Left with her friend, Lady Grace had a prompt question. “Lord John warned me he was ‘funny’—but you already know him?”
There might have been a sense of embarrassment in the way in which, as to gain time, Lady Sandgate pointed, instead of answering, to the small picture pronounced upon by Mr. Bender. “He thinks your little Cuyp a fraud.”
“That one?” Lady Grace could but stare. “The wretch!” However, she made, without alarm, no more of it; she returned to her previous question. “You’ve met him before?”
“Just a little—in town. Being ‘after pictures’” Lady Sandgate explained, “he has been after my great-grandmother.”
“She,” said Lady Grace with amusement, “must have found him funny! But he can clearly take care of himself, while Kitty takes care of Lord John, and while you, if you’ll be so good, go back to support father—in the hour of his triumph: which he wants you so much to witness that he complains of your desertion and goes so far as to speak of you as sneaking away.”
Lady Sandgate, with a slight flush, turned it over. “I delight in his triumph, and whatever I do is at least above board; but if it’s a question of support, aren’t you yourself failing him quite as much?”
This had, however, no effect on the girl’s confidence. “Ah, my dear, I’m not at all the same thing, and as I’m the person in the world he least misses—” Well, such a fact spoke for itself.
“You’ve been free to return and wait for Lord John?”—that was the sense in which the elder woman appeared to prefer to understand it as speaking.
The tone of it, none the less, led her companion immediately, though very quietly, to correct her. “I’ve not come back to wait for Lord John.”
“Then he hasn’t told you—if you’ve talked—with what idea he has come?”
Lady Grace had for a further correction the same shade of detachment. “Kitty has told me—what it suits her to pretend to suppose.”
“And Kitty’s pretensions and suppositions always go with what happens—at the moment, among all her wonderful happenings—to suit her?”
Lady Grace let that question answer itself—she took the case up further on. “What I can’t make out is why thisshouldso suit her!”
“And whatIcan’t!” said Lady Sandgate without gross honesty and turning away after having watched the girl a moment. She nevertheless presently faced her again to follow this speculation up. “Do you like him enough to risk the chance of Kitty’s being for once right?”
Lady Grace gave it a thought—with which she moved away. “I don’t know how much I like him!”
“Nor how little!” cried her friend, who evidently found amusement in the tone of it. “And you’re not disposed to take the time to find out? He’s at least better than the others.”
“The ‘others’?”—Lady Grace was blank for them.
“The others of his set.”
“Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult—by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.”
It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?”
This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying—with some people we don’t know—to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.”
Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?”
“No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.”
This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then—if one’s to meet him—who he is?”
“Oh, father knows—or ought to—that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship—which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner——”
Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.”
“It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity.
“Very good—though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell methis—whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?”
The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?”
“So particularly to speak to you.”
“Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.”
“And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?”
“No, only to tell me that his friend—who’s off there—was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said—that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him—I assure you quite resignedly—in her hands.”
“She wants”—it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark—“to talk of you to him.”
“I don’t knowwhatshe wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with—and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.”
“Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father—in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s—I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him—if youareto listen?”
“I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace—“it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!”
“On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked.
“I dare say the Duchess is!”
“But do you see the Duchessproducingmoney—with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”—Lady Sandgate piled them up.
Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many—it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”
“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”
“Kitty goes free.”
“She has her creditor’s release?”
“For every shilling.”
“And if he only fails?”
“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”
“Poor father indeed!”—Lady Sandgate richly sighed it
It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes—but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”
“To the point, you mean”—for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder—“of really sacrificing you?”
The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think Ishouldbe sacrificed if I married him?”
Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “Couldyou marry him?”
Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”
“For himself even—if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”
Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”
“Yes—but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”
“No—but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”
“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”
This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she onlywantsme—which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”
To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed—for the general immaculate connection.”
The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, wehaven’thad false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”
“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”—Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman—a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears—to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern.
Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you—in the midst of the great doings I noticed—to have found a beautiful minute for me.”
