The Two Magics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898)/Covering End/Chapter 2
II
Mr. Prodmore, in Chivers's absence, remained staring as if at a sudden image of something rather fine. His child had left with him the sense of a quick irradiation, and he failed to see why, at the worst, such lightnings as she was thus able to dart shouldn't strike somewhere. If he had spoken to her of her best manner perhaps that was her best manner. He heard steps and voices, however, and immediately invited to his aid his own, which was simply magnificent. Chivers, returning, announced solemnly "Captain Yule!" and ushered in a tall young man in a darkish tweed suit and a red necktie, attached in a sailor's knot, who, as he entered, removed a soft brown hat. Mr. Prodmore, at this, immediately saluted him by uncovering. "Delighted at last to see you here!"
It was the young man who first, in his comparative simplicity, put out a hand. "If I've not come before, Mr. Prodmore, it was—very frankly speaking—from the dread of seeing you!" His speech contradicted, to some extent, his gesture, but Clement Yule's was an aspect in which contradictions were rather remarkably at home. Erect and slender, but as strong as he was straight, he was set up, as the phrase is, like a soldier, and yet finished, in certain details—matters of expression and suggestion only indeed—like a man in whom sensibility had been recklessly cultivated. He was hard and fine, just as he was sharp and gentle, just as he was frank and shy, just as he was serious and young, just as he looked, though you could never have imitated it, distinctly "kept up" and yet considerably reduced. His features were thoroughly regular, but his complete shaving might have been designed to show that they were, after all, not absurd. The face Mr. Prodmore offered him fairly glowed, on this new showing, with instant pride of possession, and there was that in Captain Yule's whole air which justified such a sentiment without consciously rewarding it.
"Ah, surely," said the elder man, "my presence is not without a motive!"
"It's just the motive," Captain Yule returned, "that makes me wince at it! Certainly I've no illusions," he added, "about the ground of our meeting. Your thorough knowledge of what you're about has placed me at your mercy—you hold me in the hollow of your hand."
It was vivid in every inch that Mr. Prodmore's was a nature to expand in the warmth, or even in the chill, of any tribute to his financial subtlety. "Well, I won't, on my side, deny that when, in general, I go in deep I don't go in for nothing. I make it pay double!" he smiled.
"You make it pay so well—'double' surely doesn't do you justice!—that, if I've understood you, you can do quite as you like with this preposterous place. Haven't you brought me down exactly that I may see you do it?"
"I've certainly brought you down that you may open your eyes!" This, apparently, however, was not what Mr. Prodmore himself had arrived to do with his own. These fine points of expression literally contracted with intensity. "Of course, you know, you can always clear the property. You can pay off the mortgages."
Captain Yule, by this time, had, as he had not done at first, looked up and down, round about and well over the scene, taking in, though at a mere glance, it might have seemed, more particularly, the row, high up, of strenuous ancestors. But Mr. Prodmore's last words rang none the less on his ear, and he met them with mild amusement. "Pay off———? What can I pay off with?"
"You can always raise money."
"What can I raise it on?"
Mr. Prodmore looked massively gay. "On your great political future."
"Oh, I've not taken—for the short run at least—the lucrative line," the young man said, "and I know what you think of that."
Mr. Prodmore's blandness confessed, by its instant increase, to this impeachment. There was always the glory of intimacy in Yule's knowing what he thought. "I hold that you keep, in public, very dangerous company; but I also hold that you're extravagant mainly because you've nothing at stake. A man has the right opinions," he developed with pleasant confidence, "as soon as he has something to lose by having the wrong. Haven't I already hinted to you how to set your political house in order? You drop into the lower regions because you keep the best rooms empty. You're a firebrand, in other words my dear Captain, simply because you're a bachelor. That's one of the early complaints we all pass through, but it's soon over, and the treatment for it quite simple. I have your remedy."
The young man's eyes, wandering again about the house, might have been those of an auditor of the fiddling before the rise of the curtain. "A remedy worse than the disease?"
"There's nothing worse, that I've ever heard of," Mr. Prodmore sharply replied, "than your particular fix. Least of all a heap of gold———"
"A heap of gold?" His visitor idly settled, as if the curtain were going up.
Mr. Prodmore raised it bravely. "In the lap of a fine fresh lass! Give pledges to fortune, as somebody says—then we'll talk. You want money—that's what you want. Well, marry it!"
Clement Yule, for a little, never stirred, save that his eyes yet again strayed vaguely. At last they stopped with a smile. "Of course I could do that in a moment!"
"It's even just my own danger from you," his companion returned. "I perfectly recognise that any woman would now jump———"
"I don't like jumping women," Captain Yule threw in; "but that perhaps is a detail. It's more to the point that I've yet to see the woman whom, by an advance of my own———"
"You'd care to keep in the really attractive position———?"
