Left alone he had a moment’s meditation where he stood; it found issue in an articulate “Poor dear thing!”—an exclamation marked at once with patience and impatience, with resignation and ridicule. After which, waiting for his daughter, Lord Theign slowly and absently roamed, finding matches at last and lighting his cigarette—all with an air of concern that had settled on him more heavily from the moment of his finding himself alone. His luxury of gloom—if gloom it was—dropped, however, on his taking heed of Lady Grace, who, arriving on the scene through the other room, had had just time to stand and watch him in silence.
“Oh!” he jerked out at sight of her—which she had to content herself with as a parental greeting after separation, his next words doing little to qualify its dryness. “I take it for granted that you know I’m within a couple of hours of leaving England under a necessity of health.” And then as drawing nearer, she signified without speaking her possession of this fact: “I’ve thought accordingly that before I go I should—on this first possible occasion since that odious occurrence at Dedborough—like to leave you a little more food for meditation, in my absence, on the painfully false position in which you there placed me.” He carried himself restlessly even perhaps with a shade of awkwardness, to which her stillness was a contrast; she just waited, wholly passive—possibly indeed a trifle portentous. “If you had plotted and planned it in advance,” he none the less firmly pursued, “if you had acted from some uncanny or malignant motive, you couldn’t have arranged more perfectly to incommode, to disconcert and, to all intents and purposes, make light of me and insult me.” Even before this charge she made no sign; with her eyes now attached to the ground she let him proceed. “I had practically guaranteed to our excellent, our charming friend, your favourable view of his appeal—which you yourself too, remember, had left him in so little doubt of!—so that, having by your performance so egregiously failed him, I have the pleasure of their coming down on me for explanations, for compensations, and for God knows what besides.”
Lady Grace, looking up at last, left him in no doubt of the rigour of her attention. “I’m sorry indeed, father, to have done you any wrong; but may I ask whom, in such a connection, you refer to as ‘they’?”
“‘They’?” he echoed in the manner of a man who has had handed back to his more careful eye, across the counter, some questionable coin that he has tried to pass. “Why, your own sister to begin with—whose interest in what may make for your happiness I suppose you decently recognise; andhispeople, one and all, the delightful old Duchess in particular, who only wanted to be charming to you, and who are as good people, and as pleasant and as clever, damn it, when all’s said and done, as any others that are likely to come your way.” It clearly did his lordship good to work out thus his case, which grew more and more coherent to him and glowed with irresistible colour. “Letting alone gallant John himself, most amiable of men, about whose merits and whose claims you appear to have pretended to agree with me just that you might, when he presumed, poor chap, ardently to urge them, deal him with the more cruel effect that calculated blow on the mouth!”
It was clear that in the girl’s great gravity embarrassment had no share. “They so come down on you I understand then, father, that you’re obliged to come down onme?”
“Assuredly—for some better satisfaction than your just moping here without a sign!”
“But a sign of what, father?” she asked—as helpless as a lone islander scanning the horizon for a sail.
“Of your appreciating, of your in some degree dutifully considering, the predicament into which you’ve put me!”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you in the least that you’ve rather putmeinto one?”
He threw back his head as from exasperated nerves. “I put you certainly in the predicament of your receiving by my care a handsome settlement in life—which all the elements that would make for your enjoying it had every appearance of successfully commending to you.” The perfect readiness of which on his lips had, like a higher wave, the virtue of lifting and dropping him to still more tangible ground. “And if I understand you aright as wishing to know whether I apologise for that zeal, why you take a most preposterous view of our relation as father and daughter.”
“You understand me no better than I fear I understand you,” Lady Grace returned, “if what you expect of me is really to take back my words to Lord John.” And then as he didn’t answer, while their breach gaped like a jostled wound, “Have you seriously come to propose—and fromhimagain,” she added—“that I shall reconsider my resolute act and lend myself to your beautiful arrangement?”
It had so the sound of unmixed ridicule that he could only, for his dignity, not give way to passion. “I’ve come, above all, forthis, I may say, Grace: to remind you of whom you’re addressing when you jibe at me, and to make of you assuredly a plain demand—exactly as to whether you judged us to have activelyincurredyour treatment of our unhappy friend, to have brought it upon us, he and I, by my refusal to discuss with you at such a crisis the question of my disposition of a particular item of my property. I’ve only to look at you, for that matter,” Lord Theign continued—always with a finer point and a higher consistency as his rehearsal of his wrongs broadened—“to have my inquiry, as it seems to me, eloquently answered. You flounced away from poor John, you took, as he tells me, ‘his head off,’ just to repay me for what you chose to regard as my snub on the score of your challenging my entertainment of a possible purchaser; a rebuke launched at me, practically, in the presence of a most inferior person, a stranger and an intruder, from whom you had all the air of taking your cue for naming me the great condition on which you’d gratify my hope. Am I to understand, in other words,”—and his lordship mounted to a climax—“that you sent us about our business because I failed to gratifyyourhope: that of my knocking under to your sudden monstrous pretension to lay down the law for my choice of ways and means of raising, to my best convenience, a considerable sum of money? You’ll be so good as to understand, once for all, that I recognise there no right of interference from any quarter—and also to let that knowledge govern your behaviour in my absence.”
