II
Mr. Prodmore stood alone in the great hall, his daughter’s departure leaving him with a sudden sense of illumination. She had darted through the room like a living flame, and now, in her absence, he caught himself smiling at possibilities. If that was her best manner, it was a weapon. Then footsteps echoed, and Chivers the old servant returned to solemnly announce, “Captain Yule!”—ushering in a tall young man in dark tweed and a red necktie knotted sailor-fashion, who removed his soft brown hat as he entered.
Prodmore at once uncovered his own head. “Delighted at last to see you here!”
The young man—Clement Yule—put out a hand with disarming frankness. “If I’ve not come before, Mr. Prodmore, it was—very frankly speaking—from the dread of seeing you!” Contradicting his gesture with his words, he was a study in oppositions: erect as a soldier, finished to a degree that spoke of cultivated sensibility, hard and fine, sharp and gentle, frank and shy, “kept up” yet reduced. Prodmore’s face glowed with pride of possession at the sight.
“Surely my presence is not without a motive!” the elder man pressed.
“It’s just the motive,” Yule returned, “that makes me wince at it! Certainly I’ve no illusions about the ground of our meeting. You hold me in the hollow of your hand.”
Prodmore expanded visibly in the warmth of such tribute to his financial subtlety. “I won’t deny that when I go in deep I don’t go in for nothing. I make it pay double!”
“You make it pay so well—‘double’ doesn’t do you justice!—that you can do quite as you like with this preposterous place.”
Prodmore’s expression contracted with intensity. “Of course, you know, you can always clear the property. You can pay off the mortgages.”
Yule, glancing up at the row of strenuous ancestors along the wall, met the words with mild amusement. “Pay off—with what?”
“You can always raise money.”
“What can I raise it on?”
Prodmore looked massively gay. “On your great political future.”
Yule shook his head. “I haven’t taken, for the short run at least, the lucrative line, and I know what you think of that.” Prodmore’s blandness confessed the impeachment. “I hold that you keep dangerous company,” he developed, “because you keep the best rooms empty. You’re a firebrand, my dear Captain, simply because you’re a bachelor. I have your remedy.”
“A remedy worse than the disease?”
Prodmore’s face sharpened. “There’s nothing worse than your particular fix. Least of all a heap of gold—”
“A heap of gold?” Yule settled as if a curtain were rising.
“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!”
Yule’s eyes wandered the room, then stopped with a smile. “Of course I could do that in a moment!”
Prodmore leaned in. “Any woman would now jump—”
“I don’t like jumping women,” Yule threw in. “But 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 be anything but that of waiting quietly.”
“Never, never anything!” Prodmore assented. “But I haven’t asked you to make an advance.”
“You’ve only asked me to receive one?”
“I’ve asked you—I asked you a month ago—to think it all over.”
Yule took a turn. “I have thought it all over, and the strange sequel is that my eyes have got accustomed to my darkness. I seem to make out that, at the worst, I can let the whole thing slide.”
“The property?” Prodmore jerked back.
“Isn’t it the property that throws me up? If I can neither live on it nor disencumber it, I can let it save its own bacon. I can say to you: ‘Take it, my dear sir, and the devil take you!’”
Prodmore gave a strained smile. “You wouldn’t be so shockingly rude!”
“Why not, if I’m a firebrand and a nuisance? Sacrifice for sacrifice, that might be the least!”
Prodmore was briefly arrested, then recovered. “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. Now that you stretch yourself in the ancient cradle of your race, can you seriously entertain the idea of parting with such a venerable family relic?”
As Yule took in the scene, it was as if the place felt itself on its honour and made no compromise. “The cradle of my race bears, for me, Mr. Prodmore, a striking resemblance to its tomb.” The sigh that dropped from him was not quite void of tenderness—a long, sad creak, like the portending collapse of some immemorial support.
“Musty, mouldy, mangy!” Yule poked at a gap in the chair-cover. “Is this the character throughout?”
“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!”
Yule’s eye was inscrutably enlivened. “Will you put in the electric light?”
Prodmore’s twinkle veiled. “Well, if you’ll meet me half-way! We’re dealing with fancy-values. Don’t you feel, as you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?”
Yule gazed at a pompous quartering in the faded old glass. “What I do feel is a sort of stiffening of the spine! The whole thing is too queer—too cold—too cruel.”
“Cruel?” 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 breath, all the helpless mortality he has tucked away!”
“Lord, sir—you have fancies!” Prodmore was almost scandalised.
But Yule’s fancies only multiplied. “I don’t know what’s the matter—but there is more here than meets the eye. I miss the old presences. I feel the old absences. I hear the old voices. I see the old ghosts.”
“The old ghosts,” Prodmore promptly replied, “are worth so much a dozen, and with the price rather raised for the quantity taken!” Then, softening, “Look about you a little more. Do make yourself at home.”
“Thank you, Mr. Prodmore. May I light a cigarette?”
“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!” Both men lit up. “As I understand you, you lump your two conditions? I must accept both or neither?”
Prodmore threw back his shoulders. “You will accept both, for by doing so you’ll clear the property at a stroke. See?—if you stand for Gossage, you’ll get returned for Gossage.”
“And if I get returned for Gossage, I shall marry your daughter.”
“I’ll burn up every scratch of your pen—a bonfire of signatures! There won’t be a penny to pay—only a position to take. You’ll take it with peculiar grace.”
Yule completed the picture. “You’ll settle down here in comfort and honour.”
Prodmore watched his irritation as if it were a working charm. “Are you very sure of the ‘honour’ if I turn my political coat?”
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