“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”
It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose—with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed—and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face—quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process—kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender—though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation—the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”
“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical—‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”
“Then you made it doubtless bleak forhim, let us say.Icouldn’t let you alone, I remember, aboutthis—it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye—and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke—characteristically, you would have been sure—into a great free gaiety of recognition.
“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.
“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said—“before a new and rare feast!”
She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin—as a first course—with tea after your ride? If the other, that is—for there has been an ogre before you—has left any.”
“Some tea, with pleasure”—he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuoustable d’hôte.”
“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon—the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”
Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles—the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious—of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which weallcan play!”
“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”
The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm—of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots ofthisorder—which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”
“We’ve had great luck,” she granted—“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town—about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live—I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”
Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”
“The rich American who’s going round.”
It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”
Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”
Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather—the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”
“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”
“I wish he had—he could then have been collared.”
“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offeringuseight thousand—or eighteen or even eighty!”
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’tsupposeyou’d traffic.”
She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But peoplehavetrafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.”
“Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours. That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest—a century and more ago—of their ever coming in.”
She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose our art-wealth came in—save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!—mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’tgrowit all.”
“We grew some of the loveliest flowers—and on the whole to-day the most exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?”
The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence anything he would. “Yes—it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’”
It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of anything.”
“Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable—! And you haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.”
“I beg your pardon—I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a livelier sense of its danger.”
Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!”
“Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself—there’s the rub! I dare say”—the young man saw it all—“he has brought his poisonous cheque.”
She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.”
“And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing dealer?”
“No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.”
He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?”
“As weallwere in our lucky time—when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.”
He appeared to recognise this complication—of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers—but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.”
The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help—that you may do something really good for us.”
“Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?”
His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.”
“Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.”
“That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!”
Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked—it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?”
“I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round and come back. You’d think again of Mr. Bender.”
“Whom I don’t, however, you see—if he’s prowling off there—in the least want to meet.” Crimble made the point with gaiety. “I don’t know what I mightn’t do to him—and yet it’s not of my temptation to violence, after all, that I’m most afraid. It’s of the brutal mistake of one’s breaking—with one’s priggish, precious modernity and one’s possibly futile discriminations—into ageneralsituation or composition, as we say, so serene and sound and right. What should one do here, out of respect for that felicity, but hold one’s breath and walk on tip-toe? The very celebrations and consecrations, as you tell me, instinctively stay outside. I saw that all,” the young man went on with more weight in his ardour, “I saw it, while we talked in London, as your natural setting and your native air—and now ten minutes on the spot have made it sink into my spirit. You’re a case, all together, of enchanted harmony, of perfect equilibrium—there’s nothing to be done or said.”
His friend listened to this eloquence with her eyes lowered, then raising them to meet, with a vague insistence, his own; after which something she had seen there appeared to determine in her another motion. She indicated the small landscape that Mr. Bender had, by Lady Sandgate’s report, rapidly studied and denounced. “For what do you take that little picture?”
Hugh Crimble went over and looked. “Why, don’t you know? It’s a jolly little Vandermeer of Delft.”
“It’s not a base imitation?”
He looked again, but appeared at a loss. “An imitation of Vandermeer?”
“Mr. Bender thinks of Cuyp.”
It made the young man ring out: “Then Mr. Bender’s doubly dangerous!”
“Singly is enough!” Lady Grace laughed. “But you see youhaveto speak.”
“Oh, tohim, rather, after that—if you’ll just take me to him.”
“Yes then,” she said; but even while she spoke Lord John, who had returned, by the terrace, from his quarter of an hour passed with Lady Imber, was there practically between them; a fact that she had to notice for her other visitor, to whom she was hastily reduced to naming him.
His lordship eagerly made the most of this tribute of her attention, which had reached his ear; he treated it—her “Oh Lord John!”—as a direct greeting. “Ah Lady Grace! I came back particularly to find you.”
She could but explain her predicament. “I was taking Mr. Crimble to see the pictures.” And then more pointedly, as her manner had been virtually an introduction of that gentleman, an introduction which Lord John’s mere noncommittal stare was as little as possible a response to: “Mr. Crimble’s one of the quite new connoisseurs.”
“Oh, I’m at the very lowest round of the ladder. But I aspire!” Hugh laughed.
