The Two Magics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898)/Covering End/Chapter 8
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.
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!"
The push was like a jar that made the vessel overflow, and he was before her now as if he stretched across the hall. "With the heroic view of your power and the barren beauty of your sacrifice? You pour out money, you move a mountain, and to let you 'go,' to close the door fast behind you, is all I can figure out to do for you?" His emotion trembled out of him with the stammer of a new language, but it was as if in a minute or two he had thrown over all consciousness. "You're the most generous—you're the noblest of women! The wonderful chance that brought you here———!"
His own arm was grasped now—she knew better than he about the wonderful chance. "It brought you at the same happy hour! I've done what I liked," she went on very simply; "and the only way to thank me is to believe it."
"You've done it for a proud, poor man"—his answer was quite as direct. "He has nothing—in the light of such a magic as yours—either to give or to hope; but you've made him, in a little miraculous hour, think of you———"
He stumbled with the rush of things, and if silence can, in its way, be active, there was a collapse too, for an instant, on her closed lips. These lips, however, she at last opened. "How have I made him think of me?"
"As he has thought of no other woman!" He had personal possession of her now, and it broke, as he pressed her, as he pleaded, the helpless fall of his eloquence. "Mrs. Gracedew—don't leave me." He jerked his head passionately at the whole place and the yellow afternoon. "If you made me care———"
"It was surely that you had made me first!" She laughed, and her laugh disengaged her, so that before he could reply she had again put space between them.
He accepted the space now—he appeared so sure of his point. "Then let me go on caring. When I asked you awhile back for some possible adjustment to my new source of credit, you simply put off the question—told me I must trust to time for it. Well," said Clement Yule, "I've trusted to time so effectually that ten little minutes have made me find it. I've found it because I've so quickly found you. May I, Mrs. Gracedew, keep all that I've found? I offer you in return the only thing I have to give—I offer you my hand and my life."
She held him off, across the hall, for a time almost out of proportion to the previous wait he had just made so little of. Then at last also, when she answered, it might have passed for a plea for further postponement, even for a plea for mercy. "Ah, Captain Yule———!" But she turned suddenly off: the flower had been nipped in the bud by the re-entrance of Chivers, at whom his master veritably glowered.
"What the devil is it?"
The old man showed the shock, but he had his duty. "Another party."
Mrs. Gracedew, at this, wheeled round. "The 'party up'!" It brought back her voice—indeed, all her gaiety. And her gaiety was always determinant. "Show them in."
Clement Yule's face fell while Chivers proceeded to obey. "You'll have them?" he wailed across the hall.
"Ah! mayn't I be proud of my house?" she tossed back at him.
At this, radiant, he had rushed at her. "Then you accept———?"
Her raised hand checked him. "Hush!"
He fell back—the party was there. Chivers ushered it as he had ushered the other, making the most, this time, of more scanty material—four persons so spectacled, satchelled, shawled, and handbooked that they testified on the spot to a particular foreign origin and presented themselves indeed very much as tourists who, at an hotel, casting up the promise of comfort or the portent of cost, take possession, while they wait for their keys, with expert looks and free sounds. Clement Yule, who had receded, effacing himself, to the quarter opposed to that of his companion, addressed to their visitors a covert but dismayed stare and then, edging round, in his agitation, to the rear, instinctively sought relief by escape through the open passage. One of the invaders meanwhile—a broad-faced gentleman with long hair tucked behind his ears and a ring on each forefinger—had lost no time in showing he knew where to begin. He began at the top—the proper place, and took in the dark pictures ranged above the tapestry. "Olt vamily bortraits?"—he appealed to Chivers and spoke very loud.
Chivers rose to the occasion and, gracefully pawing the air, began also at the beginning. "Dame Dorothy Yule—who lived to a hundred and one."
"A hundred and one—ach so!" broke, with a resigned absence of criticism, from each of the interested group; another member of which, however, indicated with a somewhat fatigued skip the central figure of the series, the personage with the long white legs that Mrs. Gracedew had invited the previous inquirers to remark. "Who's dis?" the present inquirer asked.
The question affected the lovely lady over by the fireplace as the trumpet of battle affects a generous steed. She flashed on the instant into the middle of the hall and into the friendliest and most familiar relation with everyone and with everything. "John Anthony Yule, sir,—who passed away, poor duck, in his flower!"
They met her with low salutations, a sweep of ugly shawls, and a brush of queer German hats: she had issued, to their glazed convergence, from the dusk of the Middle Ages and the shade of high pieces, and now stood there, beautiful and human and happy, in a light that, whatever it was for themselves, the very breadth of their attention, the expression of their serious faces, converted straightway for her into a new, and oh! into the right, one. To a detached observer of the whole it would have been promptly clear that she found herself striking these good people very much as the lawful heir had, half an hour before, struck another stranger—that she produced in them, in her setting of assured antiquity, quite the romantic vibration that she had responded to in the presence of that personage. They read her as she read him, and a bright and deepening cheer, reflected dimly in their thick thoroughness, went out from her as she accepted their reading. An impression was exchanged, for the minute, from side to side—their grave admiration of the finest feature of the curious house and the deep free radiance of her silent, grateful "Why not?" It made a passage of some intensity and some duration, of which the effect, indeed, the next minute, was to cause the only lady of the party—a matron of rich Jewish type, with small nippers on a huge nose and a face out of proportion to her little Freischütz hat—to break the spell by an uneasy turn and a stray glance at one of the other pictures. "Who's dat?"
"That?" The picture chanced to be a portrait over the wide arch, and something happened, at the very moment, to arrest Mrs. Gracedew's eyes rather above than below. What took place, in a word, was that Clement Yule, already fidgeting in his impatience back from the front, just occupied the arch, completed her thought, and filled her vision. "Oh, that's my future husband!" He caught the words, but answered them only by a long look at her as he moved, with a checked wildness of which she alone, of all the spectators, had a sense, straight across the hall again and to the other opening. He paused there as he had done before, then with a last dumb appeal to her dropped into the court and passed into the garden. Mrs. Gracedew, already so wonderful to their visitors, was, before she followed him, wonderful with a greater wonder to poor Chivers. "You dear old thing—I give it all back to you!"