Lady Grace had thus for some minutes waited on his words—waited even as almost with anxiety for the safe conduct he might look to from some of the more extravagant of them. But he at least felt at the end—if it was an end—all he owed them; so that there was nothing for her but to accept as achieved his dreadful felicity. “You’re very angry with me, and I hope you won’t feel me simply ‘aggravating’ if I say that, thinking everything over, I’ve done my best to allow for that. But Icananswer your question if I do answer it by saying that my discovery of your possible sacrifice of one of our most beautiful things didn’t predispose me to decide in favour of a person—however ‘backed’ by you—for whose benefit the sacrifice was to take place. Frankly,” the girl pushed on, “I did quite hate, for the moment, everything that might make for such a mistake; and took the darkest view, let me also confess, of every one, without exception, connected with it I interceded with you, earnestly, for our precious picture, and you wouldn’t on any termshavemy intercession. On top of that Lord John blundered in, without timeliness or tact—and I’m afraid that, as I hadn’t been the least in love with him even before, he did have to take the consequence.”
Lord Theign, with an elated swing of his person, greeted this as all he could possibly want. “You recognise then that your reception of himwaspurely vindictive!—the meaning of which is that unless my conduct of my private interests, of which you know nothing whatever, happens to square with your superior wisdom you’ll put me under boycott all round! While you chatter about mistakes and blunders, and about our charming friend’s lack of the discretion of which you yourself set so grand an example, what account have you to offer of the scene you made me there before that fellow—your confederate, as he had all the air of being!—by giving it me with such effrontery that, if I had eminently done with him after his remarkable display, you at least were but the more determined to see him keep it up?”
The girl’s justification, clearly, was very present to her, and not less obviously the truth that to make it strong she must, avoiding every side-issue, keep it very simple, “The only account I can give you, I think, is that I could but speak at such a moment as I felt, and that I felt—well, how can I say how deeply? If you can really bear to know, I feel so still I care in fact more than ever that we shouldn’t do such things. I care, if you like, to indiscretion—I care, if you like, to offence, to arrogance, to folly. But even as my last word to you before you leave England on the conclusion of such a step, I’m ready to cry out to you that you oughtn’t, you oughtn’t, you oughtn’t!”
Her father, with wonder-moved, elevated brows and high commanding hand, checked her as in an act really of violence—save that, like an inflamed young priestess, she had already, in essence, delivered her message. “Hallo, hallo, hallo, my distracted daughter—no ‘crying out,’ if you please!” After which, while arrested but unabashed, she still kept her lighted eyes on him, he gave back her conscious stare for a minute, inwardly and rapidly turning things over, making connections, taking, as after some long and lamentable lapse of observation, a new strange measure of her: all to the upshot of his then speaking with a difference of tone, a recognition of still more of the odious than he had supposed, so that the case might really call for some coolness. “You keep bad company, Grace—it pays the devil with your sense of proportion. If you make this row when I sell a picture, what will be left to you when I forge a cheque?”
“If you had arrived at the necessity of forging a cheque,” she answered, “I should then resign myself to that of your selling a picture.”
“But not short of that!”
“Not short of that. Not one of ours.”
“But I couldn’t,” said his lordship with his best and coldest amusement, “sell one of somebody else’s!”
She was, however, not disconcerted. “Other people do other things—they appear to have done them, and to be doing them, all about us. Butwehave been so decently different—always and ever. We’ve never done anything disloyal.”
“‘Disloyal’?”—he was more largely amazed and even interested now.
Lady Grace stuck to her word. “That’s what it seems tome!”
“It seems to you”—and his sarcasm here was easy—“more disloyal to sell a picture than to buy one? Because we didn’t paint ‘em all ourselves, you know!”
She threw up impatient hands. “I don’t ask you either to paint or to buy——!”
“Oh,that’sa mercy!” he interrupted, riding his irony hard; “and I’m glad to hear you at least let me offsuchefforts! However, if it strikes you as gracefully filial to apply to your father’s conduct so invidious a word,” he went on less scathingly, “you must take from him, in your turn, his quite other view of what makes disloyalty—understanding distinctly, by the same token, that he enjoins on you not to give an odious illustration of it, while he’s away, by discussing and deploring with anyoneof your extraordinary friends any aspect or feature whatever of his walk and conversation. That—pressed as I am for time,” he went on with a glance at his watch while she remained silent—“is the main sense of what I have to say to you; so that I count on your perfect conformity. When you have told me that Imayso count”—and casting about for his hat he espied it and went to take it up—“I shall more cordially bid you good-bye.”
His daughter looked as if she had been for some time expecting the law thus imposed upon her—had been seeing where he must come out; but in spite of this preparation she made him wait for his reply in such tension as he had himself created. “To Kitty I’ve practically said nothing—and she herself can tell you why: I’ve in fact scarcely seen her this fortnight. Putting aside then Amy Sandgate, the only person to whom I’ve spoken—of your ‘sacrifice,’ as I suppose you’ll let me call it?—is Mr. Hugh Crimble, whom you talk of as my ‘confederate’ at Dedborough.”
Lord Theign recovered the name with relief. “Mr. Hugh Crimble—that’s it!—whom you so amazingly caused to be present, and apparently invited to be active, at a business that so little concerned him.”
“He certainly took upon himself to be interested, as I had hoped he would. But it was because I had taken uponmyself—”
“To act, yes,” Lord Theign broke in, “with the grossest want of delicacy! Well, it’s from that exactly that you’ll now forbear; and ‘interested’ as he may be—for which I’m deucedly obliged to him!—you’ll not speak to Mr. Crimble again.”
“Never again?”—the girl put it as for full certitude.
“Never of the question that I thus exclude. You may chatter your fill,” said his lordship curtly, “about any others.”
“Why, the particular question you forbid,” Grace returned with great force, but as if saying something very reasonable—“that question isthequestion we care about: it’s our very ground of conversation.”