“You’ll mount!” said Lady Grace with friendly confidence.
He took it again with gay deprecation. “Ah, if by that time there’s anything left here to mounton!”
“Let us hope there will be at least what Mr. Bender, poor man, won’t have been able to carry off.” To which Lady Grace added, as to strike a helpful spark from the personage who had just joined them, but who had the air of wishing to preserve his detachment: “It’s to Lord John that we owe Mr. Bender’s acquaintance.”
Hugh looked at the gentleman to whom they were so indebted. “Then do you happen to know, sir, what your friend means todowith his spoil?”
The question got itself but dryly treated, as if it might be a commercially calculating or interested one. “Oh, not sell it again.”
“Then ship it to New York?” the inquirer pursued, defining himself somehow as not snubbed and, from this point, not snubbable.
That appearance failed none the less to deprive Lord John of a betrayed relish for being able to displease Lady Grace’s odd guest by large assent. “As fast as ever he can—and you can land things therenow, can’t you? in three or four days.”
“I dare say. But can’t he be induced to have a little mercy?” Hugh sturdily pursued.
Lord John pushed out his lips. “A ‘little’? How much do you want?”
“Well, one wants to be able somehow to stay his hand.”
“I doubt if you can any more stay Mr. Bender’s hand than you can empty his purse.”
“Ah, the Despoilers!” said Crimble with strong expression. “But it’swe,” he added, “who are base.”
“‘Base’?”—and Lord John’s surprise was apparently genuine.
“To want only to ‘do business,’ I mean, with our treasures, with our glories.”
Hugh’s words exhaled such a sense of peril as to draw at once Lady Grace. “Ah, but if we’re above thathere, as you know———!”
He stood smilingly corrected and contrite. “Of course I know—but you must forgive me if I have it on the brain. And show me first of all, won’t you? the Moretto of Brescia.”
“You know then about the Moretto of Brescia?”
“Why, didn’t you tell me yourself?” It went on between them for the moment quite as if there had been no Lord John.
“Probably, yes,” she recalled; “so how I must have swaggered!” After which she turned to the other visitor with a kindness strained clear of urgency. “Will you also come?”
He confessed to a difficulty—which his whole face begged her also to take account of. “I hoped you’d be at leisure—for something I’ve so at heart!”
This had its effect; she took a rapid decision and turned persuasively to Crimble—for whom, in like manner, there must have been something inherface. “Let Mr. Bender himself then show you. And there are things in the library too.”
“Oh yes, there are things in the library.” Lord John, happy in his gained advantage and addressing Hugh from the strong ground of an initiation already complete, quite sped him on the way.
Hugh clearly made no attempt to veil the penetration with which he was moved to look from one of these counsellors to the other, though with a ready “Thank-you!” for Lady Grace he the next instant started in pursuit of Mr. Bender.
“Your friend seems remarkably hot!” Lord John remarked to his young hostess as soon as they had been left together.
“He has cycled twenty miles. And indeed,” she smiled, “he does appear to care for what he cares for!”
Her companion then, during a moment’s silence, might have been noting the emphasis of her assent. “Have you known him long?”
“No—not long.”
“Nor seen him often?”
“Only once—till now.”
“Oh!” said Lord John with another pause. But he soon proceeded. “Let us leave him then to cool! I haven’t cycled twenty miles, but I’ve motored forty very much in the hope ofthis, Lady Grace—the chance of being able to assure you that I too care very much for what I care for.” To which he added on an easier note, as to carry off a slight awkwardness while she only waited: “You certainly mustn’t let yourself—between us all—be worked to death.”
“Oh, such days as this—I” She made light enough of her burden.
“They don’t come often tomeat least, Lady Grace! I hadn’t grasped in advance the scale of your fête,” he went on; “but since I’ve the great luck to find you alone—!” He paused for breath, however, before the full sequence.
She helped him out as through common kindness, but it was a trifle colourless. “Alone or in company, Lord John, I’m always very glad to see you.”
