Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at
once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.
“So awfully kind of you--in the midst of the great doings I noticed--to
have found a beautiful minute for me.”
“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief,
I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be
taken to hunt for me.”
It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand
were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your
revels on purpose--with the same charity you showed me from that first
moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy
already confessed--and even as if finding that their relation had grown
during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had
originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly
long oval of her essentially quiet face--quiet in spite of certain vague
depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved
and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process--kept in range
from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the
directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from
the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their
mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his
indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly
inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this
contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main
physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung
and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a
suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr.
Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case,
that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other
exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so
superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently
under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out
some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of
this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed
to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with
it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another
and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest
seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat
narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after
a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after
they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I
haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak
occasion.”
“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather,
tropical--‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of
the White City.”
“Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn’t
let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked
signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young
man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be
conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more
than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he
broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free
gaiety of recognition.
“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.
“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said--“before a
new and rare feast!”
She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin--as a first
course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has
been an ogre before you--has left any.”
“Some tea, with pleasure”--he looked all his longing; “though when you
talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day
as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous _table
d’hôte_.”
“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or
whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for;
unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I
understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions
and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old
idiotic superstitions.”
Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his
fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories
and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author
or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a
cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we _all_ can play!”
“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”
The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression
of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art,
that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said,
“no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which
express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their
assurance!”
“We’ve had great luck,” she granted--“as I’ve just been reminded;
but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the
tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’
paradise in which so many of us live--I’ve gone about with my heart in
my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to
pieces?”
Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”
“The rich American who’s going round.”
It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s
Longhi?”
Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”
Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather--the scoundrel. He
offered his infernal eight thousand down.”
“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”
“I wish he had--he could then have been collared.”
“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering _us_
eight thousand--or eighteen or even eighty!”
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance,
almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one
would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man
surely doesn’t _suppose_ you’d traffic.”
She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the
friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But
people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.”
“Ah,” Hugh Crimble cried, “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as
a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours.
That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of
stopping.” She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent
flood might almost at any moment become copious. “Precious things are
going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very
quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in.”
She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom
stirred thought soon found connections and relations. “Well, I suppose
our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly
by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from
somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t _grow_ it all.”
“We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most
exposed.” He had been pulled up but for an instant. “Great Gainsboroughs
and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables
and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in
themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than
your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?”
The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence
anything he would. “Yes--it’s our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender
has proclaimed himself particularly ‘after.’”
It brought a cloud to her friend’s face. “Then he’ll be capable of
anything.”
“Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you
haven’t at any rate,” she said, “so much as seen the picture.”
“I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am
almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a
livelier sense of its danger.”
Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford
pity. “Poor baffled Mr. Bender!”
“Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!” Crimble cried. “Once given his
money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself--there’s the rub!
I dare say”--the young man saw it all--“he has brought his poisonous
cheque.”
She gave it her less exasperated wonder. “One has heard of that, but
only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer.”
“And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn’t a particularly pushing
dealer?”
“No,” Lady Grace judiciously returned; “I think he’s not a dealer at
all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being.”
He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. “A fond true lover?”
“As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain.”
He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender’s voracious
integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the
best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that
they’re the best keepers.”
The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s
dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought
us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for
us.”
“Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest
claims?”
His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and
not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest.
This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that
if you did even that we should have to take it from you.”
“Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel,
under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and
afraid.”
“That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from
justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us
over!”
Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his
being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what
should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so
apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply
to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?”
“I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round
and come back. You’d think again of Mr. Bender.”
“Whom I don’t, however, you see--if he’s prowling off there--in the
least want to meet.” Crimble made the point with gaiety. “I don’t
know what I mightn’t do to him--and yet it’s not of my temptation to
violence, after all, that I’m most afraid. It’s of the brutal mistake
of one’s breaking--with one’s priggish, precious modernity and
one’s possibly futile discriminations--into a _general_ situation or
composition, as we say, so serene and sound and right. What should one
do here, out of respect for that felicity, but hold one’s breath and
walk on tip-toe? The very celebrations and consecrations, as you tell
me, instinctively stay outside. I saw that all,” the young man went on
with more weight in his ardour, “I saw it, while we talked in London,
as your natural setting and your native air--and now ten minutes on the
spot have made it sink into my spirit. You’re a case, all together, of
enchanted harmony, of perfect equilibrium--there’s nothing to be done or
said.”