“Then,” her father decreed, “your conversation will please todispensewith a ground; or you’ll perhaps, better still—if that’s the only way!—dispense with your conversation.”
Lady Grace took a moment as if to examine this more closely. “You require of me not to communicate with Mr. Crimble at all?”
“Most assuredly I require it—since it’s to that you insist on reducing me.” He didn’t look reduced, the master of Dedborough, as he spoke—which was doubtless precisely because he held his head so high to affirm what he suffered. “Is it so essential to your comfort,” he demanded, “to hear him, or to make him, abuse me?”
“‘Abusing’ you, father dear, has nothing whatever to do with it!”—his daughter had fairly lapsed, with a despairing gesture, to the tenderness involved in her compassion for his perversity. “We look at the thing in a much larger way,” she pursued, not heeding that she drew from him a sound of scorn for her “larger.” “It’s of our Treasure itself we talk—and of what can bedonein such cases; though with a close application, I admit, to the case that you embody.”
“Ah,” Lord Theign asked as with absurd curiosity, “I embody a case?”
“Wonderfully, father—as you do everything; and it’s the fact of its being exceptional,” she explained, “that makes it so difficult to deal with.”
His lordship had a gape for it. “‘To deal with’? You’re undertaking to ‘deal’ with me?”
She smiled more frankly now, as for a rift in the gloom. “Well, how can we help it if youwillbe a case?” And then as her tone but visibly darkened his wonder: “What we’ve set our hearts on is saving the picture.”
“What you’ve set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight against me?”
But she persisted without heat. “What we’ve set our hearts on is working for England.”
“And pray who in the world’s ‘England,’” he cried in his stupefaction, “unless I am?”
“Dear, dear father,” she pleaded, “that’s all wewantyou to be! I mean”—she didn’t fear firmly to force it home—“in the real, the right, the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours.”
“‘Ours’?”—he couldn’t but again throw back her word at her. “Isn’t it, damn you, justinours—?”
“No, no,” she interrupted—“not inours!” She smiled at him still, though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.
But he glared as at a senseless juggle. “What and who the devil are you talking about? What are ‘we,’ the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking—and riding!—straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs?” So he let her “have” the stout sound truth, as it were—and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have made her reel. “You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, God be thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly lot of us, take us together—make us numerous enough without any foreign aid or mixture: if that’s what I understand you to mean!”
“You don’t understand me at all—evidently; and above all I see you don’t want to!” she had the bravery to add, “By ‘our’ sense of what’s due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble’s and mine—and nobody’s else at all; since, as I tell you, it’s only with him I’ve talked.”
It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque measure of the scandal he faced. “So that ‘you and Mr. Crimble’ represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and duties of our house?”
Well, she was too earnest—as she clearly wished to let him see—to mind his perversion of it. “I express to you the way we feel.”
“It’s most striking to hear, certainly, what you express”—he had positively to laugh for it; “and you speak of him, with your insufferable ‘we,’ as if you were presenting him as your—God knows what! You’ve enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity.” And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and rebutted nothing: “You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!”
“Yes, we’re fellow-critics, father”—she accepted this opening. “I perfectly adopt your term.” But it took her a minute to go further. “I saw Mr. Crim-ble here half an hour ago.”
“Saw him ‘here’?” Lord Theign amazedly asked. “Hecomesto you here—and Amy Sandgate has been silent?”
“It wasn’t her business to tell you—since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect,” Lady Grace then produced, “that he’ll come again.”
It brought down with a bang all her father’s authority. “Then I simply exact of you that you don’t see him.”
The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a brimming cup. “Is that what youreallymeant by your condition just now—that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?”
“What I ‘really meant’ is what I really mean—that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether.”
“Have nothing to do with him at all?”
“Have nothing to do with him at all.”
“In fact”—she took it in—“give him wholly up.”
He had an impatient gesture. “You sound as if I asked you to give up a fortune!” And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation—verily as if it had been in the balance for her—he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. “You’re so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is likethatsort of thing?”
Lady Grace took her time—but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him, whathadgathered. “I like Mr. Crimble exceedingly, father—I think him clever, intelligent, good; I want what he wants—I want it, I think, really, as much; and I don’t at all deny that he has helped to make me so want it. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll wholly cease to see him, I’ll give him up forever, if—if—!” She faltered, however, she hung fire with a smile that anxiously, intensely appealed. Then she began and stopped again, “If—if—!” while her father caught her up with irritation.
“‘If,’ my lady? Ifwhat, please?”
“If you’ll withdraw the offer of our picture to Mr. Bender—and never make another to any one else!”
He stood staring as at the size of it—then translated it into his own terms. “If I’ll obligingly announce to the world that I’ve made an ass of myself you’ll kindly forbear from your united effort—the charming pair of you—to show me up for one?”
Lady Grace, as if consciously not caring or attempting to answer this, simply gave the first flare of his criticism time to drop. It wasn’t till a minute passed that she said: “You don’t agree to my compromise?”
Ah, the question but fatally sharpened at a stroke the stiffness of his spirit. “Good God, I’m to ‘compromise’ on top of everything?—I’m to let you browbeat me, haggle and bargain with me, over a thing that I’m entitled to settle with you as things have everbeensettled among us, by uttering to you my last parental word?”
“You don’t care enough then for what you name?”—she took it up as scarce heeding now what he said.
