Lord John, reannounced the next instant from the nearest quarter and quite waiving salutations, left no doubt of the high pitch of his eagerness and tension as soon as the door had closed behind him. “What on earth then do you suppose he has come back todo—?” To which he added while his hostess’s gesture impatiently disclaimed conjecture: “Because when a fellow really finds himself the centre of a cyclone——!”
“Isn’t it just at the centre,” she interrupted, “that you keep remarkably still, and only in the suburbs that you feel the rage? I count on dear Theign’s doing nothing in the least foolish—!”
“Ah, but he can’t have chucked everything for nothing,” Lord John sharply returned; “and wherever you place him in the rumpus he can’t not meet somehow, hang it, such an assault on his character as a great nobleman and good citizen.”
“It’s his luck to have become with the public of the newspapers the scapegoat-in-chief: for the sins, so-called, of a lot of people!” Lady Sandgate inconclusively sighed.
“Yes,” Lord John concluded for her, “the mercenary millions on whose traffic in their trumpery values—when they’re so lucky as to have any!—thisisn’t a patch!”
“Oh, there are casesandcases: situations and responsibilities so intensely differ!”—that appeared on the whole, for her ladyship, the moral to be gathered.
“Of course everything differs, all round, from everything,” Lord John went on; “and who in the world knows anything of his own case but the victim of circumstances exposing himself, for the highest and purest motives, to be literally torn to pieces?”
“Well,” said Lady Sandgate as, in her strained suspense, she freshly consulted her bracelet watch, “I hope he isn’t already torn—if you tell me you’ve been to Kitty’s.”
“Oh, he was all right so far: he had arrived and gone out again,” the young man explained, “as Lady Imber hadn’t been at home.”
“Ah cool Kitty!” his hostess sighed again—but diverted, as she spoke, by the reappearance of her butler, this time positively preceding Lord Theign, whom she met, when he presently stood before her, his garb of travel exchanged for consummate afternoon dress, with yearning tenderness and compassionate curiosity. “At last, dearest friend—what a joy! But with Kitty not at home to receive you?”
That young woman’s parent made light of it for the indulged creature’s sake. “Oh I knew my Kitty! I dressed and I find her at five-thirty.” To which he added as he only took in further, without expression, Lord John: “But Bender, who came there before my arrival—he hasn’t tried for me here?”
It was a point on which Lord John himself could at least be expressive. “I met him at the club at luncheon; he had had your letter—but for which chance, my dear man, I should have known nothing. You’ll see him all right at this house; but I’m glad, if I may say so, Theign,” the speaker pursued with some emphasis—“I’m glad, you know, to get hold of you first.”
Lord Theign seemed about to ask for the meaning of this remark, but his other companion’s apprehension had already overflowed. “You haven’t come back, have you—to whatever it may be!—fortroubleof any sort with Breckenridge?”
His lordship transferred his penetration to this fair friend, “Have you become so intensely absorbed—these remarkable days!—in ‘Breckenridge’?”
She felt the shadow, you would have seen, of his claimed right, or at least privilege, of search—yet easily, after an instant, emerged clear. “I’ve thought and dreamt but ofyou—suspicious man!—in proportion as the clamour has spread; and Mr. Bender meanwhile, if you want to know, hasn’t been near me once!”
Lord John came in a manner, and however unconsciously, to her aid. “You’d have seen, if he had been, what’s the matter with him, I think—and what perhaps Theign has seen from his own letter: since,” he went on to his fellow-visitor, “I understood him a week ago to have been much taken up with writing you.”
Lord Theign received this without comment, only again with an air of expertly sounding the speaker; after which he gave himself afresh for a moment to Lady Sandgate. “I’ve not come home for any clamour, as you surely know me well enough to believe; or to notice for a minute the cheapest insolence and aggression—which frankly scarce reached me out there; or which, so far as it did, I was daily washed clean of by those blest waters. I returned on Mr. Bender’s letter,” he then vouchsafed to Lord John—“three extraordinarily vulgar pages about the egregious Pap-pendick!”
“About his having suddenly turned up in person, yes, and, as Breckenridge says, marked the picture down?”—the young man was clearly all-knowing. “Thathasof course weighed on Bender—being confirmed apparently, on the whole, by the drift of public opinion.”
Lord Theign took, on this, with a frank show of reaction from some of his friend’s terms, a sharp turn off; he even ironically indicated the babbler or at least the blunderer in question to Lady Sandgate. “He too has known me so long, and he comes here to talk to me of ‘the drift of public opinion’!” After which he quite charged at his vain informant. “Am I to tell you again that I snap my fingers at the drift of public opinion?—which is but another name for the chatter of all the fools one doesn’t know, in addition to all those (and plenty of ‘em!) one damnably does.”
Lady Sandgate, by a turn of the hand, dropped oil from her golden cruse. “Ah, you didthat, in your own grand way, before you went abroad!”