His friend listened to this eloquence with her eyes lowered, then
raising them to meet, with a vague insistence, his own; after which
something she had seen there appeared to determine in her another
motion. She indicated the small landscape that Mr. Bender had, by Lady
Sandgate’s report, rapidly studied and denounced. “For what do you take
that little picture?”
Hugh Crimble went over and looked. “Why, don’t you know? It’s a jolly
little Vandermeer of Delft.”
“It’s not a base imitation?”
He looked again, but appeared at a loss. “An imitation of Vandermeer?”
“Mr. Bender thinks of Cuyp.”
It made the young man ring out: “Then Mr. Bender’s doubly dangerous!”
“Singly is enough!” Lady Grace laughed. “But you see you _have_ to
speak.”
“Oh, to _him_, rather, after that--if you’ll just take me to him.”
“Yes then,” she said; but even while she spoke Lord John, who had
returned, by the terrace, from his quarter of an hour passed with Lady
Imber, was there practically between them; a fact that she had to notice
for her other visitor, to whom she was hastily reduced to naming him.
His lordship eagerly made the most of this tribute of her attention,
which had reached his ear; he treated it--her “Oh Lord John!”--as a
direct greeting. “Ah Lady Grace! I came back particularly to find you.”
She could but explain her predicament. “I was taking Mr. Crimble to see
the pictures.” And then more pointedly, as her manner had been virtually
an introduction of that gentleman, an introduction which Lord John’s
mere noncommittal stare was as little as possible a response to: “Mr.
Crimble’s one of the quite new connoisseurs.”
“Oh, I’m at the very lowest round of the ladder. But I aspire!” Hugh
laughed.
“You’ll mount!” said Lady Grace with friendly confidence.
He took it again with gay deprecation. “Ah, if by that time there’s
anything left here to mount _on!_”
“Let us hope there will be at least what Mr. Bender, poor man, won’t
have been able to carry off.” To which Lady Grace added, as to strike a
helpful spark from the personage who had just joined them, but who had
the air of wishing to preserve his detachment: “It’s to Lord John that
we owe Mr. Bender’s acquaintance.”
Hugh looked at the gentleman to whom they were so indebted. “Then do you
happen to know, sir, what your friend means to _do_ with his spoil?”
The question got itself but dryly treated, as if it might be a
commercially calculating or interested one. “Oh, not sell it again.”
“Then ship it to New York?” the inquirer pursued, defining himself
somehow as not snubbed and, from this point, not snubbable.
That appearance failed none the less to deprive Lord John of a betrayed
relish for being able to displease Lady Grace’s odd guest by large
assent. “As fast as ever he can--and you can land things there _now_,
can’t you? in three or four days.”
“I dare say. But can’t he be induced to have a little mercy?” Hugh
sturdily pursued.
Lord John pushed out his lips. “A ‘little’? How much do you want?”
“Well, one wants to be able somehow to stay his hand.”
“I doubt if you can any more stay Mr. Bender’s hand than you can empty
his purse.”
“Ah, the Despoilers!” said Crimble with strong expression. “But it’s
_we_,” he added, “who are base.”
“‘Base’?”--and Lord John’s surprise was apparently genuine.
“To want only to ‘do business,’ I mean, with our treasures, with our
glories.”
Hugh’s words exhaled such a sense of peril as to draw at once Lady
Grace. “Ah, but if we’re above that _here_, as you know------!”
He stood smilingly corrected and contrite. “Of course I know--but you
must forgive me if I have it on the brain. And show me first of all,
won’t you? the Moretto of Brescia.”
“You know then about the Moretto of Brescia?”
“Why, didn’t you tell me yourself?” It went on between them for the
moment quite as if there had been no Lord John.
“Probably, yes,” she recalled; “so how I must have swaggered!” After
which she turned to the other visitor with a kindness strained clear of
urgency. “Will you also come?”
He confessed to a difficulty--which his whole face begged her also to
take account of. “I hoped you’d be at leisure--for something I’ve so at
heart!”
This had its effect; she took a rapid decision and turned persuasively
to Crimble--for whom, in like manner, there must have been something in
_her_ face. “Let Mr. Bender himself then show you. And there are things
in the library too.”
“Oh yes, there are things in the library.” Lord John, happy in his
gained advantage and addressing Hugh from the strong ground of an
initiation already complete, quite sped him on the way.
Hugh clearly made no attempt to veil the penetration with which he was
moved to look from one of these counsellors to the other, though with a
ready “Thank-you!” for Lady Grace he the next instant started in pursuit
of Mr. Bender.
V
“Your friend seems remarkably hot!” Lord John remarked to his young
hostess as soon as they had been left together.