“For putting an end to your odious commerce—? I give you the measure, on the contrary,” said Lord Theign, “of how much I care: as you give me, very strangely indeed, it strikes me, that of what it costs you—!” But his other words were lost in the hard long look at her from which he broke off in turn as for disgust.
It was with an effect of decently shielding herself—the unuttered meaning came so straight—that she substituted words of her own. “Of what it costs me to redeem the picture?”
“To lose your tenth-rate friend”—he spoke without scruple now.
She instantly broke into ardent deprecation, pleading at once and warning. “Father, father, oh—! You hold the thing in your hands.”
He pulled up before her again as to thrust the responsibility straight back. “My orders then are so much rubbish to you?”
Lady Grace held her ground, and they remained face to face in opposition and accusation, neither making the other the sign of peace. But the girl at leasthad, in her way, held out the olive-branch, while Lord Theign had but reaffirmed his will. It was for her acceptance of this that he searched her, her last word not having yet come. Before it had done so, however, the door from the lobby opened and Mr. Gotch had regained their presence. This appeared to determine in Lady Grace a view of the importance of delay, which she signified to her companion in a “Well—I must think!” For the butler positively resounded, and Hugh was there.
“Mr. Crimble!” Mr. Gotch proclaimed—with the further extravagance of projecting the visitor straight upon his lordship.
Our young man showed another face than the face his friend had lately seen him carry off, and he now turned it distressfully from that source of inspiration to Lord Theign, who was flagrantly, even from this first moment, no such source at all, and then from his noble adversary back again, under pressure of difficulty and effort, to Lady Grace, whom he directly addressed. “Here I am again, you see—and I’ve got my news, worse luck!” But his manner to her father was the next instant more brisk. “I learned you were here, my lord; but as the case is important I told them it was all right and came up. I’ve been to my club,” he added for the girl, “and found the tiresome thing—!” But he broke down breathless.
“And it isn’t good?” she cried with the highest concern.
Ruefully, yet not abjectly, he confessed, “Not so good as I hoped. For I assure you, my lord, I counted—”
“It’s the report from Pappendick about the picture at Verona,” Lady Grace interruptingly explained.
Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarrassment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in his thought, for a more awkward force than any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. “The man I toldyouabout also,” he said to his formidable patron; “whom I went to Brussels to talk with and who, most kindly, has gone for us to Verona. He has been able to get straight attheirMantovano, but the brute horribly wires me that he doesn’t quite see the thing; see, I mean”—and he gathered his two hearers together now in his overflow of chagrin, conscious, with his break of the ice, more exclusively of that—“my vivid vital point, the absolute screaming identity of the two persons represented. I still hold,” he persuasively went on, “that our man is their man, but Pappendick decides that he isn’t—and as Pappendick has somuchto be reckoned with of course I’m awfully abashed.”
Lord Theign had remained what he had begun by being, immeasurably and inaccessibly detached—only with his curiosity more moved than he could help and as, on second thought, to see what sort of a still more offensive fool the heated youth would really make of himself. “Yes—you seem indeed remarkably abashed!”
Hugh clearly was thrown again, by the cold “cut” of this, colder than any mere social ignoring, upon a sense of the damnably poor figure he did offer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek tingle. “I backed my own judgment strongly, I know—and I’ve got my snub. But I don’t in the least knock under.”
“Only the first authority in Europe doesn’t care, I suppose, whether you do or not!”
“He isn’tthefirst authority in Europe, thank God,” the young man returned—“though he is, I admit, one of the three or four first. And I mean to appeal—I’ve another shot in my locker,” he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. “I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi.”
“Bardi of Milan?”—she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father’s presence.
It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. “You know of him?—how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel,” he quickly explained, “he must havemostthe instinct—and it has come over me since that he’d have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture.”
She had fairly hung on his lips. “But does he know ours?”
“No—not ours yet. That is”—he consciously and quickly took himself up—“not yours! But as Pap-pendick went to Verona for us I’ve asked Bardi to do us the great favour to come here—if Lord Theign will be so good,” he said, bethinking himself with a turn, “as to let him examine the Moretto.” He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly “elected,” as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. “It’s not at all impossible—for such curious effects have been!—that the Dedborough picture seenafterthe Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough.”
“And so awfullylongafter—wasn’t it?” Lady Grace asked.
“Awfully long after—it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible.”
“Oh of course we don’t seeevery one!”—she heroically kept it up.
“You don’t see every one,” Hugh bravely laughed, “and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi,” he pursued, “to go again to Verona——”
“The last thing before coming here?”—she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. “How happy they should like so to work for you!”
“Ah, we’re a band of brothers,” he returned—“‘we few, we happy few’—from country to country”; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: “though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the rippinginterestof it all; since,” he developed and explained, for his elder friend’s benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, “when we’re really ‘hit’ over a case we’ll do almost anything in life.”
Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. “It must be so lovely tofeelso hit!”
“It does spoil one,” Hugh laughed, “for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance—putting it at themerestchance—of Bardi’s own wet blanket! But that’s again so very small—though,” he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, “you’ll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick’s veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you’ll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!” he sublimely insisted.
“How can we prevent your using it?” Lady Grace again interrupted; “or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst—”
“The thing”—he at once pursued—“will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah,” he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, “the worst sha’n’t come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express”—and he faced Lord Theign again—“for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!”
Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene—so that it was of this full view his participation had effectively consisted, “I haven’t the least idea, sir, what you’re talking about!” And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had passed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.
