The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

Something further, on this, quite immaterial, but quite adequate, passed, while the young man’s back was turned, between the two others; in consequence of which Chivers again appealed to his master. “Shall I show them straight in, sir?”

His master, still detached, replied without looking at him. “By all means—if there’s money in it!” This was jocose, but there would have been, for an observer, an increase of hope in the old man’s departing step. The lady had exerted an influence.

She continued, for that matter, with a start of genial remembrance, to exert one in his absence. “Oh, and I promised to show it to Miss Prodmore!” Her conscience, with a kind smile for the young person she named, put the question to Clement Yule. “Won’t you call her?”

The coldness of his quick response made it practically none. “‘Call’ her? Dear lady, I don’t know her!”

“You must, then—she’s wonderful.” The face with which he met this drew from the dear lady a sharper look; but, for the aid of her good-nature, Cora Prodmore, at the moment she spoke, presented herself in the doorway of the morning-room. “See? She’s charming!” The girl, with a glare of recognition, dashed across the open as if under heavy fire; but heavy fire, alas—the extremity of exposure—was promptly embodied in her friend’s public embrace. “Miss Prodmore,” said this terrible friend, “let me present Captain Yule.” Never had so great a gulf been bridged in so free a span. “Captain Yule, Miss Prodmore. Miss Prodmore, Captain Yule.”

There was stiffness, the cold mask of terror, in such notice as either party took of this demonstration, the convenience of which was not enhanced for the divided pair by the perception that Mr. Prodmore had now followed his daughter. Cora threw herself confusedly into it indeed, as with a vain rebound into the open. “Papa, let me ‘present’ you to Mrs. Gracedew. Mrs. Gracedew, Mr. Prodmore. Mr. Prodmore, Mrs. Gracedew.”

Mrs. Gracedew, with a free salute and a distinct repetition, took in Mr. Prodmore as she had taken everything else. “Mr. Prodmore”—oh, she pronounced him, spared him nothing of himself. “So happy to meet your daughter’s father. Your daughter’s so perfect a specimen.”

Mr. Prodmore, for the first moment, had simply looked large and at sea; then, like a practical man and without more question, had quickly seized the long perch held out to him in this statement. “So perfect a specimen, yes!”—he seemed to pass it on to his young friend.

Mrs. Gracedew, if she observed his emphasis, drew from it no deterrence; she only continued to cover Cora with a gaze that kept her well in the middle. “So fresh, so quaint, so droll!”

It was apparently a result of what had passed in the morning-room that Mr. Prodmore had grasped afresh the need for effective action, which he clearly felt he did something to meet in clutching precipitately the helping hand popped so suddenly out of space, yet so beautifully gloved and so pressingly and gracefully brandished. “So fresh, so quaint, so droll!”—he again gave Captain Yule the advantage of the stranger’s impression.

To what further appreciation this might have prompted the lady herself was not, however, just then manifest; for the return of Chivers had been almost simultaneous with the advance of the Prodmores, and it had taken place with forms that made it something of a circumstance. There was positive pomp in the way he preceded several persons of both sexes, not tourists at large, but simple sightseers of the half-holiday order, plain provincial folk already, on the spot, rather awestruck. The old man, with suppressed pulls and prayers, had drawn them up in a broken line, and the habit of more peopled years, the dull drone of the dead lesson, sounded out in his prompt beginning. The party stood close, in this manner, on one side of the apartment, while the master of the house and his little circle were grouped on the other. But as Chivers, guiding his squad, reached the centre of the space, Mrs. Gracedew, markedly moved, quite unreservedly engaged, came slowly forward to meet him. “This, ladies and gentlemen,” he mechanically quavered, “is perhaps the most important feature—the grand old feudal, baronial ’all. Being, from all accounts, the most ancient portion of the edifice, it was erected in the very earliest ages.” He paused a moment, to mark his effect, then gave a little cough which had become, obviously, in these great reaches of time, an essential part of the trick. “Some do say,” he dispassionately remarked, “in the course of the fifteenth century.”

Mrs. Gracedew, who had visibly thrown herself into the working of the charm, following him with vivid sympathy and hanging on his lips, took the liberty, at this, of quite affectionately pouncing on him. “I say in the fourteenth, my dear—you’re robbing us of a hundred years!”

Her victim yielded without a struggle. “I do seem, in them dark old centuries, sometimes to trip a little.” Yet the interruption of his ancient order distinctly discomposed him, all the more that his audience, gaping with a sense of the importance of the fine point, moved in its mass a little nearer. Thus put upon his honour, he endeavoured to address the group with a dignity undiminished. “The Gothic roof is much admired, but the west gallery is a modern addition.”

