I
“NO, my lord,” Banks had replied, “no stranger has yet arrived. But
I’ll see if any one has come in--or who has.” As he spoke, however, he
observed Lady Sandgate’s approach to the hall by the entrance giving
upon the great terrace, and addressed her on her passing the threshold.
“Lord John, my lady.” With which, his duty majestically performed, he
retired to the quarter--that of the main access to the spacious centre
of the house--from which he had ushered the visitor.
This personage, facing Lady Sandgate as she paused there a moment framed
by the large doorway to the outer expanses, the small pinkish paper of
a folded telegram in her hand, had partly before him, as an immediate
effect, the high wide interior, still breathing the quiet air and the
fair pannelled security of the couple of hushed and stored centuries, in
which certain of the reputed treasures of Dedborough Place beautifully
disposed themselves; and then, through ample apertures and beyond
the stately stone outworks of the great seated and supported
house--uplifting terrace, balanced, balustraded steps and containing
basins where splash and spray were at rest--all the rich composed
extension of garden and lawn and park. An ancient, an assured elegance
seemed to reign; pictures and preserved “pieces,” cabinets and
tapestries, spoke, each for itself, of fine selection and high
distinction; while the originals of the old portraits, in more or less
deserved salience, hung over the happy scene as the sworn members of a
great guild might have sat, on the beautiful April day, at one of their
annual feasts.
Such was the setting confirmed by generous time, but the handsome woman
of considerably more than forty whose entrance had all but coincided
with that of Lord John either belonged, for the eye, to no such
complacent company or enjoyed a relation to it in which the odd twists
and turns of history must have been more frequent than any dull avenue
or easy sequence. Lady Sandgate was shiningly modern, and perhaps at no
point more so than by the effect of her express repudiation of a mundane
future certain to be more and more offensive to women of real quality
and of formed taste. Clearly, at any rate, in her hands, the clue to
the antique confidence had lost itself, and repose, however founded, had
given way to curiosity--that is to speculation--however disguised. She
might have consented, or even attained, to being but gracefully stupid,
but she would presumably have confessed, if put on her trial for
restlessness or for intelligence, that she _was_, after all, almost
clever enough to be vulgar. Unmistakably, moreover, she had still, with
her fine stature, her disciplined figure, her cherished complexion, her
bright important hair, her kind bold eyes and her large constant smile,
the degree of beauty that might pretend to put every other question by.
Lord John addressed her as with a significant manner that he might have
had--that of a lack of need, or even of interest, for any explanation
about herself: it would have been clear that he was apt to discriminate
with sharpness among possible claims on his attention. “I luckily find
_you_ at least, Lady Sandgate--they tell me Theign’s off somewhere.”
She replied as with the general habit, on her side, of bland
reassurance; it mostly had easier consequences--for herself--than the
perhaps more showy creation of alarm. “Only off in the park--open to-day
for a school-feast from Dedborough, as you may have made out from the
avenue; giving good advice, at the top of his lungs, to four hundred and
fifty children.”
It was such a scene, and such an aspect of the personage so accounted
for, as Lord John could easily take in, and his recognition familiarly
smiled. “Oh he’s so great on such occasions that I’m sorry to be missing
it.”
“I’ve _had_ to miss it,” Lady Sandgate sighed--“that is to miss the
peroration. I’ve just left them, but he had even then been going on for
twenty minutes, and I dare say that if you care to take a look you’ll
find him, poor dear victim of duty, still _at_ it.”
“I’ll warrant--for, as I often tell him, he makes the idea of one’s duty
an awful thing to his friends by the extravagance with which he always
overdoes it.” And the image itself appeared in some degree to prompt
this particular edified friend to look at his watch and consider. “I
should like to come in for the grand _finale_, but I rattled over in a
great measure to meet a party, as he calls himself--and calls, if you
please, even me!--who’s motoring down by appointment and whom I think I
should be here to receive; as well as a little, I confess, in the hope
of a glimpse of Lady Grace: if you can perhaps imagine _that!_”
“I can imagine it perfectly,” said Lady Sandgate, whom evidently no
perceptions of that general order ever cost a strain. “It quite sticks
out of you, and every one moreover has for some time past been waiting
to see. But you haven’t then,” she added, “come from town?”
“No, I’m for three days at Chanter with my mother; whom, as she kindly
lent me her car, I should have rather liked to bring.”