“I don’t speak of the matter, my dear man, in the light of its effect onyou,” Lord John importantly explained—“but in the light of its effect on Bender; who so consumedly wants the picture, if heisto have it, to be a Mantovano, but seems unable to get it taken at last for anything but the fine old Moretto that of course it has always been.”
Lord Theign, in growing disgust at the whole beastly complication, betrayed more and more the odd pitch of the temper that had abruptly restored him with such incalculable weight to the scene of action. “Well, isn’t a fine old Moretto good enough for him; confound him?”
It pulled up not a little Lord John, who yet made his point. “A fine old Moretto, you know, was exactly what he declined at Dedborough—for its comparative, strictly comparative, insignificance; and he only thought of the picture when the wind began to rise for the enormous rarity—”
“That that mendacious young cad who has bamboozled Grace,” Lord Theign broke in, “tried to befool us, for his beggarly reasons, into claiming for it?”
Lady Sandgate renewed her mild influence. “Ah, the knowing people haven’t had their last word—the possible Mantovano isn’t explodedyet!” Her noble friend, however, declined the offered spell. “I’ve had enough of the knowing people—the knowing people are serpents! My picture’s to take or to leave—and it’s what I’ve come back, if you please, John, to say to your man to his face.”
This declaration had a report as sharp and almost as multiplied as the successive cracks of a discharged revolver; yet when the light smoke cleared Lady Sand-gate at least was still left standing and smiling. “Yes, why in mercy’s name can’t he choosewhich?—and why does he write him, dreadful Breckenridge, such tiresome argumentative letters?”
Lord John took up her idea as with the air of something that had been working in him rather vehemently, though under due caution too, as a consequence of this exchange, during which he had apprehensively watched his elder. “I don’t think I quite seehow, my dear Theign, the poor chap’s letter was so offensive.”
In that case his dear Theign could tell him. “Because it was a tissue of expressions that may pass current—over counters and in awful newspapers—inhisextraordinary world or country, but that I decline to take time to puzzle out here.”
“If he didn’t make himself understood,” Lord John took leave to laugh, “it must indeed have been an unusual production for Bender.”
“Oh, I often, with the wild beauty, if you will, of so many of his turns, haven’t a notion,” Lady Sandgate confessed with an equal gaiety, “of what he’s talking about.”
“I think I never miss his weird sense,” her younger guest again loyally contended—“and in fact as a general thing I rather like it!”
“I happen to like nothing that I don’t enjoy,” Lord Theign rejoined with some asperity—“and so far as I do follow the fellow he assumes on my part an interest in his expenditure of purchase-money that I neither feel nor pretend to. He doesn’t want—by what I spell out—the picture he refused at Dedborough; he may possibly want—if one reads it so—the picture on view in Bond Street; and he yet appears to make, with great emphasis, the stupid ambiguous point that these two ‘articles’ (the greatest of Morettos an ‘article’!) haven’t been ‘by now’ proved different: as if I engaged with him that I myself would so prove them!”
Lord John indulged in a pause—but also in a suggestion. “He must allude to your hoping—when you allowed us to place the picture with Mackintosh—that it would show to all London in the most precious light conceivable.”
“Well, if it hasn’t so shown”—and Lord Theign stared as if mystified—“what in the world’s the meaning of this preposterous racket?”
“The racket is largely,” his young friend explained, “the vociferation of the people who contradict each other about it.”
On which their hostess sought to enliven the gravity of the question. “Some—yes—shouting on the housetops that’s a Mantovano of the Mantovanos, and others shrieking back at them that they’re donkeys if not criminals.”
“He may take it for whatever he likes,” said Lord Theign, heedless of these contributions, “he may father it on Michael Angelo himself if he’ll but clear out with it and let me alone!”
“What he’dliketo take it for,” Lord John at this point saw his way to remark, “is something in the nature of a Hundred Thousand.”
“A Hundred Thousand?” cried his astonished friend.
“Quite, I dare say, a Hundred Thousand”—the young man enjoyed clearly handling even by the lips so round a sum.
Lady Sandgate disclaimed however with agility any appearance of having gaped. “Why, haven’t you yet realised, Theign, that those are the American figures?”
His lordship looked at her fixedly and then did the same by Lord John, after which he waited a little. “I’ve nothing to do with the American figures—which seem to me, if you press me, you know, quite intolerably vulgar.”
“Well, I’d be as vulgar as anybody for a Hundred Thousand!” Lady Sandgate hastened to proclaim.
“Didn’t he let us know at Dedborough,” Lord John asked of the master of that seat, “that he had no use, as he said, for lower values?”
“I’ve heard him remark myself,” said their companion, rising to the monstrous memory, “that he wouldn’t take a cheap picture—even though a ‘handsome’ one—as a present.”
“And does he call the thing round the corner a cheap picture?” the proprietor of the work demanded.
