Face to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the impression his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn’t want to go?” And then before Lord John could reply: “What the deuce is the matter with her?”
Lord John took his time. “I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble.”
“And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?”
“A young man who was just with her—and whom she appears to have invited.”
“Where is he then?” Lord Theign demanded.
“Off there among the pictures—which he seems partly to have come for.”
“Oh!”—it made his lordship easier. “Then he’s all right—on such a day.”
His companion could none the less just wonder. “Hadn’t Lady Grace told you?”
“That he was coming? Not that I remember.” But Lord Theign, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve had other fish to fry, and you know the freedom I allow her.”
His friend had a vivid gesture. “My dear man, I only ask to profit by it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John’s face a light of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.
Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score—at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also—toknowthe time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of whom I’ve but just heard?”
“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord John’s difficulties. “I mustn’t appear to Bender to have failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn’t been perhaps,” he continued, “quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if I’m not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without abhorrence. Only I’ve led her to expect—for our case—that you’ll be so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her yourself.”
“Without loss, you mean, of—a—my daughter’s time?” Lord Theign, confessedly and amiably interested, had accepted these intimations—yet with the very blandness that was not accessible to hustling and was never forgetful of its standing privilege of criticism. He had come in from his public duty, a few minutes before, somewhat flushed and blown; but that had presently dropped—to the effect, we should have guessed, of his appearing to Lord John at least as cool as the occasion required. His appearance, we ourselves certainly should have felt, was in all respects charming—with the great note of it the beautiful restless, almost suspicious, challenge to you, on the part of deep and mixed things in him, his pride and his shyness, his conscience, his taste and his temper, to deny that he was admirably simple. Obviously, at this rate, he had a passion for simplicity—simplicity, above all, of relation with you, and would show you, with the last subtlety of displeasure, his impatience of your attempting anything more with himself. With such an ideal of decent ease he would, confound you, “sink” a hundred other attributes—or the recognition at least and the formulation of them—that you might abjectly have taken for granted in him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages, flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective, a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion, you might infer—to cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any opportunity, however convenient, for an unfair pull. Which habit it was that must have produced in him a sort of ripe and radiant fairness; if it be allowed us, that is, to figure in so shining an air a nobleman of fifty-three, of an undecided rather than a certified frame or outline, of a head thinly though neatly covered and not measureably massive, of an almost trivial freshness, of a face marked but by a fine inwrought line or two and lighted by a merely charming expression. You might somehow have traced back the whole character so presented to an ideal privately invoked—that of his establishing in the formal garden of his suffered greatness such easy seats and short perspectives, such winding paths and natural-looking waters, as would mercifully break up the scale. You would perhaps indeed have reflected at the same time that the thought of so much mercy was almost more than anything else the thought of a great option and a great margin—in fine of fifty alternatives. Which remarks of ours, however, leave his lordship with his last immediate question on his hands.
“Well, yes—that, of course, in all propriety,” his companion has meanwhile replied to it. “But I was thinking a little, you understand, of the importance of our own time.”
Divinably Lord Theign put himself out less, as we may say, for the comparatively matter-of-course haunters of his garden than for interlopers even but slightly accredited. He seemed thus not at all to strain to “understand” in this particular connection—it would be his familiarly amusing friend Lord John, clearly, who must do most of the work for him. “‘Our own’ in the sense of yours and mine?”
“Of yours and mine and Lady Imber’s, yes—and a good bit, last not least, in that of my watching and waiting mother’s.” This struck no prompt spark of apprehension from his listener, so that Lord John went on: “The last thing she did this morning was to remind me, with her fine old frankness, that she would like to learn without more delay where, on the whole question, sheis, don’t you know? What she put to me”—the younger man felt his ground a little, but proceeded further—“what she put to me, with her rather grand way of lookingallquestions straight in the face, you see, was: Do we or don’t we, decidedly, take up practically her very handsome offer—‘very handsome’ being, I mean, whatshecalls it; though it strikes even me too, you know, as rather decent.”
Lord Theign at this point resigned himself to know. “Kitty has of course rubbed into me how decent she herself finds it. She hurls herself again on me—successfully!—for everything, and it suits her down to the ground. She pays her beastly debt—that is, I mean to say,” and he took himself up, though it was scarce more than perfunctory, “discharges her obligations—by her sister’s fair hand; not to mention a few other trifles for which I naturally provide.”