“Then that assurance helps me to wonder if you don’t perhaps gently guess what it is I want to say.” This time indeed she left him to his wonder, so that he had to support himself. “I’ve tried, all considerately—these three months—to let you see for yourself how I feel. I feel very strongly, Lady Grace; so that at last”—and his impatient sincerity took after another instant the jump—“well, I regularly worship you. You’re my absolute ideal. I think of you the whole time.”
She measured out consideration as if it had been a yard of pretty ribbon. “Are you sure youknowme enough?”
“I think I know a perfect woman when I see one!” Nothing now at least could have been more prompt, and while a decent pity for such a mistake showed in her smile he followed it up. “Isn’t what you rather mean that you haven’t cared sufficiently to knowme?If so, that can be little by little mended, Lady Grace.” He was in fact altogether gallant about it. “I’m aware of the limits of what I have to show or to offer, but I defy you to find a limit to my possible devotion.”
She deferred to that, but taking it in a lower key. “I believe you’d be very good to me.”
“Well, isn’tthatsomething to start with?”—he fairly pounced on it. “I’ll do any blest thing in life you like, I’ll accept any condition you impose, if you’ll only tell me you see your way.”
“Shouldn’t I have a little more first to see yours?” she asked. “When you say you’ll do anything in life I like, isn’t there anything you yourself want strongly enough to do?”
He cast a stare about on the suggestions of the scene. “Anything that will make money, you mean?”
“Make money or make reputation—or even just make the time pass.”
“Oh, what I have to look to in the way of a career?” If that was her meaning he could show after an instant that he didn’t fear it. “Well, your father, dear delightful man, has been so good as to give me to understand that he backs me for a decent deserving creature; and I’ve noticed, as you doubtless yourself have, that when Lord Theign backs a fellow——!”
He left the obvious moral for her to take up—which she did, but all interrogatively. “The fellow at once comes in for something awfully good?”
“I don’t in the least mind your laughing at me,” Lord John returned, “for when I put him the question of the lift he’d give me by speaking to you first he bade me simply remember the complete personal liberty in which he leaves you, and yet which doesn’t come—take my word!” said the young man sagely—“from his being at all indifferent.”
“No,” she answered—“father isn’t indifferent. But father’s ‘great’”
“Great indeed!”—her friend took it as with full comprehension. This appeared not to prevent, however, a second and more anxious thought. “Too great foryou?”
“Well, he makes me feel—even as his daughter—my extreme comparative smallness.”
It was easy, Lord John indicated, to see what she meant “He’s agrand seigneur, and a serious one—that’s what he is: the very type and model of it, down to the ground. So you can imagine,” the young man said, “what he makes me feel—most of all when he’s so awfully good-natured to me. His being as ‘great’ as you say and yet backing me—such as I am!—doesn’tthatstrike you as a good note for me, the best you could possibly require? For he reallywouldlike what I propose to you.”
She might have been noting, while she thought, that he had risen to ingenuity, to fineness, on the wings of his argument; under the effect of which her reply had the air of a concession. “Yes—he would like it.”
“Then hehasspoken to you?” her suitor eagerly asked.
“He hasn’t needed—he has ways of letting one know.”
“Yes, yes, he has ways; all his own—like everything else he has. He’s wonderful.”
She fully agreed. “He’s wonderful.”
The tone of it appeared somehow to shorten at once for Lord John the rest of his approach to a conclusion. “So you do see your way?”
“Ah—!” she said with a quick sad shrinkage.
“I mean,” her visitor hastened to explain, “if he does put it to you as the very best idea he has for you. When he does that—as I believe him ready to do—will you really and fairly listen to him? I’m certain, honestly, that when you know me better—!” His confidence in short donned a bravery.
“I’ve been feeling this quarter of an hour,” the girl returned, “that I do know you better.”
“Then isn’t that all I want?—unless indeed I ought perhaps to ask rather if it isn’t allyoudo! At any rate,” said Lord John, “I may see you again here?”
She waited a moment. “You must have patience with me.”
“Iamhaving it Butafteryour father’s appeal.”
“Well,” she said, “that must come first.”
“Then you won’t dodge it?”
She looked at him straight “I don’t dodge, Lord John.”