Lord John threw up his arms with a grin of impatience. “All he wants to do, don’t you see? is to prevent yourmakingit one!”
Lord Theign glared at this imputation to him of a low ductility. “I offered the thing, as it was, at an estimate worthy of it—and ofme.”
“My dear reckless friend,” his young adviser protested, “you named no figureat allwhen it came to the point——!”
“Itdidn’tcome to the point! Nothing came to the point but that I put a Moretto on view; as a thing, yes, perfectly”—Lord Theign accepted the reminding gesture—“on which a rich American had an eye and in which he had, so to speak, an interest. That was what I wanted, and so we left it—parting each of us ready but neither of us bound.”
“Ah, Mr. Bender’s bound, as he’d say,” Lady Sand-gate interposed—“‘bound’ to make you swallow the enormous luscious plum that your appetite so morbidly rejects!”
“My appetite, as morbid as you like”—her old friend had shrewdly turned on her—“is my own affair, and if the fellow must deal in enormities I warn him to carry them elsewhere!”
Lord John, plainly, by this time, was quite exasperated at the absurdity of him. “But how can’t you see that it’s only a plum, as she says, for a plum and an eye for an eye—since the picture itself, with this huge ventilation, is now quite a different affair?”
“How the deuce a different affair when just what the man himself confesses is that, in spite of all the chatter of the prigs and pedants, there’s no really established ground for treating it as anything but the same?” On which, as having so unanswerably spoken, Lord Theign shook himself free again, in his high petulance, and moved restlessly to where the passage to the other room appeared to offer his nerves an issue; all moreover to the effect of suggesting to us that something still other than what he had said might meanwhile work in him behind and beneath that quantity. The spectators of his trouble watched him, for the time, in uncertainty and with a mute but associated comment on the perversity and oddity he had so suddenly developed; Lord John giving a shrug of almost bored despair and Lady Sandgate signalling caution and tact for their action by a finger flourished to her lips, and in fact at once proceeding to apply these arts. The subject of her attention had still remained as in worried thought; he had even mechanically taken up a book from a table—which he then, after an absent glance at it, tossed down.
“You’re so detached from reality, you adorable dreamer,” she began—“and unless you stick tothatyou might as well have done nothing. What you call the pedantry and priggishness and all the rest of it is exactly what poor Breckenridge asked almost on his knees, wonderful man, to beallowedto pay you for; since even if the meddlers and chatterers haven’t settled anything for those who know—though which of the elect themselves after alldoesseem to know?—it’s a great service rendered him to have started such a hare to run!”
Lord John took freedom to throw off very much the same idea. “Certainly his connection with the whole question and agitation makes no end for his glory.”
It didn’t, that remark, bring their friend back to him, but it at least made his indifference flash with derision. “His ‘glory’—Mr. Bender’s glory? Why, they quite universally loathe him—judging by the stuff they print!”
“Oh, here—as a corrupter of our morals and a promoter of our decay, even though so many are flat on their faces to him—yes! But it’s another affair over there where the eagle screams like a thousand steam-whistles and the newspapers flap like the leaves of the forest:therehe’ll be, if you’ll only let him, the biggest thing going; since sound, in that air, seems to mean size, and size to be all that counts. If he said of the thing, as you recognise,” Lord John went on, “‘It’s going to be a Mantovano,’ why you can bet your life that itis—that it hasgotto be some kind of a one.”
His fellow-guest, at this, drew nearer again, irritated, you would have been sure, by the unconscious infelicity of the pair—worked up to something quite openly wilful and passionate. “No kind of a furious flaunting one, undermypatronage, that I can prevent, my boy! The Dedborough picture in the market—owing to horrid little circumstances that regard myself alone—is the Dedborough picture at a decent, sufficient, civilised Dedborough price, and nothing else whatever; which I beg you will take as my last word on the subject.”
Lord John, trying whether hecouldtake it, momentarily mingled his hushed state with that of their hostess, to whom he addressed a helpless look; after which, however, he appeared to find that he could only reassert himself. “May I nevertheless reply that I think you’ll not be able to preventanything?—since the discussed object will completely escape your control in New York!”
“And almost any discussed object”—Lady Sand-gate rose to the occasion also—“is in New York, by what one hears, easilywortha Hundred Thousand!”
Lord Theign looked from one of them to the other. “I sell the man a Hundred Thousand worth of swagger and advertisement; and of fraudulent swagger and objectionable advertisement at that?”
“Well”—Lord John was but briefly baffled—“when the picture’s his you can’t help its doing what it can and what it will for him anywhere!”
“Then it isn’t his yet,” the elder man retorted—“and I promise you never will be if he hassentyou to me with his big drum!”
Lady Sandgate turned sadly on this to her associate in patience, as if the case were now really beyond them. “Yes, how indeed can it everbecomehis if Theign simply won’t let him pay for it?”