Lord John, a little unexpectedly to himself on the defensive, was yet but briefly at a loss. “Of course we take into account, don’t we? not only the fact of my mother’s desire (intended, I assure you, to be most flattering) that Lady Grace shall enter our family with all honours, but her expressed readiness to facilitate the thing by an understanding over and above——”
“Over and above Kitty’s release from her damnable payment?”—Lord Theign reached out to what his guest had left rather in the air. “Of course we takeeverythinginto account—or I shouldn’t, my dear fellow, be discussing with you at all a business one or two of whose aspects so little appeal to me: especially as there’s nothing, you easily conceive, that a daughter of mine can come in for by entering even your family, or any other (as a family) that she wouldn’t be quite as sure of by just staying in her own. The Duchess’s idea, at any rate, if I’ve followed you, is that if Grace does accept you she settles on you twelve thousand; with the condition—”
Lord John was already all there. “Definitely, yes, of your settling the equivalent on Lady Grace.”
“And what do you call the equivalent of twelve thousand?”
“Why, tacked on to a value so great and so charming as Lady Grace herself, I dare say such a sum as nine or ten would serve.”
“And where the mischief, if you please, at this highly inconvenient time, am I to pick up nine or ten thousand?”
Lord John declined, with a smiling, a fairly irritating eye for his friend’s general resources, to consider that question seriously. “Surely you can have no difficulty whatever—!”
“Why not?—when you can see for yourself that I’ve had this year to let poor dear old Hill Street! Do you call it the moment for me to havelikedto see myself all but cajoled into planking down even such a matter as the very much lower figure of Kitty’s horrid incubus?”
“Ah, but the inducement and thequid pro quo,” Lord John brightly indicated, “are here much greater! In the case you speak of you will only have removed the incubus—which, I grant you, she must and you must feel as horrid. In this other you pacify Lady Imberandmarry Lady Grace: marry her to a man who has set his heart on her and of whom she has just expressed—to himself—a very kind and very high opinion.”
“She has expressed a very high opinion of you?”—Lord Theign scarce glowed with credulity.
But the younger man held his ground. “She has told me she thoroughly likes me and that—though a fellow feels an ass repeating such things—she thinks me perfectly charming.”
“A tremendous creature, eh, all round? Then,” said Lord Theign, “what does she want more?”
“She very possibly wants nothing—but I’m to that beastly degree, you see,” his visitor patiently explained, “in the cleft stick of my fearfully positive mother’s wants. Those are her ‘terms,’ and I don’t mind saying that they’re most disagreeable to me—I quite hate ‘em: there! Only I think it makes a jolly difference that I wouldn’t touch ‘em with a long pole if my personal feeling—in respect to Lady Grace—wasn’t so immensely enlisted.”
“I assure you I’d chuck ‘em out of window, my boy, if I didn’t believe you’d be really good to her,” Lord Theign returned with the properest spirit.
It only encouraged his companion. “Youwilljust tell her then, now and here, how good you honestly believe I shall be?”
This appeal required a moment—a longer look at him. “You truly hold that that friendly guarantee, backed by my parental weight, will do your job?”
“That’s the conviction I entertain.”
Lord Theign thought again. “Well, even if your conviction’s just, that still doesn’t tell me into which of my very empty pockets it will be of the least use for me to fumble.”
“Oh,” Lord John laughed, “when a man has such a tremendous assortment of breeches—!” He pulled up, however, as, in his motion, his eye caught the great vista of the open rooms. “If it’s a question of pockets—and what’sin‘em—here precisely is my man!” This personage had come back from his tour of observation and was now, on the threshold of the hall, exhibited to Lord Theign as well. Lord John’s welcome was warm. “I’ve had awfully to fail you, Mr. Bender, but I was on the point of joining you. Let me, however, still better, introduce you to our host.”
Mr. Bender indeed, formidably advancing, scarce had use for this assistance. “Happy to meet you—especially in your beautiful home, Lord Theign.” To which he added while the master of Dedborough stood good-humouredly passive to his approach: “I’ve been round, by your kind permission and the light of nature, and haven’t required support; though if I had there’s a gentleman there who seemed prepared to allow me any amount.” Mr. Bender, out of his abundance, evoked as by a suggestive hand this contributory figure. “A young, spare, nervous gentleman with eye-glasses—I guess he’s an author. A friend of yours too?” he asked of Lord John.
The answer was prompt and emphatic. “No, the gentleman is no friend at all of mine, Mr. Bender.”