He admired the manner of it “You look awfully handsome as you say so—and you see whatthatdoes to me.” As to attentuate a little the freedom of which he went on: “May I fondly hope that if Lady Imber too should wish to put in another word for me——?”
“Will I listen to her?”—it brought Lady Grace straight down. “No, Lord John, let me tell you at once that I’ll do nothing of the sort Kitty’s quite another affair, and I never listen to her a bit more than I can help.”
Lord John appeared to feel, on this, that he mustn’t too easily, in honour, abandon a person who had presented herself to him as an ally. “Ah, you strike me as a little hard on her. Your father himself—in his looser moments!—takes pleasure in what she says.”
Our young woman’s eyes, as they rested on him after this remark, had no mercy for its extreme feebleness. “If you mean that she’s the most reckless rattle one knows, and that she never looks so beautiful as when she’s at her worst, and that, always clever for where she makes out her interest, she has learnt to ‘get round’ him till he only sees through her eyes—if you meanthatI understand you perfectly. But even if you think me horrid for reflecting so on my nearest and dearest, it’s not on the side on which he has most confidence in his elder daughter that his youngest is moved to have most confidence inhim.”
Lord John stared as if she had shaken some odd bright fluttering object in his face; but then recovering himself: “He hasn’t perhaps an absolutely boundless confidence—”
“In any one in the world but himself?”—she had taken him straight up. “He hasn’t indeed, and that’s what we must come to; so that even if he likes you as much as you doubtless very justly feel, it won’t be because you are right about your being nice, but becauseheis!”
“You mean that if I were wrong about it he would still insist that he isn’t?”
Lady Grace was indeed sure. “Absolutely—if he had begun so! He began so with Kitty—that is with allowing her everything.”
Lord John appeared struck. “Yes—and he still allows her two thousand.”
“I’m glad to hear it—she has never told me how much!” the girl undisguisedly smiled.
“Then perhaps I oughtn’t!”—he glowed with the light of contrition.
“Well, you can’t help it now,” his companion remarked with amusement.
“You mean that he ought to allowyouas much?” Lord John inquired. “I’m sure you’re right, and that he will,” he continued quite as in good faith; “but I want you to understand that I don’t care in the least what it may be!”
The subject of his suit took the longest look at him she had taken yet. “You’re very good to say so!”
If this was ironic the touch fell short, thanks to his perception that they had practically just ceased to be alone. They were in presence of a third figure, who had arrived from the terrace, but whose approach to them was not so immediate as to deprive Lord John of time for another question. “Will you lethimtell you, at all events, how good he thinks me?—and then let me come back and have it from you again?”
Lady Grace’s answer to this was to turn, as he drew nearer, to the person by whom they were now joined. “Lord John desires you should tell me, father, how good you think him.”
“‘Good,’ my dear?—good for what?” said Lord Theign a trifle absurdly, but looking from one of them to the other.
“I feel I must askhimto tell you.”
“Then I shall give him a chance—as I should particularly like you to go back and deal with those overwhelming children.”
“Ah, they don’t overwhelmyou, father!”—the girl put it with some point.
“If you mean to say I overwhelmedthem, I dare say I did,” he replied—“from my view of that vast collective gape of six hundred painfully plain and perfectly expressionless faces. But that was only for the time: I pumped advice—ohsuchadvice!—and they held the large bucket as still as my pet pointer, when I scratch him, holds his back. The bucket, under the stream—”
“Was bound to overflow?” Lady Grace suggested.
“Well, the strong recoil of the wave of intelligence has been not unnaturally followed by the formidable break. You must really,” Lord Theign insisted, “go and deal with it.”
His daughter’s smile, for all this, was perceptibly cold. “You work people up, father, and then leave others to let them down.”
“The two things,” he promptly replied, “require different natures.” To which he simply added, as with the habit of authority, though not of harshness, “Go!”
It was absolute and she yielded; only pausing an instant to look as with a certain gathered meaning from one of the men to the other. Faintly and resignedly sighing she passed away to the terrace and disappeared.
“The nature thatcanlet you down—I rather like it, you know!” Lord John threw off. Which, for an airy elegance in them, were perhaps just slightly rash words—his companion gave him so sharp a look as the two were left together.