His discriminations had the note of culture, but his candour, all too promptly, struck Mrs. Gracedew as excessive. “What in the name of Methuselah do you call ‘modern’? It was here at the visit of James the First, in 1611, and is supposed to have served, in the charming detail of its ornament, as a model for several that were constructed in his reign. The great fireplace,” she handsomely conceded, “is Jacobean.”

She had taken him up with such wondrous benignant authority—as if, for her life, if they were to have it, she couldn’t help taking care that they had it out; she had interposed with an assurance that so converted her—as by the wave of a great wand, the motion of one of her own free arms—from mere passive alien to domesticated dragon, that poor Chivers could only assent with grateful obeisances. She so plunged into the old book that he had quite lost his place. The two gentlemen and the young lady, moreover, were held there by the magic of her manner. His own, as he turned again to his cluster of sightseers, took refuge in its last refinement. “The tapestry on the left Italian—the elegant wood-work Flemish.”

Mrs. Gracedew was upon him again. “Excuse me if I just deprecate a misconception. The elegant wood-work Italian—the tapestry on the left Flemish.” Suddenly she put it to him before them all, pleading as familiarly and gaily as she had done when alone with him, and looking now at the others, all round, gentry and poor folk alike, for sympathy and support. She had an idea that made her dance. “Do you really mind if I just do it? Oh, I know how: I can do quite beautifully the housekeeper last week at Castle Gaunt.” She fraternised with the company as if it were a game they must play with her, though this first stage sufficiently hushed them. “How do you do? Ain’t it thrilling?” Then with a laugh as free as if, for a disguise, she had thrown her handkerchief over her head or made an apron of her tucked-up skirt, she passed to the grand manner. “Keep well together, please—we’re not doing puss-in-the-corner. I’ve my duty to all parties—I can’t be partial to one!”

The contingent from Gossage had, after all, like most contingents, its spokesman—a very erect little personage in a very new suit and a very green necktie, with a very long face and upstanding hair. It was on an evident sense of having been practically selected for encouragement that he, in turn, made choice of a question which drew all eyes. “How many parties, now, can you manage?”

Mrs. Gracedew was superbly definite. “Two. The party up and the party down.” Chivers gasped at the way she dealt with this liberty, and his impression was conspicuously deepened as she pointed to one of the escutcheons in the high hall-window. “Observe in the centre compartment the family arms.” She did take his breath away, for before he knew it she had crossed with the lightest but surest of gestures to the black old portrait, on the opposite wall, of a long-limbed gentleman in white trunk-hose. “And observe the family legs!” Her method was wholly her own, irregular and broad; she flew, familiarly, from the pavement to the roof and then dropped from the roof to the pavement as if the whole air of the place were an element in which she floated. “Observe the suit of armour worn at Tewkesbury—observe the tattered banner carried at Blenheim.” They bobbed their heads wherever she pointed, but it would have come home to any spectator that they saw her alone. This was the case quite as much with the opposite trio—the case especially with Clement Yule, who indeed made no pretence of keeping up with her signs. It was the signs themselves he looked at—not at the subjects indicated. But he never took his eyes from her, and it was as if, at last, she had been peculiarly affected by a glimpse of his attention. All her own, for a moment, frankly went back to him and was immediately determined by it. “Observe, above all, that you’re in one of the most interesting old houses, of its type, in England; for which the ages have been tender and the generations wise: letting it change so slowly that there’s always more left than taken—living their lives in it, but letting it shape their lives!”

Though this pretty speech had been unmistakeably addressed to the younger of the temporary occupants of Covering End, it was the elder who, on the spot, took it up. “A most striking and appropriate tribute to a real historical monument!” Mr. Prodmore had a natural ease that could deal handsomely with compliments, and he manifestly, moreover, like a clever man, saw even more in such an explosion of them than fully met the ear. “You do, madam, bring the whole thing out!”

The visitor who had already with such impunity ventured had, on this, a loud renewal of boldness, but for the benefit of a near neighbour. “Doesn’t she indeed, Jane, bring it out?”

Mrs. Gracedew, with a friendly laugh, caught the words in their passage. “But who in the world wants to keep it in? It isn’t a secret—it isn’t a strange cat or a political party!” The housekeeper, as she talked, had already dropped from her; her sense of the place was too fresh for control, though instead of half an hour it might have taken six months to become so fond. She soared again, at random, to the noble spring of the roof. “Just look at those lovely lines!” They all looked, all but Clement Yule, and several of the larger company, subdued, overwhelmed, nudged each other with strange sounds. Wherever she turned Mrs. Gracedew appeared to find a pretext for breaking out. “Just look at the tone of that glass, and the gilding of that leather, and the cutting of that oak, and the dear old flags of the very floor.” It came back, came back easily, her impulse to appeal to the lawful heir, and she seemed, with her smile of universal intelligence, just to demand the charity of another moment for it. “To look, in this place, is to love!”

