Got it?”
“All in my head, I mean. That’s all I want.” She had not yet, save to Mr. Prodmore, made quite so light of it.
This had its action in his markedly longer face. “Why, I thought you loved it so!”
Ah, she was perfectly consistent. “I love it far too much to deprive _you_ of it.”
Yet Clement Yule could in a fashion meet her. “Oh, it wouldn’t be depriving----!”
She altogether protested. “Not to turn you out----?”
“Dear lady, I’ve never been _in_!”
Oh, she was none the less downright. “You’re in _now_--I’ve put you, and you must stay.” He looked round so woefully, however, that she presently attenuated. “I don’t mean _all_ the while, but long enough----!”
“Long enough for what?”
“For me to feel you’re here.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Well, you think me very fast--but sometimes I’m slow. I told you just now, at any rate,” she went on, “that I had arranged you should lose nothing. Is the very next thing I do, then, to make you lose everything?”
“It isn’t a question of what I lose,” the young man anxiously cried; “it’s a question of what I _do_! What _have_ I done to find it all so plain?” Fate was really--fate reversed, improved, and unnatural--too much for him, and his heated young face showed honest stupefaction. “I haven’t lifted a finger. It’s you who have done all.”
“Yes, but if you’re just where you were before, how in the world are you saved?” She put it to him with still superior lucidity.
“By my life’s being my own again--to do what I want.”
“What you ‘want’”--Mrs. Gracedew’s handsome uplifted head had it all there, every inch of it--“is to keep your house.”
“Ah, but only,” he perfectly assented, “if, as you said, you find a way!”
“I _have_ found a way--and there the way is: for _me_ just simply not to touch the place. What you ‘want,’” she argued more closely, “is what made you give in to Prodmore. What you ‘want’ is these walls and these acres. What you ‘want’ is to take the way I first showed you.”
Her companion’s eyes, quitting for the purpose her face, looked to the quarter marked by her last words as at an horizon now remote. “Why, the way you first showed me was to marry Cora!”
She had to admit it, but as little as possible. “Practically--yes.”
“Well, it’s just ‘practically’ that I can’t!”
“I didn’t know that then,” said Mrs. Gracedew. “You didn’t tell me.”
He passed, with an approach to a grimace, his hand over the back of his head. “I felt a delicacy!”
“I didn’t even know _that_.” She spoke it almost sadly.
“It didn’t strike you that I might?”
She thought a moment. “No.” She thought again. “No. But don’t quarrel with me about it _now_!”
“Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement.
She laughed, but she had changed colour. “Cora, at any rate, felt no delicacy. Cora told me.”
Clement Yule fairly gaped. “Then she did know----?”
“She knew all; and if her father said she didn’t, he simply told you what was not.” She frankly gave him this, but the next minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped to reassurance. “It was quite right of her. She would have refused you.”
The young man stared. “Oh!” He was quick, however, to show--by an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done--that he felt no personal wound. “Do you call that quite right?”
Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. “For _her_--yes; and for Prodmore.”
“Oh, for Prodmore”--his laugh grew more grim--“with all my heart!”
This, then,--her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,--was all she meant. “To stay at your post--_that_ was the way I showed you.”
He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new predicament. “How can I take any way at all, dear lady----?”
“If I only stick here in your path?” She had taken him straight up, and with spirit; and the same spirit bore her to the end. “I won’t stick a moment more! Haven’t I been trying this age to leave you?”
Clement Yule, for all answer, caught her sharply, in her passage, by the arm. “You surrender your rights?” He was for an instant almost terrible.
She quite turned pale with it. “Weren’t you ready to surrender _yours_?”
“I hadn’t any, so it was deuced easy. I hadn’t paid for them.”
Oh that, she let him see,--even though with his continued grasp he might hurt her,--had nothing in it! “Your ancestors had paid: it’s the same thing.” Erect there in the brightness of her triumph and the force of her logic, she must yet, to anticipate his return, take a stride--like a sudden dip into a gully and the scramble up on the other bank--that put her dignity to the test. “You’re just, in a manner, my tenant.”
“But how can I treat that as such a mere detail? I’m your tenant on what terms?”
“Oh, _any_ terms--choose them for yourself!” She made an attempt to free her arm--gave it a small vain shake. Then, as if to bribe him to let her go: “You can write me about them.”
He appeared to consider it. “To Missoura Top?”
She fully assented. “I go right back.” As if it had put him off his guard she broke away. “Farewell!”
She broke away, but he broke faster, and once more, nearer the door, he had barred her escape. “Just one little moment, please. If you won’t tell me your own terms, you must at least tell me Prodmore’s.”
Ah, the fiend--she could never squeeze past _that_! All she could do, for the instant, was to reverberate foolishly “Prodmore’s?”
But there was nothing foolish, at last, about _him_. “How you did it--how you managed him.” His feet were firm while he waited, though he had to wait some time. “You bought him out?”
She made less of it than, clearly, he had ever heard made of a stroke of business; it might have been a case of his owing her ninepence. “I bought him out.”
He wanted at least the exact sum. “For how much?” Her silence seemed to say that she had made no note of it, but his pressure only increased. “I really must know.”
She continued to try to treat it as if she had merely paid for his cab--she put even what she could of that suggestion into a tender, helpless, obstinate headshake. “You shall never know!”
The only thing his own manner met was the obstinacy. “I’ll get it from _him_!”
She repeated her headshake, but with a world of sadness added, “Get it if you can!”
He looked into her eyes now as if it was the sadness that struck him most. “He won’t say, because he _did_ you?”
They showed each other, on this, the least separated faces yet. “He’ll never, never say.”
The confidence in it was so tender that it sounded almost like pity, and the young man took it up with all the flush of the sense that pity could be but for _him_. This sense broke full in her face. “The scoundrel!”
“Not a bit!” she returned, with equal passion--“I was only too clever for him!” The thought of it was again an exaltation in which she pushed her friend aside. “So let me go!”