“He has cycled twenty miles. And indeed,” she smiled, “he does appear to
care for what he cares for!”
Her companion then, during a moment’s silence, might have been noting
the emphasis of her assent. “Have you known him long?”
“No--not long.”
“Nor seen him often?”
“Only once--till now.”
“Oh!” said Lord John with another pause. But he soon proceeded. “Let us
leave him then to cool! I haven’t cycled twenty miles, but I’ve motored
forty very much in the hope of _this_, Lady Grace--the chance of being
able to assure you that I too care very much for what I care for.” To
which he added on an easier note, as to carry off a slight awkwardness
while she only waited: “You certainly mustn’t let yourself--between us
all--be worked to death.”
“Oh, such days as this--I” She made light enough of her burden.
“They don’t come often to _me_ at least, Lady Grace! I hadn’t grasped
in advance the scale of your fête,” he went on; “but since I’ve the
great luck to find you alone--!” He paused for breath, however, before
the full sequence.
She helped him out as through common kindness, but it was a trifle
colourless. “Alone or in company, Lord John, I’m always very glad to see
you.”
“Then that assurance helps me to wonder if you don’t perhaps gently
guess what it is I want to say.” This time indeed she left him to
his wonder, so that he had to support himself. “I’ve tried, all
considerately--these three months--to let you see for yourself how
I feel. I feel very strongly, Lady Grace; so that at last”--and his
impatient sincerity took after another instant the jump--“well, I
regularly worship you. You’re my absolute ideal. I think of you the
whole time.”
She measured out consideration as if it had been a yard of pretty
ribbon. “Are you sure you _know_ me enough?”
“I think I know a perfect woman when I see one!” Nothing now at least
could have been more prompt, and while a decent pity for such a mistake
showed in her smile he followed it up. “Isn’t what you rather mean that
you haven’t cared sufficiently to know _me?_ If so, that can be little
by little mended, Lady Grace.” He was in fact altogether gallant about
it. “I’m aware of the limits of what I have to show or to offer, but I
defy you to find a limit to my possible devotion.”
She deferred to that, but taking it in a lower key. “I believe you’d be
very good to me.”
“Well, isn’t _that_ something to start with?”--he fairly pounced on it.
“I’ll do any blest thing in life you like, I’ll accept any condition you
impose, if you’ll only tell me you see your way.”
“Shouldn’t I have a little more first to see yours?” she asked. “When
you say you’ll do anything in life I like, isn’t there anything you
yourself want strongly enough to do?”
He cast a stare about on the suggestions of the scene. “Anything that
will make money, you mean?”
“Make money or make reputation--or even just make the time pass.”
“Oh, what I have to look to in the way of a career?” If that was her
meaning he could show after an instant that he didn’t fear it. “Well,
your father, dear delightful man, has been so good as to give me to
understand that he backs me for a decent deserving creature; and I’ve
noticed, as you doubtless yourself have, that when Lord Theign backs a
fellow----!”
He left the obvious moral for her to take up--which she did, but all
interrogatively. “The fellow at once comes in for something awfully
good?”
“I don’t in the least mind your laughing at me,” Lord John returned,
“for when I put him the question of the lift he’d give me by speaking
to you first he bade me simply remember the complete personal liberty in
which he leaves you, and yet which doesn’t come--take my word!” said the
young man sagely--“from his being at all indifferent.”
“No,” she answered--“father isn’t indifferent. But father’s ‘great’”
“Great indeed!”--her friend took it as with full comprehension. This
appeared not to prevent, however, a second and more anxious thought.
“Too great for _you?_”
“Well, he makes me feel--even as his daughter--my extreme comparative
smallness.”
It was easy, Lord John indicated, to see what she meant “He’s a _grand
seigneur_, and a serious one--that’s what he is: the very type and model
of it, down to the ground. So you can imagine,” the young man said,
“what he makes me feel--most of all when he’s so awfully good-natured
to me. His being as ‘great’ as you say and yet backing me--such as I
am!--doesn’t _that_ strike you as a good note for me, the best you could
possibly require? For he really _would_ like what I propose to you.”
She might have been noting, while she thought, that he had risen to
ingenuity, to fineness, on the wings of his argument; under the effect
of which her reply had the air of a concession. “Yes--he would like it.”
“Then he _has_ spoken to you?” her suitor eagerly asked.
“He hasn’t needed--he has ways of letting one know.”
“Yes, yes, he has ways; all his own--like everything else he has. He’s
wonderful.”
She fully agreed. “He’s wonderful.”
