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“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.”
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