Her question was unanswerable. “It’s the first time in all my life I’ve known a man feel insulted, in such a piece of business, by happeningnotto be, in the usual way, more or less swindled!”
“Theign is unable to take it in,” her ladyship explained, “that—as I’ve heard it said of all these money-monsters of the new type—Bender simply can’taffordnot to be cited and celebrated as the biggest buyer who ever lived.”
“Ah, cited and celebrated at myexpense—say it at once and have it over, that I may enjoy what you all want to do to me!”
“The dear man’s inimitable—at his ‘expense’!” It was more than Lord John could bear as he fairly flung himself off in his derisive impotence and addressed his wail to Lady Sandgate.
“Yes, at my expense is exactly what I mean,” Lord Theign asseverated—“at the expense of my modest claim to regulate my behaviour by my own standards. There you perfectlyareabout the man, and it’s precisely what I say—that he’s to hustle and harry mebecausehe’s a money-monster: which I never for a moment dreamed of, please understand, when I let you, John, thrust him at me as a pecuniary resource at Dedborough. I didn’t put my property on view thathemight blow about it———!”
“No, if you like it,” Lady Sandgate returned; “but you certainly didn’t so arrange”—she seemed to think her point somehow would help—“that you might blow about it yourself!”
“Nobody wants to ‘blow,’” Lord John more stoutly interposed, “either hot or cold, I take it; but I really don’t see the harm of Bender’s liking to be known for the scale of his transactions—actual or merely imputed even, if you will; since that scale is really so magnificent.”
Lady Sandgate half accepted, half qualified this plea. “The only question perhaps is why he doesn’t try for some precious work that somebody—less delicious than dear Theign—canbe persuaded on bended knees to accept a hundred thousand for.”
“‘Try’ for one?”—her younger visitor took it up while her elder more attentively watched him. “That was exactly what he did try for when he pressed you so hard in vain for the great Sir Joshua.”
“Oh well, he mustn’t come back tothat—must he, Theign?” her ladyship cooed.
That personage failed to reply, so that Lord John went on, unconscious apparently of the still more suspicious study to which he exposed himself. “Besides which thereareno things of that magnitude knocking about, don’t you know?—they’vegotto be worked up first if they’re to reach the grand publicity of the Figure! Would you mind,” he continued to his noble monitor, “an agreement on some such basis asthis?—that you shall resign yourself to the biggest equivalent you’ll squeamishly consent to take, if it’s at the same time the smallest he’ll squeamishly consent to offer; but that, that done, you shall leave him free——”
Lady Sandgate took it up straight, rounding it off, as their companion only waited. “Leave him free to talk about the sum offered and the sum taken as practically one and the same?”
“Ah, you know,” Lord John discriminated, “he doesn’t ‘talk’ so much himself—there’s really nothing blatant or crude about poor Bender. It’s the rate at which—by the very way he’s ‘fixed’: an awful way indeed, I grant you!—a perfect army of reporter-wretches, close at his heels, are always talking for him and of him.”
Lord Theign spoke hereupon at last with the air as of an impulse that had been slowly gathering force. “Youtalk for him, my dear chap, pretty well. You urge his case, my honour, quite as if you were assured of a commission on the job—on a fine ascending scale! Has he put you up to that proposition, eh?Doyou get a handsome percentage andareyou to make a good thing of it?”
The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry—whether from a good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but he otherwise showed a bold front, only bending his eyes a moment on his watch. “As he’s to come to you himself—and I don’t know why the mischief he doesn’t come!—he will answer you that graceful question.”
“Will he answer it,” Lord Theign asked, “with the veracity that the suggestion you’ve just made on his behalf represents him as so beautifully adhering to?” On which he again quite fiercely turned his back and recovered his detachment, the others giving way behind him to a blanker dismay.
Lord John, in spite of this however, pumped up a tone. “I don’t see why you should speak as if I were urging some abomination.”
“Then I’ll tell you why!”—and Lord Theign was upon him again for the purpose. “Because I had rather give the cursed thing away outright and for good and all than that it should hang out there another day in the interest of such equivocations!”
Lady Sandgate’s dismay yielded to her wonder, and her wonder apparently in turn to her amusement. “‘Give it away,’ my dear friend, to a man who only longs to smother you in gold?”
Her dear friend, however, had lost patience with her levity. “Give it away—just for a luxury of protest and a stoppage of chatter—to some cause as unlike as possible that of Mr. Bender’s power of sound and his splendid reputation: to the Public, to the Authorities, to the Thingumbob, to the Nation!”
Lady Sandgate broke into horror while Lord John stood sombre and stupefied. “Ah, my dear creature, you’ve flights of extravagance——!”