"Which can never, of course, be anything"—Yule took his friend up again—"but that of waiting quietly."
"Never, never anything!" Mr. Prodmore, most assentingly, banished all other thought. "But I haven't asked you, you know, to make an advance."
"You've only asked me to receive one?"
Mr. Prodmore waited a little. "Well, I've asked you—I asked you a month ago—to think it all over."
"I have thought it all over," Clement Yule said; "and the strange sequel seems to be that my eyes have got accustomed to my darkness. I seem to make out, in the gloom of my meditations, that, at the worst, I can let the whole thing slide."
"The property?"—Mr. Prodmore jerked back as if it were about to start.
"Isn't it the property," his visitor inquired, "that positively throws me up? If I can afford neither to live on it nor to disencumber it, I can at least let it save its own bacon and pay its own debts. I can say to you simply: 'Take it, my dear sir, and the devil take you!'"
Mr. Prodmore gave a quick, strained smile. "You wouldn't be so shockingly rude!"
"Why not—if I'm a firebrand and a keeper of low company and a general nuisance? Sacrifice for sacrifice, that might very well be the least!"
This was put with such emphasis that Mr. Prodmore was for a moment arrested. He could stop very short, however, and yet talk as still going. "How do you know, if you haven't compared them? It's just to make the comparison—in all the proper circumstances—that you're here at this hour." He took, with a large, though vague, exhibitory gesture, a few turns about. "Now that you stretch yourself—for an hour's relaxation and rocked, as it were, by my friendly hand—in the ancient cradle of your race, can you seriously entertain the idea of parting with such a venerable family relic?"
It was evident that, as he decorously embraced the scene, the young man, in spite of this dissuasive tone, was entertaining ideas. It might have appeared at the moment to a spectator in whom fancy was at all alert that the place, becoming in a manner conscious of the question, felt itself on its honour, and that its honour could make no compromise. It met Clement Yule with no grimace of invitation, with no attenuation of its rich old sadness. It was as if the two hard spirits, the grim genius loci and the quick modern conscience, stood an instant confronted. "The cradle of my race bears, for me, Mr. Prodmore, a striking resemblance to its tomb." The sigh that dropped from him, however, was not quite void of tenderness. It might, for that matter, have been a long, sad creak, portending collapse, of some immemorial support of the Yules. "Heavens, how melancholy———!"
Mr. Prodmore, somewhat ambiguously, took up the sound. "Melancholy?"—he just balanced. That well might be, even a little should be—yet agreement might depreciate.
"Musty, mouldy;" then with a poke of his stick at a gap in the stuff with which an old chair was covered, "mangy!" Captain Yule responded. "Is this the character throughout?"
Mr. Prodmore fixed a minute the tell-tale tatter. "You must judge for yourself—you must go over the house." He hesitated again; then his indecision vanished—the right line was clear. "It does look a bit run down, but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll do it up for you—neatly: I'll throw that in!"
His young friend turned on him an eye that, though markedly enlivened by his offer, was somehow only the more inscrutable. "Will you put in the electric light?"
Mr. Prodmore's own twinkle—at this touch of a spring he had not expected to work—was, on the other hand, temporarily veiled. "Well, if you'll meet me half-way! We're dealing here"—he backed up his gravity—"with fancy-values. Don't you feel," he appealed, "as you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?"
Clement Yule gazed awhile at one of the pompous quarterings in the faded old glass that, in tones as of late autumn, crowned with armorial figures the top of the great hall-window; then with abruptness he turned away. "Perhaps I don't take it all in; but what I do feel is—since you mention it—a sort of stiffening of the spine! The whole thing is too queer—too cold—too cruel."
"Cruel?"—Mr. Prodmore's demur was virtuous.
"Like the face of some stuck-up distant relation who won't speak first. I see in the stare of the old dragon, I taste in his very breath, all the helpless mortality he has tucked away!"
"Lord, sir—you have fancies!" Mr. Prodmore was almost scandalised.
But the young man's fancies only multiplied as he moved, not at all critical, but altogether nervous, from object to object. "I don't know what's the matter—but there is more here than meets the eye." He tried as for his amusement or his relief to figure it out. "I miss the old presences. I feel the old absences. I hear the old voices. I see the old ghosts."
This last was a profession that offered some common ground. "The old ghosts, Captain Yule," his companion promptly replied, "are worth so much a dozen, and with no reduction, I must remind you—with the price indeed rather raised—for the quantity taken!" Feeling then apparently that he had cleared the air a little by this sally, Mr. Prodmore proceeded to pat his interlocutor on a back that he by no means wished to cause to be put to the wall. "Look about you, at any rate, a little more." He crossed with his toes well out the line that divides encouragement from patronage. "Do make yourself at home."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Prodmore. May I light a cigarette?" his visitor asked.
