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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—”
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