“A friend of my daughter’s,” Lord Theign easily explained. “I hope they’re looking after him.”
“Oh, they took care he had tea and bread and butter to any extent; and were so good as to move something,” Mr. Bender conscientiously added, “so that he could get up on a chair and see straight into the Moretto.”
This was a touch, however, that appeared to affect Lord John unfavourably. “Up on a chair? I say!”
Mr. Bender took another view. “Why, I got right up myself—a little more and I’d almost have begun to paw it! He got me quite interested”—the proprietor of the picture would perhaps care to know—“in that Moretto.” And it was on these lines that Mr. Bender continued to advance. “I take it that your biggest value, however, Lord Theign, is your splendid Sir Joshua. Our friend there has a great deal to say about that too—but it didn’t lead to our moving any more furniture.” On which he paused as to enjoy, with a show of his fine teeth, his host’s reassurance. “Ithasyet, my impression of that picture, sir, led to something else. Are you prepared, Lord Theign, to entertain a proposition?”
Lord Theign met Mr. Bender’s eyes while this inquirer left these few portentous words to speak for themselves. “To the effect that I part to you with ‘The Beautiful Duchess of Waterbridge’? No, Mr. Bender, such a proposition would leave me intensely cold.”
Lord John had meanwhile had a more headlong cry. “My dear Bender, Ienvyyou!”
“I guess you don’t envy me,” his friend serenely replied, “as much as I envy Lord Theign.” And then while Mr. Bender and the latter continued to face each other searchingly and firmly: “What I allude to is an overture of a strong and simple stamp—such as perhaps would shed a softer light on the difficulties raised by association and attachment. I’ve had some experience of first shocks, and I’d be glad to meet you as man to man.”
Mr. Bender was, quite clearly, all genial and all sincere; he intended no irony and used, consciously, no great freedom. Lord Theign, not less evidently, saw this, and it permitted him amusement. “As rich man to poor man is how I’m to understand it? For me to meetyou,” he added, “I should have to be tempted—and I’m not even temptable. So there we are,” he blandly smiled.
His blandness appeared even for a moment to set an example to Lord John. “‘The Beautiful Duchess of Waterbridge,’ Mr. Bender, is a golden apple of one of those great family trees of which respectable people don’t lop off the branches whose venerable shade, in this garish and denuded age, they so much enjoy.”
Mr. Bender looked at him as if he had cut some irrelevant caper. “Then if they don’t sell their ancestors where in the world are all the ancestors bought?”
“Doesn’t it for the moment sufficiently answer your question,” Lord Theign asked, “that they’re definitely not bought at Dedborough?”
“Why,” said Mr. Bender with a wealthy patience, “you talk as if it were my interest to bereasonable—which shows how little you understand. I’d be ashamed—with the lovely ideas I have—if I didn’t make you kick.” And his sturdy smile for it all fairly proclaimed his faith. “Well, I guess I can wait!”
This again in turn visibly affected Lord John: marking the moment from which he, in spite of his cultivated levity, allowed an intenser and more sustained look to keep straying toward their host. “Mr. Bender’s bound tohavesomething!”
It was even as if after a minute Lord Theign had been reached by his friend’s mute pressure. “‘Something’?”
“Something, Mr. Bender?” Lord John insisted.
It made their visitor rather sharply fix him. “Why, haveyouan interest, Lord John?”
This personage, though undisturbed by the challenge, if such it was, referred it to Lord Theign. “Do you authorise me to speak—a little—as if I have an interest?”
Lord Theign gave the appeal—and the speaker—a certain attention, and then appeared rather sharply to turn away from them. “My dear fellow, you may amuse yourself at my expense as you like!”
“Oh, I don’t mean at your expense,” Lord John laughed—“I mean at Mr. Bender’s!”
“Well, go ahead, Lord John,” said that gentleman, always easy, but always too, as you would have felt, aware of everything—“go ahead, but don’t sweetly hope to create me in any desire that doesn’t already exist in the germ. The attempt has often been made, over here—has in fact been organised on a considerable scale; but I guess I’ve got some peculiarity, for it doesn’t seem as if the thing could be done. If the germ is there, on the other hand,” Mr. Bender conceded, “it develops independently of all encouragement.”
Lord John communicated again as in a particular sense with Lord Theign. “He thinks I really mean toofferhim something!”
