Mr. Prodmore, somewhat ambiguously, took up the sound. "Melancholy?"--he just balanced. That well might be, even a little _should_ be--yet agreement might depreciate.
"Musty, mouldy;" then with a poke of his stick at a gap in the stuff with which an old chair was covered, "mangy!" Captain Yule responded. "Is this the character throughout?"
Mr. Prodmore fixed a minute the tell-tale tatter. "You must judge for yourself--you must go over the house." He hesitated again; then his indecision vanished--the right line was clear. "It does look a bit run down, but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll do it up for you--neatly: I'll throw _that_ in!"
His young friend turned on him an eye that, though markedly enlivened by his offer, was somehow only the more inscrutable. "Will you put in the electric light?"
Mr. Prodmore's own twinkle--at this touch of a spring he had not expected to work--was, on the other hand, temporarily veiled. "Well, if you'll meet me half-way! We're dealing here"--he backed up his gravity--"with fancy-values. Don't you feel," he appealed, "as you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?"
Clement Yule gazed awhile at one of the pompous quarterings in the faded old glass that, in tones as of late autumn, crowned with armorial figures the top of the great hall-window; then with abruptness he turned away. "Perhaps I _don't_ take it all in; but what I do feel is--since you mention it--a sort of stiffening of the spine! The whole thing is too queer--too cold--too cruel."
"Cruel?"--Mr. Prodmore's demur was virtuous.
"Like the face of some stuck-up distant relation who won't speak first. I see in the stare of the old dragon, I taste in his very breath, all the helpless mortality he has tucked away!"
"Lord, sir--you _have_ fancies!" Mr. Prodmore was almost scandalised.
But the young man's fancies only multiplied as he moved, not at all critical, but altogether nervous, from object to object. "I don't know what's the matter--but there _is_ more here than meets the eye." He tried as for his amusement or his relief to figure it out. "I miss the old presences. I feel the old absences. I hear the old voices. I see the old ghosts."
This last was a profession that offered some common ground. "The old ghosts, Captain Yule," his companion promptly replied, "are worth so much a dozen, and with no reduction, I must remind you--with the price indeed rather raised--for the quantity taken!" Feeling then apparently that he had cleared the air a little by this sally, Mr. Prodmore proceeded to pat his interlocutor on a back that he by no means wished to cause to be put to the wall. "Look about you, at any rate, a little more." He crossed with his toes well out the line that divides encouragement from patronage. "Do make yourself at home."