There ensued upon his words and movement a vivid mute passage, the richest of commentaries, between his companions; who, deeply divided by the width of the ample room, followed him with their eyes and then used for their own interchange these organs of remark, eloquent now over Hugh’s unmistakable dismissal at short order, on which obviously he must at once act. Lady Grace’s young arms conveyed to him by a despairing contrite motion of surrender that she had done for him all she could do in his presence and that, however sharply doubtful the result, he was to leave the rest to herself. They communicated thus, the strenuous pair, for their full moment, without speaking; only with the prolonged, the charged give and take of their gaze and, it might well have been imagined, of their passion. Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation—of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance. It was the girl’s raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter on the spot from which she had not moved. It presently ended in his lordship’s turn about as if inferring by the silence that the intruder had withdrawn.
“Is that young man your lover?” he said as he drew again near.
Lady Grace waited a little, but spoke as quietly as if she had been prepared. “Has the question a bearing on the promise you a short time ago demanded of me?”
“It has a bearing on the so extraordinary appearance of your intimacy with him!”
“You mean that if heshouldbe—what you ask me about—your exaction would then be modified?”
“My request that you break it short off? That request would, on the contrary,” Lord Theign pronounced, “rest on an immense new ground. Therefore I insist on your telling me the truth.”
“Won’t the truth be before you, father, if you’llthinka moment—without extravagance?” After which, while, as stiffly as ever—and it probably seemed to her impatience as stupidly—he didn’t rise to it, she went on: “If Iofferedyou not again to see him, does that make for you the appearance—?”
“If you offered it, you mean, on your condition—my promising not to sell? I promised,” said Lord Theign, “absolutely nothing at all!”
She took him up with all expression. “So I promised as little! But that I should have been able to say what I did sufficiently meets your curiosity.”
She might, wronged as she held herself, have felt him stupid not to seehowwronged; but he was in any case acute for an evasion. “You risked your offer for the great equivalent over which you’ve so wildly worked yourself up.”
“Yes, I’ve worked myself—that, I grant you and don’t blush for! But hardly so much as to renounce my ‘lover’—if,” she prodigiously smiled, “I were so fortunate as to have one!”
“You renounced poor John mightily easily—whom you were so fortunate as to have!”
Her brows rose as high as his own had ever done. “Do you call Lord John my lover?”
“He was your suitor most assuredly,” Lord Theign inimitably said, though without looking at her; “and as strikingly encouraged as he was respectfully ardent!”
“Encouraged byyou, dear father, beyond doubt!”
“Encouraged—er—by every one: because you were (yes, youwere!) encouraging. And what I ask of you now is a word of common candour as to whether you didn’t, on your honour, turn him off because of your just then so stimulated views on the person who has been with us.”
Grace replied but after an instant, as moved by more things than she could say—moved above all, in her trouble and her pity for him, by other things than harshness: “Oh father, father, father——!”
He searched her through all the compassion of her cry, but appeared to give way to her sincerity. “Well then if Ihaveyour denial I take it as answering my whole question—in a manner that satisfies me. If there’s nothing, on your word, of that sort between you, you can all the more drop him.”
“But you said a moment ago that I should all the more in the other case—that of therebeingsomething!”
He brushed away her logic-chopping. “If you’re so keen then for past remarks I take up your own words—I accept your own terms for your putting an end to Mr. Crimble.” To which, while, turning pale, she said nothing, he added: “You recognise that you profess yourself ready——”
“Not again to see him,” she now answered, “if you tell me the picture’s safe? Yes, I recognise that Iwasready—as well as how scornfully little you then were!”
“Never mind what I then was—the question’s of what I actually am, since I close with you on it The picture’s therefore as safe as you please,” Lord Theign pursued, “if you’ll do what you just now engaged to.”
“I engaged to do nothing,” she replied after a pause; and the face she turned to him had grown suddenly tragic. “I’ve no word to take back, for none passed between us; but Iwon’tdo what I mentioned and what you at once laughed at Because,” she finished, “the case is different.”
“Different?” he almost shouted—“how, different?”
She didn’t look at him for it, but she was none the less strongly distinct “He hasbeenhere—and that has done it He knows,” she admirably emphasised.
“Knows what I think of him, no doubt—for a brazen young prevaricator! But what else?”
She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. “What he will have seen—that I feel we’re too good friends.”
“Then your denial of it’s false,” her father fairly thundered—“and youareinfatuated?”
It made her the more quiet. “I like him very much.”
“So that your row about the picture,” he demanded with passion, “has been all a blind?” And then as her quietness still held her: “And his a blind as much—to help him to getatyou?”
She looked at him again now. “He must speak for himself. I’ve said what I mean.”
“But what the devildoyou mean?” Lord Theign, taking in the hour, had reached the door as in supremely baffled conclusion and with a sense of time lamentably lost.
Their eyes met upon it all dreadfully across the wide space, and, hurried and incommoded as she saw him, she yet made him still stand a minute. Then she let everything go. “Do what you like with the picture!”
He jerked up his arm and guarding hand as before a levelled blow at his face, and with the other hand flung open the door, having done with her now and immediately lost to sight. Left alone she stood a moment looking before her; then with a vague advance, held apparently by a quickly growing sense of the implication of her act, reached a table where she remained a little, deep afresh in thought—only the next thing to fall into a chair close to it and there, with her elbows on it, yield to the impulse of covering her flushed face with her hands.
HUGH CRIMBLE waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room—this time at the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at things about him without seeing them; all he saw, all he outwardly studied, was his own face and figure as he stopped an instant before a long glass suspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief and perhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace—that he had sent up his name to whom was immediately apparent—presented herself at the entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon no instant exchange of words; their exchange was mute—they but paused where they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the other for full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would have appeared, to Hugh; though he then at once asked for confirmation of it.