"In your own house, Captain?"
"That's just the question: it seems so much less my own house than before I had come into it!" The Captain offered Mr. Prodmore a cigarette which that gentleman, also taking a light from him, accepted; then he lit his own and began to smoke. "As I understand you," he went on, "you lump your two conditions? I mean I must accept both or neither?"
Mr. Prodmore threw back his shoulders with a high recognition of the long stride represented by this question. "You will accept both, for, by doing so, you'll clear the property at a stroke. The way I put it is—see?—that if you'll stand for Gossage, you'll get returned for Gossage."
"And if I get returned for Gossage, I shall marry your daughter. Accordingly," the young man pursued, "if I marry your daughter———"
"I'll burn up, before your eyes," said this young lady's proprietor, "every scratch of your pen. It will be a bonfire of signatures. There won't be a penny to pay—there'll only be a position to take. You'll take it with peculiar grace."
"Peculiar, Mr. Prodmore—very!"
The young man had assented more than he desired, but he was not deterred by it from completing the picture. "You'll settle down here in comfort and honour."
Clement Yule took several steps; the effect of his host was the reverse of soothing; yet the latter watched his irritation as if it were the working of a charm. "Are you very sure of the 'honour' if I turn my political coat?"
"You'll only be turning it back again to the way it was always worn. Gossage will receive you with open arms and press you to a heaving Tory bosom. That bosom"—Mr. "Prodmore followed himself up—"has never heaved but to sound Conservative principles. The cradle, as I've called it,—or at least the rich, warm coverlet,—of your race, Gossage was the political property, so to speak, of generations of your family. Stand therefore in the good old interest and you'll stand like a lion."
"I'm afraid you mean," Captain Yule laughed, "that I must first roar like one."
"Oh, I'll do the roaring!"—and Mr. Prodmore shook his mane. "Leave that to me."
"Then why the deuce don't you stand yourself?"
Mr. Prodmore knew so familiarly why! "Because I'm not a remarkably handsome young man with the grand old home and the right old name. Because I'm a different sort of matter altogether. But if I haven't these advantages," he went on, "you'll do justice to my natural desire that my daughter at least shall have them."
Clement Yule watched himself smoke a minute. "Doing justice to natural desires is just what, of late, I've tried to make a study of. But I confess I don't quite grasp the deep attraction you appear to discover in so large a surrender of your interests."
"My surrenders are my own affair," Mr. Prodmore rang out, "and as for my interests, as I never, on principle, give anything for nothing, I dare say I may be trusted to know them when I see them. You come high—I don't for a moment deny it; but when I look at you, in this pleasant, intimate way, my dear boy—if you'll allow me so to describe things—I recognise one of those cases, unmistakeable when really met, in which one must put down one's money. There's not an article in the whole shop, if you don't mind the comparison, that strikes me as better value. I intend you shall be, Captain," Mr. Prodmore wound up in a frank, bold burst, "the true comfort of my life!"
The young man was as hushed for a little as if an organ-tone were still in the air. "May I inquire," he at last returned, "if Miss Prodmore's ideas of comfort are as well defined—and in her case, I may add, as touchingly modest—as her father's? Is she a responsible party of this ingenious arrangement?"
Mr. Prodmore rendered homage—his appreciation was marked—to the elevated character of his young friend's scruple. "Miss Prodmore, Captain Yule, may be perhaps best described as a large smooth sheet of blank, though gilt-edged, paper. No image of any tie but the true and perfect filial has yet, I can answer for it, formed itself on the considerable expanse. But for that image to be projected———"
"I've only, in person, to appear?" Yule asked with an embarrassment that he tried to laugh off.
"And, naturally, in person," Mr. Prodmore intelligently assented, "do yourself, as well as the young lady, justice. Do you remember what you said when I first, in London, laid the matter before you?"
Clement Yule did remember, but his amusement increased. "I think I said it struck me I should first take a look at—what do you call it?—the corpus delicti."
"You should first see for yourself what you had really come into? I was not only eager for that," said Mr. Prodmore, "but I'm willing to go further: I'm quite ready to hear you say that you think you should also first see the young lady."
Captain Yule continued to laugh. "There is something in that then, since you mention it!"
"I think you'll find that there's everything." Mr. Prodmore again looked at his watch. "Which will you take first?"
"First?"
"The young lady or the house?"
His companion, at this, unmistakeably started. "Do you mean your daughter's here?"
Mr. Prodmore glowed with consciousness. "In the morning-room."
"Waiting for me?"
The tone showed a consternation that Mr. Prodmore's was alert to soothe. "Ah, as long, you know, as you like!"
Yule's alarm, however, was not assuaged; it appeared to grow as he stared, much discomposed, yet sharply thinking, at the door to which his friend had pointed. "Oh, longer than this, please!" Then as he turned away: "Do you mean she knows———?"
