Cora stood in the doorway, robust against the garden-light, looking from one to the other. “Yes—but I’ve also something more to say to you.”
“Do you mean now?” the young man asked.
It was the first time he had spoken to her, and her hesitation might have signified a maidenly flutter. “No—but before she goes.”
Mrs. Gracedew took it amiably up. “Come back, then; I’m not going.” And there was both dismissal and encouragement in the way she blew her a familiar kiss. Cora waited just enough to show that she took it without a response; then dashed out, while Mrs. Gracedew looked at their visitor in vague surprise. “What’s the matter with her?”
She had turned away as soon as she spoke, moving as far from him as she had moved a few moments before from Cora. The silence that followed her question would have been seen by a spectator to be a hard one for either to break. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” he said at last; “I’m afraid I only know what’s the matter with me. It will doubtless give you pleasure to learn that I’ve closed with Mr. Prodmore.”
It was a speech that, strangely enough, seemed but half to dissipate the hush. Mrs. Gracedew reached the great chimney again; again she stood there with her face averted. “I thought you said he gave you time.”
“Yes; but you produced just now so deep an effect on me that I thought best not to take any. I came upon him right there, and I burnt my ships.”
“You do what he requires?”
The young man was markedly caught. “I do what he requires. I felt the tremendous force of all you said to me.”
She turned round on him now, as if with a slight sharpness, the face of responsibility—even, it might be, of reproach. “So did I—or I shouldn’t have said it!”
It was doubtless this element of justification in her tone that drew from him a laugh a tiny trifle dry. “You’re perhaps not aware that you wield an influence of which it’s not too much to say––”
But he paused at the important point so long that she took him up. “To say what?”
“Well, that it’s practically irresistible!”
It sounded a little as if it had not been what he first meant; but it made her still graver and just faintly ironical. “You’ve given me the most flattering proof of my influence that I’ve ever enjoyed in my life!”
He fixed her very hard, now distinctly so mystified. “This was inevitable, dear madam, from the moment you had converted me—and in about three minutes too!—into the absolute echo of your raptures.”
Nothing was more extraordinary than her air of having suddenly forgotten them. “My ‘raptures’?”
He was amazed. “Why, about my home.”
He might look her through and through, but she had no eyes for himself, though she had now quitted the fireplace and finally recognised this allusion. “Oh, yes—your home! It’s a nice tattered, battered old thing. It has defects of course.” With this renewed attention they appeared suddenly to strike her. However, her conscience dropped. “But it’s no use mentioning them now!”
They had half an hour earlier been vividly present to himself, but to see her thus oddly pulled up by them was to forget the ground he had taken. “I’m particularly sorry that you didn’t mention them before!”
At this imputation of inconsequence, Mrs. Gracedew was reduced to an effort not quite successfully disguised. “If you had really gone over the house, as I almost went on my knees to you to do, you might have discovered some of them yourself!”
“How can you say that,” the young man asked with heat, “when I was precisely in the very act of it? It was just because I was that the first person I met above was Mr. Prodmore; on which, feeling that I must come to it sooner or later, I simply gave in to him on the spot—yielded him, to have it well over, the whole of his point.”
She listened to this account of the matter as she might have gazed, from afar, at some queer object. “Let me then congratulate you on at last knowing what you want!”
But there were, after all, no such great reasons for that. “I only know it so far as you know it! I struck while the iron was hot—or at any rate while the hammer was.”
“Of course I recognise,” she adopted his image, “that it can rarely have been exposed to such a fire. I blazed up, and I know that when I burn––”
She had pulled up with the foolish sense of this. “When you burn?”
“Well, I do it as Chicago does.”
He could laugh out now. “Isn’t that usually down to the ground?”
Meeting his laugh, she threw up her light arms. “As high as the sky!” Then she came back, as with a scruple, to the real question. “I suppose you’ve still formalities to go through.”
“With Mr. Prodmore? Oh, endless, tiresome ones, no doubt!”
“You mean they’ll take so very, very long?”
He seemed after all to know perfectly what he meant. “Every hour, every month, that I can possibly make them last!”
She was with him, however, but to a certain point. “You mustn’t drag them out too much—must you? Won’t he think in that case you may want to retract?”
Yule tried to focus Mr. Prodmore under this delusion, and with a quick, odd result. “I shouldn’t be so terribly upset by his mistake, you know, even if he did!”
His manner, with its slight bravado, left her proportionately shocked. “Oh, it would never do to give him any colour whatever for supposing you to have any doubt that, as one may say, you’ve pledged your honour.”
He devoted to this proposition more thought than its simplicity would have seemed to demand; but at last his intelligence triumphed. “Of course not—not when I haven’t any doubt!”
She still wished to show she was there to support it. “How can you possibly have any—any more than you can possibly have that one’s honour is everything in life?”
He could give her every assurance. “Oh, yes—everything in life!”
It did her much good, brought back the rest of her brightness. “Wasn’t it just of the question of the honour of things that we talked awhile ago? There’s no more to be said therefore,” she went on with the faintest soft sigh, “except that I leave you to your ancient glory as I leave you to your strict duty. I hope you’ll do justice to dear old Covering in spite of its weak points, and I hope above all you’ll not be incommoded––”
As she hesitated he was too intent. “Incommoded?”
She saw it better than she could express it. “Well, by such a rage!”
He challenged this description with a strange gleam. “You suppose it will be a rage?”
She laughed out at his look. “Are you afraid of the love that kills?”
He grew singularly grave. “Will it kill?”
“Great passions have!”—she was highly amused.
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