“Am I right, Lady Grace, am I right?—to havecome, I mean, after so many days of not hearing, not knowing, and perhaps, all too stupidly, not trying.” And he went on as, still with her eyes on him, she didn’t speak; though, only, we should have guessed, from her stress of emotion. “Even if I’m wrong, let me tell you, I don’t care—simply because, whatever new difficulty I may have brought about for you here a fortnight ago, there’s something that to-day adds to my doubt and my fear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear the suspense of them as they are.”
The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet declined a dread. “Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being without the other opinion—?”
“Ah, that worries me, yes; and all the more, at this hour, as I say, that—” He dropped it, however: “I’ll tell you in a moment! Myrealtorment, all the while, has been not to know, from day to day, what situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father here has let you in for; and yet at the same time—having no sign nor sound from you!—to see the importance of not making anything possibly worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I’ve been in the dark,” he pursued, “and feeling that I must leaveyouthere; so that now—just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any cost—I don’t know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn from you.”
Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture, marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. “Have you had—first of all—any news yet of Bardi?”
“That I have is what has driven me straightatyou again—since I’ve shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped and like a regular good ‘un,” Hugh was able to state; “I’ve just met him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my extreme exasperation, to ‘sample’ Canterbury, and I leave him to a bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to Bond Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension, oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the flash-light projected—well,” said the young man, to wind up handsomely, but briefly and reasonably, “over the whole field of our question.”
She panted with comprehension. “That of the two portraits being but the one sitter!”
“That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden nail of authenticity, and”—he quite glowed through his gloom for it—“we take our stand in glory on the last Mantovano in the world.”
It was a presumption his friend visibly yearned for—but over which, too, with her eyes away from him, she still distinguished the shadow of a cloud. “That is if the flash-light comes!”
“That is if it comes indeed, confound it!”—he had to enlarge a little under the recall of past experience. “So now, at any rate, you see my tension!”
She looked at him again as with a vision too full for a waste of words. “While you on your side of course keep well in view Mr. Bender’s.”
“Yes, while I keep well in view Mr. Bender’s; though he doesn’t know, you see, of Bardi’s being at hand.”
“Still,” said the girl, always all lucid for the case, “if the ‘flash-light’ does presently break——!”
“It will first take him in the eye?” Hugh had jumped to her idea, but he adopted it only to provide: “It might if he didn’t now wear goggles, so to say!—clapped on him too hard by Pappendick’s so damnably perverse opinion.” With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. “Ah, of course, these wretched days, you haven’t known of Pappendick’s personal visit. After that wire from Verona I wired him back defiance—”
“And that brought him?” she cried.
“To do the honest thing, yes—Iwillsay for him: to renew, for full assurance, his early memory of our picture.”
She hung upon it. “But only to stick then to what he had telegraphed?”
“To declare that forhim, lackaday! our thing’s a pure Moretto—and to declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, to Bender himself, who of course made a point of seeing him.”
“So that Bender”—she followed and wondered—“is, as a consequence, wholly off?”
It made her friend’s humour play up in his acute-ness. “Bender, Lady Grace, is, by the law of his being, never ‘wholly’ off—or on!—anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silver light on earth; never quite gone, yet neverallthere—save for inappreciable moments. Hewouldbe in eclipse as a peril, I grant,” Hugh went on—“if the question had struck him as really closed. But luckily the blessed Press—which is a pure heavenly joy and now quite immense on it—keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly.”
“Which makes, however,” Lady Grace discriminated, “for the danger of a grab.”
“Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admit that when it’s a question of a life spent, like his, in waiting, acquisitively, for the cat to jump, the only thing for one, at a given moment, as against that signal, is to be found one’s self by the animal in the line of its trajectory. That’s exactly,” he laughed, “where we are!”
She cast about as intelligently to note the place. “Your great idea, you mean,hasso worked—with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to come to us here?”
“All beyond my wildest hope,” Hugh returned; “since the sight of the picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifullytells. That we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it tight, is the cry that fills the air—to the tune of ten letters a day in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing of more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfully wild, but all of it wind in our sails.”
“I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see the thing in its new light,” Lady Grace said. “But I couldn’t stay—for tears!”
“Ah,” Hugh insisted on his side for comfort, “we’ll crow loudest yet! And don’t meanwhile, justdon’t, those splendid strange eyes of the fellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him, cling to him, and there’s talk of a ‘Ladies’ League of Protest’—all of which keeps up the pitch.”
“Poor Amy and I are a ladies’ league,” the girl joylessly joked—“as we now take in the ‘Journal’ regardless of expense.”
“Oh then you practicallyhaveit all—since,” Hugh, added after a brief hesitation, “I suppose Lord Theign himself doesn’t languish uninformed.”
“At far-off Salsomaggiore—by the papers? No doubt indeed he isn’t spared even the worst,” said Lady Grace—“and no doubt too it’s a drag on his cure.”
Her companion seemed struck with her lack of assurance. “Then you don’t—if I may ask—hear from him?”
“I? Never a word.”
“He doesn’t write?” Hugh allowed himself to insist.
“He doesn’t write. And I don’t write either.”
“And Lady Sandgate?” Hugh once more ventured.
“Doesn’tshewrite?”
“Doesn’tshehear?” said the young man, treating the other form of the question as a shade evasive.
“I’ve asked her not to tell me,” his friend replied—“that is if he simply holds out.”