"That she's here on view?" Mr. Prodmore hung fire a moment, but was equal to the occasion. "She knows nothing whatever. She's as unconscious as the rose on its stem!"
His companion was visibly relieved. "That's right—let her remain so! I'll first take the house," said Clement Yule.
"Shall I go round with you?" Mr. Prodmore asked.
The young man's reflection was brief. "Thank you. I'd rather, on the whole, go round alone."
The old servant who had admitted the gentlemen came back at this crisis from the morning-room, looking from under a bent brow and with much limpid earnestness from one of them to the other. The one he first addressed had evidently, though quite unaware of it, inspired him with a sympathy from which he now took a hint. "There's tea on, sir!" he persuasively jerked as he passed the younger man.
The elder answered. "Then I'll join my daughter." He gained the morning-room door, whence he repeated with an appropriate gesture—that of offering proudly, with light, firm fingers, a flower of his own celebrated raising—his happy formula of Miss Prodmore's state. "The rose on its stem!" Scattering petals, diffusing fragrance, he thus passed out.
Chivers, meanwhile, had rather pointlessly settled once more in its place some small object that had not strayed; to whom Clement Yule, absently watching him, abruptly broke out. "I say, my friend, what colour is the rose?"
The old man looked up with a dimness that presently glimmered. "The rose, sir?" He turned to the open door and the shining day. "Rather a brilliant———"
"A brilliant———?" Yule was interested.
"Kind of old-fashioned red." Chivers smiled with the pride of being thus able to testify, but the next instant his smile went out. "It's the only one left—on the old west wall."
His visitor's mirth, at this, quickly enough revived. "My dear fellow, I'm not alluding to the sole ornament of the garden, but to the young lady at present in the morning-room. Do you happen to have noticed if she's pretty?"
Chivers stood queerly rueful. "Laws, sir—it's a matter I mostly notice; but isn't it, at the same time, sir, a matter—like—of taste?"
"Pre-eminently. That's just why I appeal with such confidence to yours."
The old man acknowledged with a flush of real embarrassment a responsibility he had so little invited. "Well, sir,—mine was always a sort of fancy for something more merry-like."
"She isn't merry-like then, poor Miss Prodmore?" Captain Yule's attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an "Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn't signify," he went on. "What are you?" he more sociably demanded.
Chivers clearly had to think a bit. "Well, sir, I'm not quite that. Whatever has there been to make me, sir?" he asked in dim extenuation.
"How in the world do I know? I mean to whom do you belong?"
Chivers seemed to scan impartially the whole field. "If you could just only tell me, sir! I quite seem to waste away—for someone to take an order of."
Clement Yule, by this time, had become aware he was amusing. "Who pays your wages?"
"No one at all, sir," said the old man very simply.
His friend, fumbling an instant in a waistcoat pocket, produced something that his hand, in obedience to a little peremptory gesture and by a trick of which he had unlearned, through scant custom, the neatness, though the propriety was instinctive, placed itself in a shy practical relation to. "Then there's a sovereign. And I haven't many!" the young man, turning away resignedly, threw after it.
Chivers, for an instant, intensely studied him. "Ah, then, shouldn't it stay in the family?"
Clement Yule wheeled round, first struck, then, at the sight of the figure made by his companion in this offer, visibly touched. "I think it does, old boy."
Chivers kept his eyes on him now. "I've served your house, sir."
"How long?"
"All my life."
So, for a time, they faced each other, and something in Chivers made Yule at last speak. "Then I won't give you up!"
"Indeed, sir, I hope you won't give up anything."
The Captain took up his hat. "It remains to be seen." He looked over the place again; his eyes wandered to the open door. "Is that the garden?"
"It was!"—and the old man's sigh was like the creak of the wheel of time. "Shall I show you how it used to be?"
"It's just as it is, alas, that I happen to require it!" Captain Yule reached the door and stood looking beyond. "Don't come," he then said; "I want to think." With which he walked out.
Chivers, left alone, appeared to wonder at it, and his wonder, like that of most old people, lay near his lips. "What does he want, poor dear, to think about?" This speculation, however, was immediately checked by a high, clear voice that preceded the appearance on the stairs, before she had reached the middlemost landing, of the wonderful figure of a lady, a lady who, with the almost trumpeted cheer of her peremptory but friendly call—"Housekeeper, Butler, old Family Servant!"—fairly waked the sleeping echoes. Chivers gazed up at her in quick remembrance, half dismayed, half dazzled, of a duty neglected. She appeared now; she shone at him out of the upper dusk; reaching the middle, she had begun to descend, with beautiful laughter and rustling garments; and though she was alone she gave him the sense of coming in a crowd and with music. "Oh, I should have told him of her!"