Lord Theign, who seemed to wish to advertise a degree of detachment from the issue, or from any other such, strolled off, in his restlessness, toward the door that opened to the terrace, only stopping on his way to light a cigarette from a matchbox on a small table. It was but after doing so that he made the remark: “Ah, Mr. Bender may easily be too much for you!”
“That makes me the more sorry, sir,” said his visitor, “not to have been enough foryou!”
“I risk it, at any rate,” Lord John went on—“I put you, Bender, the question of whether you wouldn’t Move,’ as you say, to acquire that Moretto.”
Mr. Bender’s large face had a commensurate gaze. “As I say? I haven’t said anything of the sort!”
“But you do ‘love’ you know,” Lord John slightly overgrimaced.
“I don’t when I don’t want to. I’m different from most people—I can love or not as I like. The trouble with that Moretto,” Mr. Bender continued, “is that it ain’t what I’m after.”
His “after” had somehow, for the ear, the vividness of a sharp whack on the resisting surface of things, and was concerned doubtless in Lord John’s speaking again across to their host. “The worst he can do for me, you see, is to refuse it.”
Lord Theign, who practically had his back turned and was fairly dandling about in his impatience, tossed out to the terrace the cigarette he had but just lighted. Yet he faced round to reply: “It’s the very first time in the history of this house (a long one, Mr. Bender) that a picture, or anything else in it, has been offered——!”
It was not imperceptible that even if he hadn’t dropped Mr. Bender mightn’t have been markedly impressed. “Then it must be the very first time such an offer has failed.”
“Oh, it isn’t that we in the least press it!” Lord Theign quite naturally laughed.
“Ah, I beg your pardon—I press it very hard!” And Lord John, as taking from his face and manner a cue for further humorous license, went so far as to emulate, though sympathetically enough, their companion’s native form. “You don’t mean to say you don’t feel the interest of that Moretto?”
Mr. Bender, quietly confident, took his time to reply. “Well, if you had seen me up on that chair you’d have thought I did.”
“Then you must have stepped down from the chair properly impressed.”
“I stepped down quite impressed with that young man.”
“Mr. Crimble?”—it came after an instant to Lord John. “Withhisopinion, really? Then I hope he’s aware of the picture’s value.”
“You had better ask him,” Mr. Bender observed.
“Oh, we don’t depend here on the Mr. Crimbles!” Lord John returned.
Mr. Bender took a longer look at him. “Are you aware of the value yourself?”
His friend resorted again, as for the amusement of the thing, to their entertainer. “Am I aware of the value of the Moretto?”
Lord Theign, who had meanwhile lighted another cigarette, appeared, a bit extravagantly smoking, to wish to put an end to his effect of hovering aloof.
“That question needn’t trouble us—when I see how much Mr. Bender himself knows about it.”
“Well, Lord Theign, I only know what that young man puts it at.” And then as the others waited, “Ten thousand,” said Mr. Bender.
“Ten thousand?” The owner of the work showed no emotion.
“Well,” said Lord John again in Mr. Bender’s style, “what’s the matter with ten thousand?”
The subject of his gay tribute considered. “There’s nothing the matter with ten thousand.”
“Then,” Lord Theign asked, “is there anything the matter with the picture?”
“Yes, sir—I guess there is.”
It gave an upward push to his lordship’s eyebrows. “But what in the world——?”
“Well, that’s just the question!”
The eyebrows continued to rise. “Does he pretend there’s a question of whether itisa Moretto?”
“That’s what he was up there trying to find out.”
“But if the value’s, according to himself, ten thousand——?”
“Why, of course,” said Mr. Bender, “it’s a fine work anyway.”
“Then,” Lord Theign brought good-naturedly out, “what’s the matter withyou, Mr. Bender?”
That gentleman was perfectly clear. “The matter with me, Lord Theign, is that I’ve no use for a ten thousand picture.”
“‘No use?’”—the expression had an oddity. “But what’s it your idea to do with such things?”
“I mean,” Mr. Bender explained, “that a picture of that rank is not what I’m after.”
“The figure,” said his noble host—speaking thus, under pressure, commercially—“is beyond what you see your way to?”
But Lord John had jumped at the truth. “The matter with Mr. Bender is that he sees his way much further.”
“Further?” their companion echoed.
“The matter with Mr. Bender is that he wants to give millions.”
Lord Theign sounded this abyss with a smile. “Well, there would be no difficulty aboutthat, I think!”