“So that as she doesn’t tell you”—Hugh was clear for the inference—“he of course does hold out.” To which he added almost accusingly while his eyes searched her: “But your case is really bad.”
She confessed to it after a moment, but as if vaguely enjoying it. “My case is really bad.”
He had a vividness of impatience and contrition. 197
“And it’s I who—all too blunderingly!—have made it so?”
“I’ve made it so myself,” she said with a high head-shake, “and you, on the contrary—!” But here she checked her emphasis.
“Ah, I’ve sowanted, through our horrid silence, to help you!” And he pressed to get more at the truth. “You’ve so quite fatally displeased him?”
“To the last point—as I tell you. But it’s not to that I refer,” she explained; “it’s to the ground of complaint I’ve givenyou.” And then as this but left him blank, “It’s time—it was at once time—that you should know,” she pursued; “and yet if it’s hard for me to speak, as you see, it was impossible for me to write. But there it is.” She made her sad and beautiful effort. “The last thing before he left us I let the picture go.”
“You mean—?” But he could only wonder—till, however, it glimmered upon him. “You gave up your protest?”
“I gave up my protest. I told him that—so far as I’m concerned!—he might do as he liked.”
Her poor friend turned pale at the sharp little shock of it; but if his face thus showed the pang of too great a surprise he yet wreathed the convulsion in a gay grimace. “You leave me to struggle alone?”
“I leave you to struggle alone.”
He took it in bewilderingly, but tried again, even to the heroic, for optimism. “Ah well, you decided, I suppose, on some new personal ground.”
“Yes; a reason came up, a reason I hadn’t to that extent looked for and which of a sudden—quickly, before he went—Ihadsomehow to deal with. So to give him my word in the dismal sense I mention was my only way to meet the strain.” She paused; Hugh waited for something further, and “I gave him my word I wouldn’t help you,” she wound up.
He turned it over. “Toactin the matter—I see.”
“To act in the matter”—she went through with it—“after the high stand I had taken.”
Still he studied it. “I see—I see. It’s between you and your father.”
“It’s between him and me—yes. An engagement not again to trouble him.”
Hugh, from his face, might have feared a still greater complication; so he made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. “Ah, that was nice of you. And natural.That’sall right!”
“No”—she spoke from a deeper depth—“it’s altogether wrong. For whatever happens I must now accept it.”
“Well, say you must”—he really declined not to treat it almost as rather a “lark”—“if we can at least go on talking.”
“Ah, wecanat least go on talking!” she perversely sighed. “I can say anything I like so long as I don’t say it tohim” she almost wailed. But she added with more firmness: “I can still hope—and I can still pray.”
He set free again with a joyous gesture all his confidence. “Well, what morecouldyou do, anyhow? So isn’t that enough?”
It took her a moment to say, and even then she didn’t. “Is it enough foryou, Mr. Crimble?”
“Whatisenough for me”—he could for his part readily name it—“is the harm done you at our last meeting by my irruption; so that if you got his consent to see me——!”
“I didn’t get his consent!”—she had turned away from the searching eyes, but she faced them again to rectify: “I see you against his express command.”
“Ah then thank God I came!”—it was like a bland breath on afeu de joie: he flamed so much higher.
“Thank God you’ve come, yes—for my deplorable exposure.” And to justify her name for it before he could protest, “Iofferedhim here not to see you,” she rigorously explained.
“‘Offered him?”—Hugh did drop for it. “Not to see me—ever again?”
She didn’t falter. “Never again.”
Ah then he understood. “But he wouldn’t let that serve——?”
“Not for the price I put on it.”
“His yielding on the picture?”
“His yielding on the picture.”
Hugh lingered before it all. “Your proposal wasn’t ‘good enough’?”
“It wasn’t good enough.”
“I see,” he repeated—“I see.” But he was in that light again mystified. “Then why are you therefore not free?”
“Because—just after—you came back, and Ididsee you again!”
Ah, it was all present. “You found you were too sorry for me?”
“I found I was too sorry for you—as he himself found I was.”
Hugh had got hold of it now. “Andthat, you mean, he couldn’t stomach?”
“So little that when you had gone (andhowyou had to go you remember) he at once proposed, rather than that I should deceive you in a way so different from his own——”
“To do all we want of him?”
“To do all I did at least.”
“And it wasthen,” he took in, “that you wouldn’t deal?”
“Well”—try though she might to keep the colour out, it all came straighter and straighter now—“those moments had brought you home to me as they had also broughthim; making such a difference, I felt, for what he veered round to agree to.”
“The difference”—Hugh wanted it so adorably definite—“that you didn’t see your way to accepting——?”
“No, not to accepting the condition he named.”
“Which was that he’d keep the picture for you if you’d treat me as too ‘low’——?”
“If I’d treat you,” said Lady Grace with her eyes on his fine young face, “as impossible.”
He kept her eyes—he clearly liked so to make her repeat it. “And not even for the sake of the picture—?” After he had given her time, however, her silence, with her beautiful look in it, seemed to admonish him not to force her for his pleasure; as if what she had already told him didn’t make him throb enough for the wonder of it. Hehadit, and let her see by his high flush how he made it his own—while, the next thing, as it was but part of her avowal, the rest of that illumination called for a different intelligence. “Your father’s reprobation of me personally is on the ground that you’re all such great people?”
She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, his eagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the “ground” that his question laid bare the light veil of an evasion, “‘Great people,’ I’ve learned to see, mustn’t—to remain great—do what my father’s doing.”