A voice from the party she had in hand took it up with an artless guffaw that resounded more than had doubtless been meant and that, at any rate, was evidently the accompaniment of some private pinch applied to one of the ladies. “I say—to love!”

It was one of the ladies who very properly replied. “It depends on who you look at!”

Mr. Prodmore, in the geniality of the hour, made his profit of the simple joke. “Do you hear that, Captain? You must look at the right person!”

Mrs. Gracedew certainly had not been looking at the wrong one. “I don’t think Captain Yule cares. He doesn’t do justice–!”

Though her face was still gay, she had faltered, which seemed to strike the young man even more than if she had gone on. “To what, madam?”

Well, on the chance she let him have it. “To the value of your house.”

He took it beautifully. “I like to hear you express it!”

“I can’t express it!” She once more looked all round, and so much more gravely than she had yet done that she might have appeared in trouble. She tried but, with a sigh, broke down. “It’s too inexpressible!”

This was a view of the case to which Mr. Prodmore, for his own reasons, was not prepared to assent. Expression and formulation were what he naturally most desired, and he had just encountered a fountain of these things that he couldn’t prematurely suffer to fail him. “Do what you can for it, madam. It would bring it quite home.”

Thus excited, she gave with sudden sombre clearness another try. “Well—the value’s a fancy value!”

Mr. Prodmore, receiving it as more than he could have hoped, turned triumphant to his young friend. “Exactly what I told you!”

Mrs. Gracedew explained indeed as if Mr. Prodmore’s triumph was not perhaps exactly what she had argued for. Still, the truth was too great. “When a thing’s unique, it’s unique!”

That was every bit Mr. Prodmore required. “It’s unique!”

This met, moreover, the perception of the gentleman in the green necktie. “It’s unique!” They all, in fact, demonstratively—almost vociferously now—caught the point.

Mrs. Gracedew, finding herself so sustained, and still with her eyes on the lawful heirs, put it yet more strongly. “It’s worth anything you like.”

What was this but precisely what Mr. Prodmore had always striven to prove? “Anything you like!” he richly reverberated.

The pleasant discussion and the general interest seemed to bring them all together. “Twenty thousand now?” one of the gentlemen from Gossage archly inquired—a very young gentleman with an almost coaxing voice, who blushed immensely as soon as he had spoken.

He blushed still more at the way Mrs. Gracedew faced him. “I wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!”

Mr. Prodmore, on the other hand, was proportionately uplifted. “She wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!” he announced with intensity to the Captain.

The visitor who had been the first to speak gave a shrewder guess. “Thirty, then, as it stands?”

Mrs. Gracedew looked more and more responsible; she communed afresh with the place; but she too evidently had her conscience. “It would be giving it away!”

Mr. Prodmore, at this, could scarcely contain himself. “It would be giving it away!”

The second speaker had meanwhile conceived the design of showing that, though still crimson, he was not ashamed. “You’d hold out for forty–?”

Mrs. Gracedew required a minute to answer—a very marked minute during which the whole place, pale old portraits and lurking old echoes and all, might have made you feel how much depended on her; to the degree that the consciousness in her face became finally a reason for her not turning it to Gossage. “Fifty thousand, Captain Yule, is what I think I should propose.”

If the place had seemed to listen it might have been the place that, in admiring accents from the gentleman with the green tie, took up the prodigious figure. “Fifty thousand pound!”

It was echoed in a high note from the lady he had previously addressed. “Fifty thousand!”

Yet it was Mr. Prodmore who caught it up loudest and appeared to make it go furthest. “Fifty thousand—fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew had put him in such spirits that he found on the spot, indicating to her his young friend, both the proper humour and the proper rigour for any question of what anyone might “propose.” “He’ll never part with the dear old home!”

Mrs. Gracedew could match at least the confidence. “Then I’ll go over it again while I have the chance.” Her own humour enjoined that she should drop into the housekeeper, in the perfect tone of which character she addressed herself once more to the party. “We now pass to the grand staircase.” She gathered her band with a brave gesture, but before she had fairly impelled them to the ascent she heard herself rather sharply challenged by Captain Yule, who, during the previous scene, had uttered no sound, yet had remained as attentive as he was impenetrable. “Please let them pass without you!”

She was taken by surprise. “And stay here with you?”

“If you’ll be so good. I want to speak to you.” Turning then to Chivers and frowning on the party, he delivered himself for the first time as a person in a position. “For God’s sake, remove them!”

The old man, at this blast of impatience, instantly fluttered forward. “We now pass to the grand staircase.”