“Ah,” said his guest, “you know the basis, sir, on which I’m ready to pay.”
“On the basis then of the Sir Joshua,” Lord John inquired, “how far would you go?”
Mr. Bender indicated by a gesture that on a question reduced to a moiety by its conditional form he could give but semi-satisfaction. “Well, I’d go all the way.”
“He wants, you see,” Lord John elucidated, “anideallyexpensive thing.”
Lord Theign appeared to decide after a moment to enter into the pleasant spirit of this; which he did by addressing his younger friend. “Then why shouldn’t I make even the Moretto as expensive as he desires?”
“Because you can’t do violence tothatmaster’s natural modesty,” Mr. Bender declared before Lord John had time to speak. And conscious at this moment of the reappearance of his fellow-explorer, he at once supplied a further light. “I guess this gentleman at any rate can tell you.”
Hugh Crimble had come back from his voyage of discovery, and it was visible as he stood there flushed and quite radiant that he had caught in his approach Lord Theign’s last inquiry and Mr. Bender’s reply to it. You would have imputed to him on the spot the lively possession of a new idea, the sustaining sense of a message important enough to justify his irruption. He looked from one to the other of the three men, scattered a little by the sight of him, but attached eyes of recognition then to Lord Theign’s, whom he remained an instant longer communicatively smiling at. After which, as you might have gathered, he all confidently plunged, taking up the talk where the others had left it. “I should say, Lord Theign, if you’ll allow me, in regard to what you appear to have been discussing, that it depends a good deal on just that question—of what your Moretto, at any rate, may be presumed or proved to ‘be.’ Let me thank you,” he cheerfully went on, “for your kind leave to go over your treasures.”
The personage he so addressed was, as we know, nothing if not generally affable; yet if that was just then apparent it was through a shade of coolness for the slightly heated familiarity of so plain, or at least so free, a young man in eye-glasses, now for the first time definitely apprehended. “Oh, I’ve scarcely ‘treasures’—but I’ve some things of interest.”
Hugh, however, entering the opulent circle, as it were, clearly took account of no breath of a chill. “I think possible, my lord, that you’ve a great treasure—if you’ve really so high a rarity as a splendid Manto-vano.”
“A ‘Mantovano’?” You wouldn’t have been sure that his lordship didn’t pronounce the word for the first time in his life.
“There have been supposed to be onlysevenreal examples about the world; so that if by an extraordinary chance you find yourself the possessor of a magnificent eighth——”
But Lord John had already broken in. “Why, there youare, Mr. Bender!”
“Oh, Mr. Bender, with whom I’ve made acquaintance,” Hugh returned, “was there as it began to work in me—”
“That your Moretto, Lord Theign”—Mr. Bender took their informant up—“isn’t, after all, a Moretto at all.” And he continued amusedly to Hugh: “It began to work in you, sir, like very strong drink!”
“Do I understand you to suggest,” Lord Theign asked of the startling young man, “that my precious picture isn’t genuine?”
Well, Hugh knew exactly what he suggested. “As a picture, Lord Theign, as a great portrait, one of the most genuine things in Europe. But it strikes me as probable that from far back—for reasons!—there has been a wrong attribution; that the work has been, in other words, traditionally, obstinately miscalled. It has passed for a Moretto, and at first I quite took it for one; but I suddenly, as I looked and looked and saw and saw, began to doubt, and now I knowwhyI doubted.”
Lord Theign had during this speech kept his eyes on the ground; but he raised them to Mr. Crimble’s almost palpitating presence for the remark: “I’m bound to say that I hope you’ve some very good grounds!”
“I’ve three or four, Lord Theign; they seem to me of the best—as yet. They made me wonder and wonder—and then light splendidly broke.”
His lordship didn’t stint his attention. “Reflected, you mean, fromotherMantovanos—that I don’t know?”
“I mean from those I know myself,” said Hugh; “and I mean from fine analogies with one in particular.”
“Analogies that in all these years, these centuries, have so remarkably not been noticed?”
“Well,” Hugh competently explained, “they’re a sort of thing the very sense of, the value and meaning of, are a highly modern—in fact a quite recent growth.”
Lord John at this professed with cordiality that he at least quite understood. “Oh, we know a lot more about our pictures and things than ever our ancestors did!”
“Well, I guess it’s enough forme,” Mr. Bender contributed, “that your ancestors knew enough to get ‘em!”