“One thing’s very certain,” Lord Theign quite heedlessly pursued—“that the thought of my property on view there does give intolerably on my nerves, more and more every minute that I’m conscious of it; so that, hang it, if one thinks of it, why shouldn’t I, for my relief, do again, damme,what I like?—that is bang the door in their faces, have the show immediately stopped?” He turned with the attraction of this idea from one of his listeners to the other. “It’smyshow—it isn’t Bender’s, surely!—and I can do just as I choose with it.”
“Ah, but isn’t that the very point?”—and Lady Sandgate put it to Lord John. “Isn’t it Bender’s show much more than his?”
Her invoked authority, however, in answer to this, made but a motion of disappointment and disgust at so much rank folly—while Lord Theign, on the other hand, followed up his happy thought. “Then if it’s Bender’s show, or if he claims it is, there’s all the more reason!” And it took his lordship’s inspiration no longer to flower. “See here, John—do this: go right round there this moment, please, and tell them from me to shut straight down!”
“‘Shut straight down’?” the young man abhorrently echoed.
“Stop itto-night—wind it up and end it: see?” The more the entertainer of that vision held it there the more charm it clearly took on for him. “Have the picture removed from view and the incident closed.”
“You seriously askthatof me!” poor Lord John quavered.
“Why in the world shouldn’t I? It’s a jolly lot less than you asked of me a month ago at Dedborough.”
“What then am I to say to them?” Lord John spoke but after a long moment, during which he had only looked hard and—an observer might even then have felt—ominously at his taskmaster.
That personage replied as if wholly to have done with the matter. “Say anything that comes into your clever head. I don’t really see that there’s anything elseforyou!” Lady Sandgate sighed to the messenger, who gave no sign save of positive stiffness.
The latter seemed still to weigh his displeasing obligation; then he eyed his friend significantly—almost portentously. “Those are absolutely your sentiments?”
“Those are absolutely my sentiments”—and Lord Theign brought this out as with the force of a physical push.
“Very well then!” But the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. “Not one more day?”
Lord Theign only waved him away. “Not one more hour!”
He paused at the door, this reluctant spokesman, as if for some supreme protest; but after another prolonged and decisive engagement with the two pairs of eyes that waited, though differently, on his performance, he clapped on his hat as in the rage of his resentment and departed on his mission.
“He can’t bear to do it, poor man!” Lady Sand-gate ruefully remarked to her remaining guest after Lord John had, under extreme pressure, dashed out to Bond Street.
“I dare say not!”—Lord Theign, flushed with the felicity of self-expression, made little of that. “But he goes too far, you see, and it clears the air—pouah! Now therefore”—and he glanced at the clock—“I must go to Kitty.”
“Kitty—with what Kitty wants,” Lady Sandgate opined—“won’t thank you forthat!”
“She never thanks me for anything”—and the fact of his resignation clearly added here to his bitterness. “So it’s no great loss!”
“Won’t you at any rate,” his hostess asked, “wait for Bender?”
His lordship cast it to the winds. “What have I to do with him now?”
“Why surely if he’ll accept your own price—!”
Lord Theign thought—he wondered; and then as if fairly amused at himself: “Hanged if I know whatismy own price!” After which he went for his hat. “But there’s one thing,” he remembered as he came back with it: “where’s my too,toounnatural daughter?”
“If you mean Grace and really want her I’ll send and find out.”
“Not now”—he bethought himself. “But does sheseethat chatterbox?”
“Mr. Crimble? Yes, she sees him.”
He kept his eyes on her. “Then how far has it gone?”
Lady Sandgate overcame an embarrassment. “Well, not even yet, I think, so far as they’d like.”
“They’d ‘like’—heaven save the mark!—to marry?”
“I suspect them of it. What line, if it should come to that,” she asked, “would you then take?”
He was perfectly prompt. “The line that for Grace it’s simply ignoble.”
The force of her deprecation of such language was qualified by tact. “Ah, darling, as dreadful asthat?”
He could but view the possibility with dark resentment. “It lets us so down—from what we’ve always been and done; so down, down, down that I’m amazed you don’t feel it!”
“Oh, I feel there’s still plenty to keep you up!” she soothingly laughed.
He seemed to consider this vague amount—which he apparently judged, however, not so vast as to provide for the whole yearning of his nature. “Well, my dear,” he thus more blandly professed, “I shall need all the extraagrémentthat your affection can supply.”
If nothing could have been, on this, richer response, nothing could at the same time have bee more pleasing than her modesty. “Ah, my affectionate Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always in flood; but in any more worldly element than that—as you’ve ever seen for yourself—a poor strand with my own sad affairs, a broken reed; not ‘great’ as they used so finely to call it! Youare—with the natural sense of greatness and, for supreme support, the instinctive grand man doing and taking things.”