Lady Sandgate left the unsaid, in this connection, languish no
longer than was decent. “But whom you doubtless had to leave, by her
preference, just settling down to bridge.”
“Oh, to sit down would imply that my mother at some moment of the day
gets up----!”
“Which the Duchess never does?”--Lady Sand-gate only asked to be allowed
to show how she saw it. “She fights to the last, invincible; gathering
in the spoils and only routing her friends?” She abounded genially in
her privileged vision. “Ah yes--we know something of that!”
Lord John, who was a young man of a rambling but not of an idle eye,
fixed her an instant with a surprise that was yet not steeped in
compassion. “You too then?”
She wouldn’t, however, too meanly narrow it down. “Well, in this house
generally; where I’m so often made welcome, you see, and where----”
“Where,” he broke in at once, “your jolly good footing quite sticks out
of _you_, perhaps you’ll let me say!”
She clearly didn’t mind his seeing her ask herself how she should deal
with so much rather juvenile intelligence; and indeed she could only
decide to deal quite simply. “You can’t say more than I feel--and am
proud to feel!--at being of comfort when they’re worried.”
This but fed the light flame of his easy perception--which lighted for
him, if she would, all the facts equally. “And they’re worried now,
you imply, because my terrible mother is capable of heavy gains and of
making a great noise if she isn’t paid? I ought to mind speaking of
that truth,” he went on as with a practised glance in the direction of
delicacy; “but I think I should like you to know that I myself am not a
bit ignorant of why it has made such an impression here.”
Lady Sandgate forestalled his knowledge. “Because poor Kitty Imber--who
should either never touch a card or else learn to suffer in silence, as
I’ve had to, goodness knows!--has thrown herself, with her impossible
big debt, upon her father? whom she thinks herself entitled to ‘look to’
even more as a lovely young widow with a good jointure than she formerly
did as the mere most beautiful daughter at home.”
She had put the picture a shade interrogatively, but this was as nothing
to the note of free inquiry in Lord John’s reply. “You mean that our
lovely young widows--to say nothing of lovely young wives--ought by this
time to have made out, in predicaments, how to turn round?”
His temporary hostess, even with his eyes on her, appeared to decide
after a moment not wholly to disown his thought. But she smiled for it.
“Well, in that set----!”
“My mother’s set?” However, if she could smile he could laugh. “I’m much
obliged!”
“Oh,” she qualified, “I don’t criticise her Grace; but the ways and
traditions and tone of this house----”
“Make it”--he took her sense straight from her--“the house in England
where one feels most the false note of a dishevelled and bankrupt elder
daughter breaking in with a list of her gaming debts--to say nothing of
others!--and wishing to have at least those wiped out in the interest of
her reputation? Exactly so,” he went on before she could meet it with a
diplomatic ambiguity; “and just that, I assure you, is a large part of
the reason I like to come here--since I personally don’t come with any
such associations.”
“Not the association of bankruptcy--no; as you represent the payee!”
The young man appeared to regard this imputation for a moment almost
as a liberty taken. “How do you know so well, Lady Sandgate, what I
represent?”
She bethought herself--but briefly and bravely. “Well, don’t you
represent, by your own admission, certain fond aspirations? Don’t
you represent the belief--very natural, I grant--that more than _one_
perverse and extravagant flower will be unlikely on such a fine healthy
old stem; and, consistently with that, the hope of arranging with our
admirable host here that he shall lend a helpful hand to your commending
yourself to dear Grace?”
Lord John might, in the light of these words, have felt any latent
infirmity in such a pretension exposed; but as he stood there facing
his chances he would have struck a spectator as resting firmly enough on
some felt residuum of advantage: whether this were cleverness or luck,
the strength of his backing or that of his sincerity. Even with the
young woman to whom our friends’ reference thus broadened still a
vague quantity for us, you would have taken his sincerity as quite
possible--and this despite an odd element in him that you might have
described as a certain delicacy of brutality. This younger son of
a noble matron recognised even by himself as terrible enjoyed in
no immediate or aggressive manner any imputable private heritage
or privilege of arrogance. He would on the contrary have irradiated
fineness if his lustre hadn’t been a little prematurely dimmed. Active
yet insubstantial, he was slight and short and a trifle too punctually,
though not yet quite lamentably, bald. Delicacy was in the arch of his
eyebrow, the finish of his facial line, the economy of “treatment”
by which his negative nose had been enabled to look important and his
meagre mouth to smile its spareness away.
