選択した言語の要約本文はまだ利用できません。英語版を表示しています。
IV
The hall of Covering End held a silence that might have curdled into awkwardness had it lasted another moment. Captain Clement Yule had his back turned, but he swung about—distinctly grave, though—to meet the gaze of the woman who had just astonished him. He was the heir to this place, and yet he stood in it like a stranger.
“How do you come to know so much about my house?” he asked.
Mrs. Gracedew was as distinctly not grave. “How do you come to know so little?”
“It’s not my fault,” he said very gently. “A particular combination of misfortunes has forbidden me, till this hour, to come within a mile of it.”
These words struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that her interest quickened. The combination of misfortunes corresponded to lifelong service; he was plainly as good in his way as the old butler. “Why, you poor thing!” she cried, coming toward him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least you’ll stay. Do make yourself comfortable. Don’t mind me.”
Yule looked a shade less serious. “That’s exactly what I wanted to say to you!”
She was struck with the way it came in. “Well, if you had been haughty, I shouldn’t have been quite crushed, should I?”
The young man’s gravity completely yielded. “I’m never haughty—oh, no!”
She seemed even more amused. “Fortunately then, as I’m never crushed. I don’t think I’m really as crushable as you.”
The smile with which he received this failed to conceal that it was something of a home thrust. “Aren’t we really all crushable—by the right thing?”
She considered. “Don’t you mean rather by the wrong?”
He had got, clearly, a trifle more accustomed to her being extraordinary. “Are you sure we always know them apart?”
She weighed the responsibility. “I always do. Don’t you?”
“Not quite every time!”
“Oh, I don’t think, thank goodness, we have positively ‘every time’ to distinguish.”
“Yet we must always act,” he objected.
She turned this over, then with her wonderful living look: “I’m glad to hear it, because, I fear, I always do! You’ll certainly think,” she added with more gravity, “that I’ve taken a line today!”
“Do you mean that of mistress of the house? Yes—you do seem in possession!”
“You don’t!” she honestly answered; then, as to attenuate the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look as I want you to.”
It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. “How do you ‘want’ me to look?”
She endeavoured to make up her mind, but seemed only to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at me, you’re all right!” she sighed. “Look at that chimneypiece.”
“Well––?” he inquired as his eyes came back from it.
“You mean to say it isn’t lovely?”
He returned to it without passion—gave a vivid sign of mere disability. “I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t mean to say anything. I’m a rank outsider.”
The original text of this work is in the public domain. This page focuses on a guided summary article, reading notes, selected quotes, and visual learning materials for educational purposes.