He sighed, none the less, he groaned, with his thoughts of trouble, for the strain he foresaw on these resolutions. “If you mean that I hold up my head, on higher grounds, I grant that I always have. But how much longer possible when my children commit such vulgarities? Why in the name of goodness are such children? What the devil has got into them, and is it really the case that when Grace offers as a proof of her license and a specimen of her taste a son-in-law as you tell me I’m in danger of helplessly to swallow the dose?”
“Do you find Mr. Crimble,” Lady Sandgate as if there might really be something to say, “so utterly out of the question?”
“I found him on the two occasions before I went away in the last degree offensive and outrageous; but even if he charged one and one’s poor dear decent old defences with less rabid a fury everything about him would forbidthatkind of relation.”
What kind of relation, if any, Hugh’s deficiencies might still render thinkable Lord Theign was kept from going on to mention by the voice of Mr. Gotch, who had thrown open the door to the not altogether assured sound of “Mr. Breckenridge Bender.” The guest in possession gave a cry of impatience, but Lady Sandgate said “Coming up?”
“If his lordship will see him.”
“Oh, he’s beyond his time,” his lordship pronounced—“I can’t see him now!”
“Ah, butmustn’tyou—and mayn’tIthen?” She waited, however, for no response to signify to her servant “Let him come,” and her companion could but exhale a groan of reluctant accommodation as if he wondered at the point she made of it. It enlightened him indeed perhaps a little that she went on while Gotch did her bidding. “Does the kind of relation you’d be condemned to with Mr. Crimble let you down, down, down, as you say, more than the relation you’ve been having with Mr. Bender?”
Lord Theign had for it the most uninforming of stares. “Do you mean don’t I hate ‘em equally both?”
She cut his further reply short, however, by a “Hush!” of warning—Mr. Bender was there and his introducer had left them.
Lord Theign, full of his purpose of departure, sacrificed hereupon little to ceremony. “I’ve but a moment, to my regret, to give you, Mr. Bender, and if you’ve been unavoidably detained, as you great bustling people are so apt to be, it will perhaps still be soon enough for your comfort to hear from me that I’ve just given order to close our exhibition. From the present hour on, sir”—he put it with the firmness required to settle the futility of an appeal.
Mr. Bender’s large surprise lost itself, however, promptly enough, in Mr. Bender’s larger ease. “Why, do you really mean it, Lord Theign?—removing already from view a work that gives innocent gratification to thousands?”
“Well,” said his lordship curtly, “if thousands have seen it I’ve done what I wanted, and if they’ve been gratified I’m content—and inviteyouto be.”
Mr. Bender showed more keenness for this richer implication. “In other words it’s I who may remove the picture?”
“Well—if you’ll take it on my estimate.”
“But what, Lord Theign, all this time,” Mr. Bender almost pathetically pleaded, “isyour estimate?”
The parting guest had another pause, which prolonged itself, after he had reached the door, in a deep solicitation of their hostess’s conscious eyes. This brief passage apparently inspired his answer. “Lady Sandgate will tell you.” The door closed behind him.
The charming woman smiled then at her other friend, whose comprehensive presence appeared now to demand of her some account of these strange proceedings. “He means that your own valuation is much too shockingly high.”
“But how can I knowhowmuch unless I find out what he’ll take?” The great collector’s spirit had, in spite of its volume, clearly not reached its limit of expansion. “Is he crazily waiting for the thing to be provednotwhat Mr. Crimble claims?”
“No, he’s waiting for nothing—since he holds that claim demolished by Pappendick’s tremendous negative, which you wrote to tell him of.”
Vast, undeveloped and suddenly grave, Mr. Bender’s countenance showed like a barren tract under a black cloud. “I wrote toreport, fair and square, on Pap-pendick, but to tell him I’d take the picture just the same, negative and all.”
“Ah, but take it in that way not for what it is but for what it isn’t.”
“We know nothing about what it ‘isn’t,’” said Mr. Bender, “after all that has happened—we’ve only learned a little better every day what it is.”
“You mean,” his companion asked, “the biggest bone of artistic contention——?”
“Yes,”—he took it from her—“the biggest that has been thrown into the arena for quite a while. I guess I can do with it forthat.”
Lady Sandgate, on this, after a moment, renewed her personal advance; it was as if she had now made sure of the soundness of her main bridge. “Well, if it’s the biggest bone I won’t touch it; I’ll leave it to be mauled by my betters. But since his lordship has asked me to name a price, dear Mr. Bender, I’ll name one—and as you prefer big prices I’ll try to make it suit you. Only it won’t be for the portrait of a person nobody is agreed about. The whole world is agreed, you know, about my great-grandmother.”
“Oh, shucks, Lady Sandgate!”—and her visitor turned from her with the hunch of overcharged shoulders.
But she apparently felt that she held him, or at least that even if such a conviction might be fatuous she must now put it to the touch. “You’ve been delivered into my hands—too charmingly; and you won’t really pretend that you don’t recognise that and in fact rather like it.”
