Chivers surrounded this description of Miss Prodmore with the deep discretion of silence, and then, after a moment, evidently reflected that silence, in a world bestrewn with traps to irreverence, might be as rash as speech. “Were they coming—a—together, sir?”
He had scarcely mended the matter, for his visitor gave an inconsequent stare. “Together?—for what do you take Miss Prodmore?” This young lady’s parent glared about him again as if to alight on something else that was out of place; but the good intentions expressed in the attitude of every object might presently have been presumed to soothe his irritation. It had at any rate the effect of bridging, for poor Chivers, some of his gaps. “It is in a sense true that their ‘coming together,’ as you call it, is exactly what I’ve made my plans for today: my calculation was that we should all punctually converge on this spot. Attended by her trusty maid, Miss Prodmore, who happens to be on a week’s visit to her grandmother at Bellborough, was to take the 1.40 from that place. I was to drive over—ten miles—from the most convenient of my seats. Captain Yule”—the speaker wound up his statement as with the mention of the last touch in a masterpiece of his own sketching—“was finally to shake off for a few hours the peculiar occupations that engage him.”
The old man listened with his head askance to favour his good ear, but his visible attention all on a sad spot in one of the half-dozen worn rugs. “They must be peculiar, sir, when a gentleman comes into a property like this and goes three months without so much as a nat’ral curiosity——! I don’t speak of anything but what is nat’ral, sir; but there have been people here——”
“There have repeatedly been people here!” Mr. Prodmore complacently interrupted.
“As you say, sir—to be shown over. With the master himself never shown!” Chivers dismally commented.
“He shall be, so that nobody can miss him!” Mr. Prodmore, for his own reassurance as well, hastened to retort.
His companion risked a tiny explanation. “It will be a mercy indeed to look on him; but I meant that he has not been taken round.”
“That’s what I meant too. I’ll take him—round and round: it’s exactly what I’ve come for!” Mr. Prodmore rang out; and his eyes made the lower circuit again, looking as pleased as such a pair of eyes could look with nobody as yet quite good enough either to terrify or to tickle. “He can’t fail to be affected, though he has been up to his neck in such a different class of thing.”
Chivers clearly wondered awhile what class of thing it could be. Then he expressed a timid hope. “In nothing, I dare say, but what’s right, sir——?”
“In everything,” Mr. Prodmore distinctly informed him, “that’s wrong! But here he is!” that gentleman added with elation as the doorbell again sounded. Chivers, under the double agitation of the appeal and the disclosure, proceeded to the front as fast as circumstances allowed; while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, would have been observed—had not his solitude been so bleak—to recover a degree of cheerfulness. Cheerfulness in solitude at Covering End was certainly not irresistible, but particular feelings and reasons had pitched, for their campaign, the starched, if now somewhat ruffled, tent of his large white waistcoat. If they had issued audibly from that pavilion, they would have represented to us his consciousness of the reinforcement he might bring up for attack should Captain Yule really resist the house. The sound he next heard from the front caused him none the less, for that matter, to articulate a certain drop. “Only Cora?—Well,” he added in a tone somewhat at variance with his “only,” “he shan’t, at any rate, resist her!” This announcement would have quickened a spectator’s interest in the young lady whom Chivers now introduced and followed, a young lady who straightway found herself the subject of traditionary discipline. “I’ve waited. What do you mean?”