They all passed, Chivers covering their scattered ascent as a shepherd scales a hillside with his flock; but it became evident during the manœuvre that Cora Prodmore was quite out of tune. She had been standing beyond and rather behind Captain Yule; but she now moved quickly round and reached her new friend’s right. “Mrs. Gracedew, may I speak to you?”

Her father, before the reply could come, had taken up the place. “After Captain Yule, my dear.” He was in a state of positively polished lucidity. “You must make the most—don’t you see?—of the opportunity of the others!”

He waved her to the staircase as one who knew what he was about, but, while the young man, turning his back, moved consciously and nervously away, the girl renewed her effort to provoke Mrs. Gracedew to detain her. It happened, to her sorrow, that this lady appeared for the moment, to the detriment of any free attention, to be absorbed in Captain Yule’s manner; so that Cora could scarce disengage her without some air of invidious reference to it. Recognising as much, she could only for two seconds, but with great yearning, parry her own antagonist. “She’ll help me, I think, papa!”

“That’s exactly what strikes me, love!” he cheerfully replied. “But I’ll help you too!” He gave her, toward the stairs, a push proportioned both to his authority and to her weight; and while she reluctantly climbed in the wake of the visitors, he laid on Mrs. Gracedew’s arm, with a portentous glance at Captain Yule, a hand of commanding significance. “Just pile it on!”

Her attention came back—she seemed to see. “He doesn’t like it?”

“Not half enough. Bring him round.”

Her eyes rested again on their companion, who had fidgeted further away and who now, with his hands in his pockets and unaware of this private passage, stood again in the open doorway and gazed into the grey court. Something in the sight determined her. “I’ll bring him round.”

But at this moment Cora, pausing half-way up, sent down another entreaty. “Mrs. Gracedew, will you see me?”

The charming woman looked at her watch. “In ten minutes,” she smiled back.

Mr. Prodmore, bland and assured, looked at his own. “You could put him through in five—but I’ll allow you twenty. There!” he decisively cried to his daughter, whom he quickly rejoined and hustled on her course. Mrs. Gracedew kissed after her a hand of vague comfort.

IV

The silence that reigned between the pair might have been registered as embarrassing had it lasted a trifle longer. Yule had continued to turn his back, but he faced about, though he was distinctly grave, in time to avert an awkwardness. “How do you come to know so much about my house?”

She 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 evidently struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that such a felicity of misery could only quicken her interest. He was plainly as good in his way as the old butler—the particular combination of misfortunes corresponded to the lifelong service. Her interest, none the less, in its turn, could only quicken her pity, and all her emotions, we have already seen, found prompt enough expression. What could any expression do indeed now but mark the romantic reality? “Why, you poor thing!”—she came toward him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least you’ll stay.” Their intercourse must pitch itself—so far as she was concerned—in some key that would make up for things. “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, at this, completely yielded. “I’m never haughty—oh, no!”

She seemed even more amused. “Fortunately then, as I’m never crushed. I don’t think,” she added, “that I’m really as crushable as you.”

The smile with which he received this failed to conceal completely that it was something of a home thrust. “Aren’t we really all crushable—by the right thing?”

She considered a little. “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,” she replied, “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,” she exclaimed, “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; after which, as to attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look”—she was very serious—“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, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at me, you’re all right!” she sighed. It was an obstacle to her lesson, and she cast her eyes about. “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.”

It had an instant effect on her—she almost pounced upon him. “Then you must let me put you up!”

“Up to what?”

“Up to everything!”—his levity added to her earnestness. “You were smoking when you came in,” she said as she glanced about. “Where’s your cigarette?”

The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I mightn’t—here.”

“You may everywhere.”

He bent his head to the information. “Everywhere.”

She laughed at his docility, yet could only wish to presume upon it. “It’s a rule of the house!”

He took in the place with greater pleasure. “What delightful rules!”

“How could such a house have any others?”—she was already launched again in her brave relation to it. “I may go up just once more—mayn’t I—to the long gallery?”

How could he tell? “The long gallery?”

With an added glow she remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full, on the spot, of the pride of showing it. “Come right up!”

Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. “There’s a party up.”

She remembered afresh. “So we must be the party down? Well, you must give me a chance. That long gallery’s the principal thing I came over for.”

She was strangest of all when she explained. “Where in heaven’s name did you come over from?”

“Missoura Top, where I’m building—just in this style. I came for plans and ideas,” Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. “I felt I must look right at you.”

“But what did you know about us?”

She kept it a moment as if it were too good to give him all at once. “Everything!”

He seemed indeed almost afraid to touch it. “At ‘Missoura Top’?”

“Why not? It’s a growing place—forty thousand the last census.” She hesitated; then as if her warrant should be slightly more personal: “My husband left it to me.”

The young man presently changed his posture. “You’re a widow?”

Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it—and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.”