He faced about to her again as to a case of coolness unparalleled—though indeed with a quick lapse of real interest in the question of whether he had been artfully practised upon; an indifference to bad debts or peculation like that of some huge hotel or other business involving a margin for waste. He could afford, he could work waste too, clearly—and what was it, that term, you might have felt him ask, but a mean measure, anyway? quite as the “artful,” opposed to his larger game, would be the hiding and pouncing of children at play. “Do I gather that those uncanny words of his were just meant to put me off?” he inquired. And then as she but boldly and smilingly shrugged, repudiating responsibility, “Look here, Lady Sandgate, ain’t you honestly going to help me?” he pursued.
This engaged her sincerity without affecting her gaiety. “Mr. Bender, Mr. Bender, I’ll help you if you’ll helpme!”
“You’ll really get me something from him to go on with?”
“I’ll get you something from him to go on with.”
“That’s all I ask—to getthat. Then I can move the way I want. But without it I’m held up.”
“You shall have it,” she replied, “if I in turn may look toyoufor a trifle on account.”
“Well,” he dryly gloomed at her, “what do you call a trifle?”
“I mean”—she waited but an instant—“what you would feel as one.”
“That won’t do. You haven’t the least idea, Lady Sandgate,” he earnestly said, “howI feel at these foolish times. I’ve never got used to them yet.”
“Ah, don’t you understand,” she pressed, “that if I give you an advantage I’m completely at your mercy?”
“Well, what mercy,” he groaned, “do you deserve?”
She waited a little, brightly composed—then she indicated her inner shrine, the whereabouts of her precious picture. “Go and look at her again and you’ll see.”
His protest was large, but so, after a moment, was his compliance—his heavy advance upon the other room, from just within the doorway of which the great Lawrence was serenely visible. Mr. Bender gave it his eyes once more—though after the fashion verily of a man for whom it had now no freshness of a glamour, no shade of a secret; then he came back to his hostess. “Do you call giving me an advantage squeezing me by your sweet modesty for less than I may possibly bear?”
“How can I say fairer,” she returned, “than that, with my backing about the other picture, which I’ve passed you my word for, thrown in, I’ll resign myself to whatever you may be disposed—characteristically!—to give for this one.”
“If it’s a question of resignation,” said Mr. Bender, “you mean of course what I may be disposed—characteristically!—notto give.”
She played on him for an instant all her radiance. “Yes then, you dear sharp rich thing!”
“And you take in, I assume,” he pursued, “that I’m just going to lean on you, for what I want, with the full weight of a determined man.”
“Well,” she laughed, “I promise you I’ll thoroughly obey the direction of your pressure.”
“All right then!” And he stopped before her, in his unrest, monumentally pledged, yet still more massively immeasurable. “How’ll you have it?”
She bristled as with all the possible beautiful choices; then she shed her selection as a heaving fruit-tree might have dropped some round ripeness. It was for her friend to pick up his plum and his privilege. “Will you write a cheque?”
“Yes, if you want it right away.” To which, however, he added, clapping vainly a breast-pocket: “But my cheque-book’s down in my car.”
“At the door?” She scarce required his assent to touch a bell. “I can easily send for it.” And she threw off while they waited: “It’s so sweet your ‘flying round’ with your cheque-book!”
He put it with promptitude another way. “It flies round pretty well withMr——!”
“Mr. Bender’s cheque-book—in his car,” she went on to Gotch, who had answered her summons.
The owner of the interesting object further instructed him: “You’ll find in the pocket a large red morocco case.”
“Very good, sir,” said Gotch—but with another word for his mistress. “Lord John would like to know—”
“Lord John’s there?” she interrupted.
Gotch turned to the open door. “Here he is, my lady.”
She accommodated herself at once, under Mr. Bender’s eye, to the complication involved in his lordship’s presence. “It’s he who went round to Bond Street.”
Mr. Bender stared, but saw the connection. “To stop the show?” And then as the young man was already there: “You’ve stopped the show?”
“It’s ‘on’ more than ever!” Lord John responded while Gotch retired: a hurried, flurried, breathless Lord John, strikingly different from the backward messenger she had lately seen despatched. “But Theign should be here!”—he addressed her excitedly. “I announce you a call from the Prince.”
“The Prince?”—she gasped as for the burden of the honour. “He follows you?”
Mr. Bender, with an eagerness and a candour there was no mistaking, recognised on behalf of his ampler action a world of associational advantage and auspicious possibility. “Is the Princeafterthe thing?”
Lord John remained, in spite of this challenge, conscious of nothing but his message. “He was there with Mackintosh—to see and admire the picture; which he thinks, by the way, a Mantovano pure and simple!—and did me the honour to remember me. When he heard me report to Mackintosh in his presence the sentiments expressed to me here by our noble friend and of which, embarrassed though I doubtless was,” the young man pursued to Lady Sandgate, “I gave as clear an account as I could, he was so delighted with it that he declared they mustn’t think then of taking the thing off, but must on the contrary keep putting it forward for all it’s worth, and he would come round and congratulate and thank Theign and explain him his reasons.”
