Part 39

Chivers crept solemnly away, as if to bury his dead, which he consigned, with dumb rites, to a situation of honourable publicity; then, as he came back, he replied without elation: “Miss Prodmore is here, mum. She’s having her tea.”

This, for his friend, was a confirmatory touch to be fitted with eagerness into the picture. “Yes, that’s exactly it--they’re always having their tea!”

“With Mr. Prodmore--in the morning-room,” the old man supplemented. “Captain Yule’s in the garden.”

“Captain Yule?”

“The new master. He’s also just arrived.”

The wonderful lady gave an immediate “Oh!” to the effect of which her silence for another moment seemed to add. “She didn’t tell me about him.”

“Well, mum,” said Chivers, “it do be a strange thing to tell. He had never--like, mum--so much as seen the place.”

“Before today--his very own?” This too, for the visitor, was an impression among impressions, and, like most of her others, it ended after an instant as a laugh. “Well, I hope he likes it!”

“I haven’t seen many, mum,” Chivers boldly declared, “that like it as much as you.”

She made with her handsome head a motion that appeared to signify still deeper things than he had caught. Her beautiful wondering eyes played high and low, like the flight of an imprisoned swallow, then, as she sank upon a seat, dropped at last as if the creature were bruised with its limits. “I should like it still better if it were my very own!”

“Well, mum,” Chivers sighed, “if it wasn’t against my duty I could wish indeed it were! But the Captain, mum,” he conscientiously added, “is the lawful heir.”

It was a wonder what she found in whatever he said; he touched with every word the spring of her friendly joy. “That’s another of your lovely old things--I adore your lawful heirs!” She appeared to have, about everything that came up, a general lucid vision that almost glorified the particular case. “He has come to take possession?”

Chivers accepted, for the credit of the house, this sustaining suggestion. “He’s a-taking of it now.”

This evoked, for his companion, an instantaneous show. “What does he do and how does he do it? Can’t I see?” She was all impatience, but she dropped to disappointment as her guide looked blank. “There’s no grand fuss----?”

“I scarce think him, mum,” Chivers with propriety hastened to respond, “the gentleman to make any about anything.”

She had to resign herself, but she smiled as she thought. “Well, perhaps I like them better when they don’t!” She had clearly a great range of taste, and it all came out in the wistfulness with which, before the notice apparently served on her, she prepared to make way. “I also”--she lingered and sighed--“have taken possession!”

Poor Chivers really rose to her. “It was you, mum,” he smiled, “took it first!”

She sadly shook her head. “Ah, but for a poor little hour! He’s for life.”

The old man gave up, after a little, with equal depression, the pretence of dealing with such realities. “For mine, mum, I do at least hope.”

She made again the circuit of the great place, picking up without interest the jacket she had on her previous entrance laid down. “I shall think of you, you know, here together.” She vaguely looked about her as for anything else to take; then abruptly, with her eyes again on Chivers: “Do you suppose he’ll be kind to you?”

His hand, in his trousers-pocket, seemed to turn the matter over. “He has already been, mum.”

“Then be sure to be so to him!” she replied with some emphasis. The house-bell sounded as she spoke, giving her quickly another thought. “Is that his bell?”

Chivers was hardly less struck. “I must see whose!”--and hurrying, on this, to the front, he presently again vanished.

His companion, left alone, stood a minute with an air in which happy possession was oddly and charmingly mingled with desperate surrender; so much as to have left you in doubt if the next of her lively motions were curiosity or disgust. Impressed, in her divided state, with a small framed plaque of enamel, she impulsively detached it from the wall and examined it with hungry tenderness. Her hovering thought was so vivid that you might almost have traced it in sound. “Why, bless me if it isn’t Limoges! I wish awfully I were a bad woman: then, I do devoutly hope, I’d just quietly take it!” It testified to the force of this temptation that on hearing a sound behind her she started like a guilty thing; recovering herself, however, and--just, of course, not to appear at fault--keeping the object familiarly in her hand as she jumped to a recognition of the gentleman who, coming in from the garden, had stopped in the open doorway. She gathered indeed from his being there a positive advantage, the full confidence of which was already in her charming tone. “Oh, Captain Yule, I’m delighted to meet you! It’s such a comfort to ask you if I may!”

His surprise kept him an instant dumb, but the effort not too closely to betray it appeared in his persuasive inflection. “If you ‘may,’ madam----?”

“Why, just be here, don’t you know? and poke round!” She presented such a course as almost vulgarly natural. “Don’t tell me I can’t now, because I already have: I’ve been upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber--I won’t answer for it even perhaps that I’ve not been in my lord’s! I got round your lovely servant--if you don’t look out I’ll grab him. If you don’t look out, you know, I’ll grab everything.” She gave fair notice and went on with amazing serenity; she gathered positive gaiety from his frank stupefaction. “That’s what I came over for--just to lay your country waste. Your house is a wild old dream; and besides”--she dropped, oddly and quaintly, into real responsible judgment--“you’ve got some quite good things. Oh, yes, you have--several: don’t coyly pretend you haven’t!” Her familiarity took these flying leaps, and she alighted, as her victim must have phrased it to himself, without turning a hair. “Don’t you know you have? Just look at that!” She thrust her enamel before him, but he took it and held it so blankly, with an attention so absorbed in the mere woman, that at the sight of his manner her zeal for his interest and her pity for his detachment again flashed out. “Don’t you know anything? Why, it’s Limoges!”

Clement Yule simply broke into a laugh--though his laugh indeed was comprehensive. “It seems absurd, but I’m not in the least acquainted with my house. I’ve never happened to see it.”

She seized his arm. “Then do let me show it to you!”