But he could only stare. “Is it a great passion?”
“Surely—when so many feel it!”
He was fairly bewildered. “But how many?”
She reckoned them up. “Let’s see. If you count them all––”
“‘All’?” Clement Yule gasped.
She looked at him slightly mystified. “I see. You knock off some. About half?”
It was too obscure—he broke down. “Whom on earth are you talking about?”
“Why, the electors––”
“Of Gossage?”—he leaped at it. “Oh!”
“I got the whole thing up—there are six thousand. It’s such a fine figure!” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He had sharply passed from her, to cover his mistake, and it carried him half round the hall. Then, as if aware that this pause itself compromised him, he came back confusedly. “Has she a fine figure?”
But her own thoughts were off. “‘She’?”
He blushed and recovered himself. “Aren’t we talking––”
“Of Gossage? Oh, yes—she has every charm! Good-bye,” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He pulled the longest face, but was kept dumb by the very decision with which she again began to gather herself. “You don’t mean to say you’re going?”
“You don’t mean to say you’re surprised at it? Haven’t I done what I told you I had been so mystically moved to come for?” She recalled to him by her renewed supreme survey the limited character of this errand. “You dear old thing—you’re saved!”
Clement Yule might, by his simultaneous action, have given himself out for lost. “For God’s sake,” he cried as he circled earnestly round her, “don’t go till I can come back to thank you! I promised to return immediately to Prodmore.”
This completely settled his visitor. “Then don’t let me, for a moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots to talk comfortably over.”
The young man’s embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his assent was entire. “I certainly feel that I must see him again. Yes, decidedly, I must!”
“Is he out there?” Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked.
He turned short round. “No—I left him in the long gallery.”
“You saw that, then?—Isn’t it lovely?”
Clement Yule rather wondered. “I didn’t notice it. How could I?”
His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. “How couldn’t you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!”
He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped again. “Will you wait for me?”
He had such an air of proposing a bargain, of making the wait a condition, that she had to look it well in the face. The result of her doing so, however, was apparently a strong sense that she could give him no pledge. She sank suddenly into the chair she had already occupied. “Go up to him!” she simply repeated. He obeyed, with an abrupt turn, mounting briskly several steps, but pausing midway and looking back at her. He descended a few steps again and seemed, with too much on his mind, on the point of breaking out. She had sat a minute in such thought that at the sound of his return she sprang up with a protest. This checked him afresh, and he remained where he had paused, exchanging with her a look to which neither was inspired, oddly enough, to contribute a word. It struck him, without words, as enough, and he now took his upward course at such a pace that he presently disappeared.
She listened awhile to his retreating tread; then her own, on the old flags of the hall, became rapid, though directed to no visible end. It conveyed her, in the great space, from point to point, but she now for the first time moved there without attention and without joy, her course determined by a series of inward throbs as might have been the suppressed beats of a speech. A real observer, had such a monster been present, would have followed this tacit evolution from sign to sign. “Why didn’t he tell me all?—But it was none of my business!—What does he mean to do?—What should he do but what he has done?—And what can he do, when he’s so deeply committed, when he’s practically engaged, when he’s just the same as married—and buried?—The thing for me to ‘do’ is just to pull up short and bundle out: to remove from the scene they encumber the numerous fragments—well, of what?”
Her thought was plainly arrested by the sight of Cora Prodmore, who, returning from the garden, reappeared first in the court and then in the open doorway. Mrs. Gracedew’s was a thought, however, that, even when desperate, was never quite vanquished, and it found a presentable public solution in the pieces of the vase smashed by Chivers and just then, on the table where he had laid them, catching her eye. “Of my old Chelsea pot!” Her gay, sad headshake as she took one of them up pronounced for Cora’s benefit its funeral oration. She laid the morsel thoughtfully down, while her visitor seemed with simple dismay to read the story.
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