“Ah, that doesn’t go so far,” cried Hugh, “unless we ourselves know enough to keep ‘em!”
The words appeared to quicken in a manner Lord Theign’s view of the speaker. “Wereyourancestors, Mr. Crimble, great collectors?”
Arrested, it might be, in his general assurance, Hugh wondered and smiled. “Mine—collectors? Oh, I’m afraid I haven’t any—to speak of. Only it has seemed to me for a long time,” he added, “that on that head we should all feel together.”
Lord Theign looked for a moment as if these were rather large presumptions; then he put them in their place a little curtly. “It’s one thing to keep our possessions for ourselves—it’s another to keep them for other people.”
“Well,” Hugh good-humouredly returned, “I’m perhaps not so absolutely sure of myself, if you press me, as that I sha’n’t be glad of a higher and wiser opinion—I mean than my own. It would be awfully interesting, if you’ll allow me to say so, to have the judgment of one or two of the great men.”
“You’re not yourself, Mr. Crimble, one of the great men?” his host asked with tempered irony.
“Well, I guess he’s going to be, anyhow,” Mr. Bender cordially struck in; “and this remarkable exhibition of intelligence may just let him loose on the world, mayn’t it?”
“Thank you, Mr. Bender!”—and Hugh obviously tried to look neither elated nor snubbed. “I’ve too much still to learn, but I’m learning every day, and I shall have learnt immensely this afternoon.”
“Pretty well at my expense, however,” Lord Theign laughed, “if you demolish a name we’ve held for generations so dear.”
“You may have held the name dear, my lord,” his young critic answered; “but my whole point is that, if I’m right, you’ve held the picture itself cheap.”
“Because a Mantovano,” said Lord John, “is so much greater a value?”
Hugh met his eyes a moment “Are you talking of values pecuniary?”
“What values arenotpecuniary?”
Hugh might, during his hesitation, have been imagined to stand off a little from the question. “Well, some things have in a higher degree that one, and some have the associational or the factitious, and some the clear artistic.”
“And some,” Mr. Bender opined, “have themall—in the highest degree. But what you mean,” he went on, “is that a Mantovano would come higher under the hammer than a Moretto?”
“Why, sir,” the young man returned, “there aren’t any, as I’ve just stated,to‘come.’ I account—or I easily can—for every one of the very small number.”
“Then do you consider that you account for this one?”
“I believe I shall if you’ll give me time.”
“Oh, time!” Mr. Bender impatiently sighed. “But we’ll give you all we’ve got—only I guess it isn’t much.” And he appeared freely to invite their companions to join in this estimate. They listened to him, however, they watched him, for the moment, but in silence, and with the next he had gone on: “How much higher—if your idea is correct about it—would Lord Theign’s picture come?”
Hugh turned to that nobleman. “Does Mr. Bender mean come tohim, my lord?”
Lord Theign looked again hard at Hugh, and then harder than he had done yet at his other invader. “I don’t knowwhatMr. Bender means!” With which he turned off.
“Well, I guess I mean that it would come higher to me than to any one! But howmuchhigher?” the American continued to Hugh.
“How much higher toyou?”
“Oh, I can sizethat. How much higher as a Mantovano?”
Unmistakably—for us at least—our young man was gaining time; he had the instinct of circumspection and delay. “To any one?”
“To any one.”
“Than as a Moretto?” Hugh continued.
It even acted on Lord John’s nerves. “That’s what we’re talking about—really!”
But Hugh still took his ease; as if, with his eyes first on Bender and then on Lord Theign, whose back was practically presented, he were covertly studying signs. “Well,” he presently said, “in view of the very great interest combined with the very great rarity, more than—ah more than can be estimated off-hand.”
It made Lord Theign turn round. “But a fine Moretto has a very great rarity and a very great interest.”
“Yes—but not on the whole the same amount of either.”
“No, not on the whole the same amount of either!”—Mr. Bender judiciously echoed it. “But how,” he freely pursued, “are you going to find out?”
“Have I your permission, Lord Theign,” Hugh brightly asked, “to attempt to find out?”
The question produced on his lordship’s part a visible, a natural anxiety. “What would it be your idea then todowith my property?”
“Nothing at all here—it could all be done, I think, at Verona. What besets, what quite haunts me,” Hugh explained, “is the vivid image of a Mantovano—one of the glories of the short list—in a private collection in that place. The conviction grows in me that the two portraits must be of the same original. In fact I’ll bet my head,” the young man quite ardently wound up, “that the wonderful subject of the Verona picture, a very great person clearly, is none other than the very great person of yours.”
