The Jolly Corner | Page 6

general
apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances, had
nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him
as some good old servant's, some lifelong retainer's appeal for a

character, or even for a retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of
Mrs. Muldoon's that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday
round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of
her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark she
would just tell him, if he "plased," that he must ask it of somebody else.
The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy
woman against what one MIGHT see, and she put it frankly to Miss
Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "craping up
to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light
were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her
march through the great grey rooms - so many of them as there were
too! - with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare
with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil
from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace -
for the moment; the question of the "evil" hours in his old home had
already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to
"crape," and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that
pursuit had been stowed by his own hand, three weeks before, at the
back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard that occupied, as a "fixture,"
the deep recess in the dining-room. Just now he laughed at his
companions - quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that,
in the first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting
the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to
qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to his
ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice Staverton
for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination, if he ever
so prowled. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had
at all events averted enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them,
passing on to other parts.
There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could
be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was
precipitated by his friend's having herself broken out, after a yearning
look round: "But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull THIS to
pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with his re-awakened wrath: it
was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were "at" him

for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn't for their life
understand a man's liability to decent feelings. He had found the place,
just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy.
There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in
short - ! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. "In short you're to
make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on
THOSE ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental
here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony
with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness
and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination - not, like
the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world
of "society," bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really
having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that
when he had answered, after a brief demur, "Well, yes; so, precisely,
you may put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He
explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the
other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt,
further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the
stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt
himself create.
He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the
walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in
his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors,
which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years
of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly
three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended
there, and