He had pleasant but hard little eyes--they glittered, handsomely,
without promise--and a neatness, a coolness and an ease, a clear
instinct for making point take, on his behalf, the place of weight and
immunity that of capacity, which represented somehow the art of living
at a high pitch and yet at a low cost. There was that in his satisfied
air which still suggested sharp wants--and this was withal the
ambiguity; for the temper of these appetites or views was certainly,
you would have concluded, not such as always to sacrifice to form. If he
really, for instance, wanted Lady Grace, the passion or the sense of his
interest in it would scarce have been considerately irritable.
“May I ask what you mean,” he inquired of Lady Sandgate, “by the
question of my ‘arranging’?”
“I mean that you’re the very clever son of a very clever mother.”
“Oh, I’m less clever than you think,” he replied--“if you really think
it of me at all; and mamma’s a good sight cleverer!”
“Than I think?” Lady Sandgate echoed. “Why, she’s the person in all our
world I would gladly most resemble--for her general ability to put what
she wants through.” But she at once added: “That is _if_--!” pausing on
it with a smile.
“If what then?”
“Well, if I could be absolutely certain to have all in her kinds of
cleverness without exception--and to have them,” said Lady Sandgate, “to
the very end.”
He definitely, he almost contemptuously declined to follow her. “The
very end of what?”
She took her choice as amid all the wonderful directions there might be,
and then seemed both to risk and to reserve something. “Say of her so
wonderfully successful _general_ career.”
It doubtless, however, warranted him in appearing to cut insinuations
short. “When you’re as clever as she you’ll be as good.” To which he
subjoined: “You don’t begin to have the opportunity of knowing how good
she is.” This pronouncement, to whatever comparative obscurity it might
appear to relegate her, his interlocutress had to take--he was so prompt
with a more explicit challenge. “What is it exactly that you suppose
yourself to know?”
Lady Sandgate had after a moment, in her supreme good humour, decided
to take everything. “I always proceed on the assumption that I know
everything, because that makes people tell me.”
“It wouldn’t make we,” he quite rang out, “if I didn’t want to! But as
it happens,” he allowed, “there’s a question it would be convenient
to me to put to you. You must be, with your charming unconventional
relation with him, extremely in Theign’s confidence.”
She waited a little as for more. “Is that your question--_whether_ I
am?”
“No, but if you are you’ll the better answer it”
She had no objection then to answering it beautifully. “We’re the best
friends in the world; he has been really my providence, as a lone woman
with almost nobody and nothing of her own, and I feel my footing here,
as so frequent and yet so discreet a visitor, simply perfect But I’m
happy to say that--for my pleasure when I’m really curious--this doesn’t
close to me the sweet resource of occasionally guessing things.”
“Then I hope you’ve ground for believing that if I go the right way
about it he’s likely to listen to me.”
Lady Sandgate measured her ground--which scarce seemed extensive. “The
person he most listens to just now--and in fact at any time, as you must
have seen for yourself--is that arch-tormentor, or at least beautiful
wheedler, his elder daughter.”
“Lady Imber’s _here?_” Lord John alertly asked.
“She arrived last night and--as we’ve other visitors--seems to have set
up a side-show in the garden.”
“Then she’ll ‘draw’ of course immensely, as she always does. But her
sister won’t be in that case with her,” the young man supposed.
“Because Grace feels herself naturally an independent show? So she well
may,” said Lady Sandgate, “but I must tell you that when I last noticed
them there Kitty was in the very act of leading her away.”
Lord John figured it a moment. “Lady Imber”--he ironically enlarged the
figure--“_can_ lead people away.”
“Oh, dear Grace,” his companion returned, “happens fortunately to be
firm!”
This seemed to strike him for a moment as equivocal. “Not against
_me_, however--you don’t mean? You don’t think she has a beastly
prejudice----?”
“Surely you can judge about it; as knowing best what may--or what
mayn’t--have happened between you.”
“Well, I try to judge”--and such candour as was possible to Lord John
seemed to sit for a moment on his brow. “But I’m in fear of seeing her
too much as I want to see her.”
There was an appeal in it that Lady Sandgate might have been moved to
meet “Are you absolutely in earnest about her?”
“Of course I am--why shouldn’t I be? But,” he said with impatience, “I
want help.”
“Very well then, that’s what Lady Imber’s giving you.” And as it
appeared to take him time to read into these words their full sense,
she produced others, and so far did help him--though the effort was in
a degree that of her exhibiting with some complacency her own unassisted
control of stray signs and shy lights. “By telling her, by bringing it
home to her, that if she’ll make up her mind to accept you the Duchess
will do the handsome thing. Handsome, I mean, by Kitty.”