“It’s indeed on the theory of their not so behaving,” Hugh returned, “that we see them—all the inferior rest of us—in the grand glamour of their greatness!”
If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beauty in her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of the journey. “You won’t see them in it for long—if they don’t now, under such tests and with such opportunities, begin to take care.”
This had given him, at a stroke, he clearly felt, all freedom for the closer criticism. “Lord Theign perhaps recognises some such canny truth, but ‘takes care,’ with the least trouble to himself and the finest short cut—does it, if you’ll let me say so, rather on the cheap—by finding ‘the likes’ of me, as his daughter’s trusted friend, out of the question.”
“Well, you won’t mind that, will you?” Lady Grace asked, “if he finds his daughter herself, in any such relation to you, quite as much so.”
“Different enough, from position to position and person to person,” he brightly brooded, “is the view that gets itselfmostcomfortably taken of the implications of Honour!”
“Yes,” the girl returned; “my father, in the act of despoiling us all, all who are interested, without apparently the least unpleasant consciousness, keeps the balance showily even, to his mostly so fine, so delicate sense, by suddenly discovering that he’s scandalised at my caring for your friendship.”
Hugh looked at her, on this, as with the gladness verily of possession promised and only waiting—or as if from that moment forth he had her assurance of everything that most concerned him and that might most inspire. “Well, isn’t the moral of it all simply that what his perversity of pride, as we can only hold it, will have most done for us is to bring us—and to keep us—blessedly together?”
She seemed for a moment to question his “simply.” “Do you regard us as so much ‘together’ when you remember where, in spite of everything, I’ve put myself?”
“By telling him to do what he likes?” he recalled without embarrassment. “Oh, that wasn’t in spite of ‘everything’—it was only in spite of the Manto-vano.”
“‘Only’?” she flushed—“when I’ve given the picture up?”
“Ah,” Hugh cried, “I don’t care a hang for the picture!” And then as she let him, closer, close to her with this, possess himself of her hands: “We both only care, don’t we, that we’re given to each other thus? We both only care, don’t we, that nothing can keep us apart?”
“Oh, if you’ve forgiven me—!” she sighed into his fond face.
“Why, since you gave the thing upforme,” he pleadingly laughed, “it isn’t as if you had givenmeup——!”
“For anything, anything? Ah never, never!” she breathed.
“Then why aren’t we all right?”
“Well, if you will——!”
“Oh for ever and ever and ever!”—and with this ardent cry of his devotion his arms closed in their strength and she was clasped to his breast and to his lips.
The next moment, however, she had checked him with the warning “Amy Sandgate!”—as if she had heard their hostess enter the other room. Lady Sand-gate was in fact almost already upon them—their disjunction had scarce been effected and she had reached the nearer threshold. They had at once put the widest space possible between them—a little of the flurry of which transaction agitated doubtless their clutch at composure. They gave back a shade awkwardly and consciously, on one side and the other, the speculative though gracious attention she for a few moments made them and their recent intimate relation the subject of; from all of which indeed Lady Grace sought and found cover in a prompt and responsible address to Hugh. “Mustn’t you go without more delay to Clifford Street?”
He came back to it all alert “At once!” He had recovered his hat and reached the other door, whence he gesticulated farewell to the elder lady. “Please pardon me”—and he disappeared.
Lady Sandgate hereupon stood for a little silently confronted with the girl. “Have you freedom of mind for the fact that your father’s suddenly at hand?”
“He has come back?”—Lady Grace was sharply struck.
“He arrives this afternoon and appears to go straight to Kitty—according to a wire that I find downstairs on coming back late from my luncheon. He has returned with a rush—as,” said his correspondent in the elation of triumph, “I wassurehe would!”
Her young friend was more at sea. “Brought back, you mean, by the outcry—even though he so hates it?”
But she was more and more all lucidity—save in so far as she was now almost all authority. “Ah, hating still more to seem afraid, he has come back to face the music!”
Lady Grace, turning away as in vague despair for the manner in which the music might affect him, yet wheeled about again, after thought, to a positive recognition and even to quite an inconsequent pride. “Yes—that’s dear old father!”
And what was Lady Sandgate moreover but mistress now of the subject? “At the point the row has reached he couldn’t stand it another day; so he has thrown up his cure and—lest we should oppose him!—not even announced his start.”
“Well,” her companion returned, “now that I’vedoneit all I shall never oppose him again!”
Lady Sandgate appeared to show herself as still under the impression she might have received on entering. “He’ll only opposeyou!”
“If he does,” said Lady Grace, “we’re at present two to bear it.”
“Heaven save us then”—the elder woman was quick, was even cordial, for the sense of this—“your good friendisclever!”
Lady Grace honoured the remark. “Mr. Crim-ble’s remarkably clever.”
“And you’ve arranged——?”
“We haven’t arranged—but we’ve understood. So that, dear Amy, ifyouunderstand—!” Lady Grace paused, for Gotch had come in from the hall.
“His lordship has arrived?” his mistress immediately put to him.
“No, my lady, but Lord John has—to know if he’s expectedhere, and in that case, by your ladyship’s leave, to come up.”
Her ladyship turned to the girl. “May Lord John—as we do await your father—come up?”
“As suitsyou, please!”
“He may come up,” said Lady Sandgate to Gotch. “His lordship’s expected.” She had a pause till they were alone again, when she went on to her companion: “You asked me just now if I understood. Well—I do understand!”
Lady Grace, with Gotch’s withdrawal, which left the door open, had reached the passage to the other room. “Then you’ll excuse me!”—she made her escape.