Their hostess cast about for a sign. “Why Theign is at Kitty’s, worse luck! The Prince calls on himhere?”
“He calls, you see, onyou, my lady—at five-forty-five; and graciously desired me so to put it you.”
“He’s very kind, but”—she took in her condition—“I’m not evendressed!”
“You’ll have time”—the young man was a comfort—“while I rush to Berkeley Square. And pardon me, Bender—though it’s so near—if I just bag your car.”
“That’s, that’s it, take his car!”—Lady Sandgate almost swept him away.
“You may use my car all right,” Mr. Bender contributed—“but what I want to know is what the man’safter.”
“The man? what man?” his friend scarce paused to ask.
“The Prince then—if you allow heisa man! Is he after my picture?”
Lord John vividly disclaimed authority. “If you’ll wait, my dear fellow, you’ll see.”
“Oh why should he ‘wait’?” burst from their cautious companion—only to be caught up, however, in the next breath, so swift her gracious revolution. “Wait, wait indeed, Mr. Bender—I won’t give you up for any Prince!” With which she appealed again to Lord John. “He wants to ‘congratulate’?”
“On Theign’s decision, as I’ve told you—which I announced to Mackintosh, by Theign’s extraordinary order, under his Highness’s nose, and which his Highness, by the same token, took up like a shot.”
Her face, as she bethought herself, was convulsed as by some quick perception of what her informant must have done and what therefore the Prince’s interest rested on; all, however, to the effect, given their actual company, of her at once dodging and covering that issue. “The decision to remove the picture?”
Lord John also observed a discretion. “He wouldn’t hear of such a thing—says it must stay stock still. So there you are!”
This determined in Mr. Bender a not unnatural, in fact quite a clamorous, series of questions. “Butwhereare we, and what has the Prince to do with Lord Theign’s decision when that’s allI’mhere for? What in thunderisLord Theign’s decision—what was his ‘extraordinary order’?”
Lord John, too long detained and his hand now on the door, put off this solicitor as he had already been put off. “Lady Sandgate,youtell him! I rush!”
Mr. Bender saw him vanish, but all to a greater bewilderment. “What the h—— then (I beg your pardon!) is he talking about, and what ‘sentiments’ did he report round there that Lord Theign had been expressing?”
His hostess faced it not otherwise than if she had resolved not to recognise the subject of his curiosity—for fear of other recognitions. “They put everything onme, my dear man—but I haven’t the least idea.”
He looked at her askance. “Then why does the fellow say you have?”
Much at a loss for the moment, she yet found her way. “Because the fellow’s so agog that he doesn’t knowwhathe says!” In addition to which she was relieved by the reappearance of Gotch, who bore on a salver the object he had been sent for and to which he duly called attention.
“The large red morocco case.”
Lady Sandgate fairly jumped at it. “Your blessed cheque-book. Lay it on my desk,” she said to Gotch, though waiting till he had departed again before she resumed to her visitor: “Mightn’t we conclude before he comes?”
“The Prince?” Mr. Bender’s imagination had strayed from the ground to which she sought to lead it back, and it but vaguely retraced its steps. “Willhewant your great-grandmother?”
“Well, he may when he sees her!” Lady Sandgate laughed. “And Theign, when he comes, will give you on his own question, I feel sure, every information. Shall I fish it out for you?” she encouragingly asked, beside him by her secretary-desk, at which he had arrived under her persuasive guidance and where she sought solidly to establish him, opening out the gilded crimson case for his employ, so that he had but to help himself. “What enormous cheques!Youcan never draw one for two-pound-ten!”
“That’s exactly what you deserve Ishoulddo!” He remained after this solemnly still, however, like some high-priest circled with ceremonies; in consonance with which, the next moment, both her hands held out to him the open and immaculate page of the oblong series much as they might have presented a royal infant at the christening-font.
He failed, in his preoccupation, to receive it; so she placed it before him on the table, coming away with a brave gay “Well, I leave it to you!” She had not, restlessly revolving, kept her discreet distance for many minutes before she found herself almost face to face with the recurrent Gotch, upright at the door with a fresh announcement.
“Mr. Crimble, please—for Lady Grace.”
“Mr. Crimbleagain?”—she took it discomposedly.
It reached Mr. Bender at the secretary, but to a different effect. “Mr. Crimble? Why he’s just the man I want to see!”
Gotch, turning to the lobby, had only to make way for him. “Here he is, my lady.”
“Then tell her ladyship.”
“She has come down,” said Gotch while Hugh arrived and his companion withdrew, and while Lady Grace, reaching the scene from the other quarter, emerged in bright equipment—in her hat, scarf and gloves.