Lord John, appropriating for his convenience the truth in this, yet
regarded it as open to a becoming, an improving touch from himself.
“Well, and by _me_.” To which he added with more of a challenge in it:
“But you really know what my mother will do?”
“By my system,” Lady Sandgate smiled, “you see I’ve guessed. What your
mother will do is what brought you over!”
“Well, it’s that,” he allowed--“and something else.”
“Something else?” she derisively echoed. “I should think ‘that,’ for an
ardent lover, would have been enough.”
“Ah, but it’s all one Job! I mean it’s one idea,” he hastened to
explain--“if you think Lady Imber’s really acting on her.”
“Mightn’t you go and see?”
“I would in a moment if I hadn’t to look out for another matter too.”
And he renewed his attention to his watch. “I mean getting straight at
my American, the party I just mentioned------”
But she had already taken him up. “You too have an American and a
‘party,’ and yours also motors down----?”
“Mr. Breckenridge Bender.” Lord John named him with a shade of elation.
She gaped at the fuller light “You _know_ my Breckenridge?--who I hoped
was coming for me!”
Lord John as freely, but more gaily, wondered. “Had he told you so?”
She held out, opened, the telegram she had kept folded in her hand since
her entrance. “He has sent me that--which, delivered to me ten minutes
ago out there, has brought me in to receive him.”
The young man read out this missive. “‘Failing to find you in Bruton
Street, start in pursuit and hope to overtake you about four.’” It did
involve an ambiguity. “Why, he has been engaged these three days
to coincide with myself, and not to fail of him has been part of my
business.”
Lady Sandgate, in her demonstrative way, appealed to the general rich
scene. “Then why does he say it’s me he’s pursuing?”
He seemed to recognise promptly enough in her the sense of a menaced
monopoly. “My dear lady, he’s pursuing expensive works of art.”
“By which you imply that I’m one?” She might have been wound up by her
disappointment to almost any irony.
“I imply--or rather I affirm--that every handsome woman is! But what he
arranged with me about,” Lord John explained, “was that he should
see the Dedborough pictures in general and the great Sir Joshua in
particular--of which he had heard so much and to which I’ve been thus
glad to assist him.”
This news, however, with its lively interest, but deepened the
listener’s mystification. “Then why--this whole week that I’ve been in
the house--hasn’t our good friend here mentioned to me his coming?”
“Because our good friend here has had no reason”--Lord John could treat
it now as simple enough. “Good as he is in all ways, he’s so best of
all about showing the house and its contents that I haven’t even thought
necessary to write him that I’m introducing Breckenridge.”
“I should have been happy to introduce him,” Lady Sandgate just
quavered--“if I had at all known he wanted it.”
Her companion weighed the difference between them and appeared to
pronounce it a trifle he didn’t care a fig for. “I surrender you that
privilege then--of presenting him to his host--if I’ve seemed to you
to snatch it from you.” To which Lord John added, as with liberality
unrestricted, “But I’ve been taking him about to see what’s worth
while--as only last week to Lady Lappington’s Longhi.”
This revelation, though so casual in its form, fairly drew from Lady
Sandgate, as she took it in, an interrogative wail. “Her Longhi?”
“Why, don’t you know her great Venetian family group, the
What-do-you-call-’ems?--seven full-length figures, each one a gem, for
which he paid her her price before he left the house.”
She could but make it more richly resound--almost stricken, lost in her
wistful thought: “Seven full-length figures? Her price?”
“Eight thousand--slap down. Bender knows,” said Lord John, “what he
wants.”
“And does he want only”--her wonder grew and grew--
“What-do-you-call-’ems’?”
“He most usually wants what he can’t have.” Lord John made scarce more
of it than that. “But, awfully hard up as I fancy her, Lady Lappington
went _at_ him.”
It determined in his friend a boldly critical attitude. “How
horrible--at the rate things are leaving us!” But this was far from the
end of her interest. “And is that the way he pays?”
“Before he leaves the house?” Lord John lived it amusedly over. “Well,
_she_ took care of that.”