Lord Theign had listened with interest. “Mayn’t he be that and yet from another hand?”
“It isn’t another hand”—oh Hugh was quite positive. “It’s the hand of the very same painter.”
“How can you prove it’s the same?”
“Only by the most intimate internal evidence, I admit—and evidence that of course has to be estimated.”
“Then who,” Lord Theign asked, “is to estimate it?”
“Well,”—Hugh was all ready—“will you let Pap-pendick, one of the first authorities in Europe, a good friend of mine, in fact more or less my master, and who is generally to be found at Brussels? I happen to know he knows your picture—he once spoke to me of it; and he’ll go and look again at the Verona one, he’ll go and judge our issue, if I apply to him, in the light of certain new tips that I shall be able to give him.”
Lord Theign appeared to wonder. “If you ‘apply’ to him?”
“Like a shot, I believe, if I ask it of him—as a service.”
“A service toyou?He’ll be very obliging,” his lordship smiled.
“Well, I’ve obligedhim!” Hugh readily retorted.
“The obligation will be to we”—Lord Theign spoke more formally.
“Well, the satisfaction,” said Hugh, “will be to all of us. The things Pappendick has seen he intensely, ineffaceably keeps in mind, to every detail; so that he’ll tell me—as no one else really can—if the Verona man isyourman.”
“But then,” asked Mr. Bender, “we’ve got to believe anyway what he says?”
“The market,” said Lord John with emphasis, “would have to believe it—that’s the point.”
“Oh,” Hugh returned lightly, “the market will have nothing to do with it, I hope; but I think you’ll feel when he has spoken that you really know where you are.”
Mr. Bender couldn’t doubt of that. “Oh, if he gives us a bigger thing we won’t complain. Only, how long will it take him to get there? I want him to start right away.”
“Well, as I’m sure he’ll be deeply interested——”
“Wemay”—Mr. Bender took it straight up—“get news next week?”
Hugh addressed his reply to Lord Theign; it was already a little too much as if he and the American between them were snatching the case from that possessor’s hands. “The day I hear from Pappendick you shall have a full report. And,” he conscientiously added, “if I’m proved to have been unfortunately wrong——!”
His lordship easily pointed the moral. “You’ll have caused me some inconvenience.”
“Of course I shall,” the young man unreservedly agreed—“like a wanton meddling ass!” His candour, his freedom had decidedly a note of their own. “But my conviction, after those moments with your picture, was too strong for me not to speak—and, since you allow it, I face the danger and risk the test.”
“I allow it of course in the form of business.” This produced in Hugh a certain blankness. “‘Business’?” “If I consent to the inquiry I pay for the inquiry.” Hugh demurred. “Even if I turn out mistaken?” “You make me in any event your proper charge.” The young man thought again, and then as for vague accommodation: “Oh, my charge won’t be high!”
“Ah,” Mr. Bender protested, “it ought to be handsome if the thing’s markedup!” After which he looked at his watch. “But I guess I’ve got to go, Lord Theign, though your lovely old Duchess—for it’s toherI’ve lost my heart—does cry out for me again.”
“You’ll find her then still there,” Lord John observed with emphasis, but with his eyes for the time on Lord Theign; “and if you want another look at her I’ll presently come and take one too.”
“I’ll order your car to the garden-front,” Lord Theign added to this; “you’ll reach it from the saloon, but I’ll see you again first.”
Mr. Bender glared as with the round full force of his pair of motor lamps. “Well, if you’re ready to talk about anything, I am. Good-bye, Mr. Crimble.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Bender.” But Hugh, addressing their host while his fellow-guest returned to the saloon, broke into the familiarity of confidence. “As if youcouldbe ready to ‘talk’!”
This produced on the part of the others present a mute exchange that could only have denoted surprise at all the irrepressible young outsider thus projected upon them took for granted. “I’ve an idea,” said Lord John to his friend, “that you’re quite ready to talk withme.”
Hugh then, with his appetite so richly quickened, could but rejoice. “Lady Grace spoke to me of things in the library.”
“You’ll find itthatway”—Lord Theign gave the indication.
“Thanks,” said Hugh elatedly, and hastened away.
Lord John, when he had gone, found relief in a quick comment. “Very sharp, no doubt—but he wants taking down.”
The master of Dedborough wouldn’t have put it so crudely, but the young expert did bring certain things home. “The people my daughters, in the exercise of a wild freedom, do pick up——!”
“Well, don’t you see that all you’ve got to do—on the question we’re dealing with—is to claim your very own wild freedom? Surely I’m right in feeling you,” Lord John further remarked, “to have jumped at once to my idea that Bender is heaven-sent—and at what they call the psychologic moment, don’t they?—to point that moral. Why look anywhere else for a sum of money that—smaller or greater—you can find with perfect ease in that extraordinarily bulging pocket?”
Lord Theign, slowly pacing the hall again, threw up his hands. “Ah, with ‘perfect ease’ can scarcely be said!”
“Why not?—when he absolutely thrusts his dirty dollars down your throat.”
“Oh, I’m not talking of ease tohim,” Lord Theign returned—“I’m talking of ease to myself. I shall have to make a sacrifice.”
“Why not then—for so great a convenience—gallantly make it?”
“Ah, my dear chap, if you want me to sell my Sir Joshua——!”
But the horror in the words said enough, and Lord John felt its chill. “I don’t make a point of that—God forbid! But there are other things to which the objection wouldn’t apply.”
“You see how it applies—in the case of the Moret-to—forhim. A mere Moretto,” said Lord Theign, “is too cheap—for a Yankee ‘on the spend.’”
“Then the Mantovano wouldn’t be.”
“It remains to be proved that itisa Mantovano.”
“Well,” said Lord John, “go into it.”
“Hanged if I won’t!” his friend broke out after a moment. “Itwouldsuit me. I mean”—the explanation came after a brief intensity of thought—“the possible size of his cheque would.”
“Oh,” said Lord John gaily, “I guess there’s no limit to the possible size of his cheque!”
“Yes, it would suit me, it would suit me!” the elder man, standing there, audibly mused. But his air changed and a lighter question came up to him as he saw his daughter reappear at the door from the terrace. “Well, the infant horde?” he immediately put to her.
Lady Grace came in, dutifully accounting for them. “They’ve marched off—in a huge procession.”
“Thank goodness! And our friends?”
“All playing tennis,” she said—“save those who are sitting it out.” To which she added, as to explain her return: “Mr. Crimble has gone?”
Lord John took upon him to say. “He’s in the library, to which you addressed him—making discoveries.”
“Not then, I hope,” she smiled, “to our disadvantage!”
“To your very great honour and glory.” Lord John clearly valued the effect he might produce.
“Your Moretto of Brescia—do you know what it really and spendidly is?” And then as the girl, in her surprise, but wondered: “A Mantovano, neither more nor less. Ever so much more swagger.”
“A Mantovano?” Lady Grace echoed. “Why, how tremendously jolly!”
Her father was struck. “Do you know the artist—of whom I had never heard?”
“Yes, something of the little thatisknown.” And she rejoiced as her knowledge came to her. “He’s a tremendous swell, because, great as he was, there are but seven proved examples——”
“With this of yours,” Lord John broke in, “there are eight.”
“Then why haven’t I known about him?” Lord Theign put it as if so many other people were guilty for this.
His daughter was the first to plead for the vague body. “Why, I suppose in order that you should have exactly this pleasure, father.”
“Oh, pleasures not desired are like acquaintances not sought—they rather bore one!” Lord Theign sighed. With which he moved away from her.
Her eyes followed him an instant—then she smiled at their guest. “Is he bored at having the higher prize—if you’re sure itisthe higher?”
“Mr. Crimble is sure—because if he isn’t,” Lord John added, “he’s a wretch.”
“Well,” she returned, “as he’s certainly not a wretch it must be true. And fancy,” she exclaimed further, though as more particularly for herself, “our having suddenly incurred this immense debt to him!”
“Oh, I shall pay Mr. Crimble!” said her father, who had turned round.
The whole question appeared to have provoked in Lord John a rise of spirits and a flush of humour. “Don’t you let him stick it on.”
His host, however, bethinking himself, checked him. “Goyouto Mr. Bender straight!”
Lord John saw the point. “Yes—till he leaves. But I shall find you here, shan’t I?” he asked with all earnestness of Lady Grace.
She had an hesitation, but after a look at her father she assented. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Thenà tantôt!” It made him show for happy as, waving his hand at her, he proceeded to seek Mr. Bender in presence of the object that most excited that gentleman’s appetite—to say nothing of the effect involved on Lord John’s own.