“How incredibly vulgar!” It all had, however, for Lady Sandgate, still
other connections--which might have attenuated Lady Lappington’s
case, though she didn’t glance at this. “He makes the most scandalous
eyes--the ruffian!--at my great-grandmother.” And then as richly to
enlighten any blankness: “My tremendous Lawrence, don’t you know?--in
her wedding-dress, down to her knees; with such extraordinarily
speaking eyes, such lovely arms and hands, such wonderful flesh-tints:
universally considered the masterpiece of the artist.”
Lord John seemed to look a moment not so much at the image evoked, in
which he wasn’t interested, as at certain possibilities lurking behind
it. “And are you going to _sell_ the masterpiece of the artist?”
She held her head high. “I’ve indignantly refused--for all his pressing
me so hard.”
“Yet that’s what he nevertheless pursues you to-day to keep up?”
The question had a little the ring of those of which the occupant of a
witness-box is mostly the subject, but Lady Sandgate was so far as this
went an imperturbable witness. “I need hardly fear it perhaps if--in
the light of what you tell me of your arrangement with him--his pursuit
becomes, where I am concerned, a figure of speech.”
“Oh,” Lord John returned, “he kills two birds with one stone--he sees
both Sir Joshua and you.”
This version of the case had its effect, for the moment, on his fair
associate. “Does he want to buy _their_ pride and glory?”
The young man, however, struck on his own side, became at first but the
bright reflector of her thought. “Is that wonder for sale?”
She closed her eyes as with the shudder of hearing such words. “Not,
surely, by _any_ monstrous chance! Fancy dear, proud Theign------!”
“I can’t fancy him--no!” And Lord John appeared to renounce the effort.
“But a cat may look at a king and a sharp funny Yankee at anything.”
These things might be, Lady Sandgate’s face and gesture apparently
signified; but another question diverted her. “You’re clearly a
wonderful showman, but do you mind my asking you whether you’re on such
an occasion a--well, a closely interested one?”
“‘Interested’?” he echoed; though it wasn’t to gain time, he showed, for
he would in that case have taken more. “To the extent, you mean, of my
little percentage?” And then as in silence she but kept a slightly grim
smile on him: “Why do you ask if--with your high delicacy about your
great-grandmother--you’ve nothing to place?”
It took her a minute to say, while her fine eye only rolled; but when
she spoke that organ boldly rested and the truth vividly appeared.
“I ask because people like you, Lord John, strike me as dangerous to
the--how shall I name it?--the common weal; and because of my general
strong feeling that we don’t want any more of our national treasures
(for I regard my great-grandmother as national) to be scattered about
the world.”
“There’s much in this country and age,” he replied in an off-hand
manner, “to be said about _that_,” The present, however, was not the
time to say it all; so he said something else instead, accompanying it
with a smile that signified sufficiency. “To my friends, I need scarcely
remark to you, I’m all the friend.”
She had meanwhile seen the butler reappear by the door that opened to
the terrace, and though the high, bleak, impersonal approach of this
functionary was ever, and more and more at every step, a process to defy
interpretation, long practice evidently now enabled her to suggest, as
she turned again to her fellow-visitor a reading of it. “It’s the friend
then clearly who’s wanted in the park.”
She might, by the way Banks looked at her, have snatched from his hand
a missive addressed to another; though while he addressed himself to her
companion he allowed for her indecorum sufficiently to take it up where
she had left it. “By her ladyship, my lord, who sends to hope you’ll
join them below the terrace.”
“Ah, Grace hopes,” said Lady Sandgate for the young man’s encouragement.
“There you are!”
Lord John took up the motor-cap he had lain down on coming in. “I rush
to Lady Grace, but don’t demoralise Bender!” And he went forth to the
terrace and the gardens.
Banks looked about as for some further exercise of his high function.
“Will you have tea, my lady?”
This appeared to strike her as premature. “Oh, thanks--when they all
come in.”
“They’ll scarcely _all_, my lady”--he indicated respectfully that he
knew what he was talking about. “There’s tea in her ladyship’s tent;
but,” he qualified, “it has also been ordered for the saloon.”
“Ah then,” she said cheerfully, “Mr. Bender will be glad--!” And she
became, with this, aware of the approach of another visitor. Banks
considered, up and down, the gentleman ushered in, at the left, by the
footman who had received him at the main entrance to the house. “Here
he must be, my lady.” With which he retired to the spacious opposite
quarter, where he vanished, while the footman, his own office performed,
retreated as he had come, and Lady Sandgate, all hospitality, received
the many-sided author of her specious telegram, of Lord John’s
irritating confidence and of Lady Lappington’s massive cheque.