The tone of it appeared somehow to shorten at once for Lord John the
rest of his approach to a conclusion. “So you do see your way?”
“Ah--!” she said with a quick sad shrinkage.
“I mean,” her visitor hastened to explain, “if he does put it to you as
the very best idea he has for you. When he does that--as I believe him
ready to do--will you really and fairly listen to him? I’m certain,
honestly, that when you know me better--!” His confidence in short
donned a bravery.
“I’ve been feeling this quarter of an hour,” the girl returned, “that I
do know you better.”
“Then isn’t that all I want?--unless indeed I ought perhaps to ask
rather if it isn’t all _you_ do! At any rate,” said Lord John, “I may
see you again here?”
She waited a moment. “You must have patience with me.”
“I _am_ having it But _after_ your father’s appeal.”
“Well,” she said, “that must come first.”
“Then you won’t dodge it?”
She looked at him straight “I don’t dodge, Lord John.”
He admired the manner of it “You look awfully handsome as you say
so--and you see what _that_ does to me.” As to attentuate a little the
freedom of which he went on: “May I fondly hope that if Lady Imber too
should wish to put in another word for me----?”
“Will I listen to her?”--it brought Lady Grace straight down. “No, Lord
John, let me tell you at once that I’ll do nothing of the sort Kitty’s
quite another affair, and I never listen to her a bit more than I can
help.”
Lord John appeared to feel, on this, that he mustn’t too easily, in
honour, abandon a person who had presented herself to him as an ally.
“Ah, you strike me as a little hard on her. Your father himself--in his
looser moments!--takes pleasure in what she says.”
Our young woman’s eyes, as they rested on him after this remark, had
no mercy for its extreme feebleness. “If you mean that she’s the most
reckless rattle one knows, and that she never looks so beautiful as when
she’s at her worst, and that, always clever for where she makes out her
interest, she has learnt to ‘get round’ him till he only sees through
her eyes--if you mean _that_ I understand you perfectly. But even if you
think me horrid for reflecting so on my nearest and dearest, it’s not on
the side on which he has most confidence in his elder daughter that his
youngest is moved to have most confidence in _him_.”
Lord John stared as if she had shaken some odd bright fluttering
object in his face; but then recovering himself: “He hasn’t perhaps an
absolutely boundless confidence--”
“In any one in the world but himself?”--she had taken him straight up.
“He hasn’t indeed, and that’s what we must come to; so that even if he
likes you as much as you doubtless very justly feel, it won’t be because
you are right about your being nice, but because _he_ is!”
“You mean that if I were wrong about it he would still insist that he
isn’t?”
Lady Grace was indeed sure. “Absolutely--if he had begun so! He began so
with Kitty--that is with allowing her everything.”
Lord John appeared struck. “Yes--and he still allows her two thousand.”
“I’m glad to hear it--she has never told me how much!” the girl
undisguisedly smiled.
“Then perhaps I oughtn’t!”--he glowed with the light of contrition.
“Well, you can’t help it now,” his companion remarked with amusement.
“You mean that he ought to allow _you_ as much?” Lord John inquired.
“I’m sure you’re right, and that he will,” he continued quite as in good
faith; “but I want you to understand that I don’t care in the least what
it may be!”
The subject of his suit took the longest look at him she had taken yet.
“You’re very good to say so!”
If this was ironic the touch fell short, thanks to his perception that
they had practically just ceased to be alone. They were in presence of
a third figure, who had arrived from the terrace, but whose approach to
them was not so immediate as to deprive Lord John of time for another
question. “Will you let _him_ tell you, at all events, how good he
thinks me?--and then let me come back and have it from you again?”
Lady Grace’s answer to this was to turn, as he drew nearer, to the
person by whom they were now joined. “Lord John desires you should tell
me, father, how good you think him.”
“‘Good,’ my dear?--good for what?” said Lord Theign a trifle absurdly,
but looking from one of them to the other.
“I feel I must ask _him_ to tell you.”
“Then I shall give him a chance--as I should particularly like you to go
back and deal with those overwhelming children.”
“Ah, they don’t overwhelm _you_, father!”--the girl put it with some
point.
“If you mean to say I overwhelmed _them_, I dare say I did,” he
replied--“from my view of that vast collective gape of six hundred
painfully plain and perfectly expressionless faces. But that was only
for the time: I pumped advice--oh _such_ advice!--and they held the
large bucket as still as my pet pointer, when I scratch him, holds his
back. The bucket, under the stream--”
“Was bound to overflow?” Lady Grace suggested.
“Well, the strong recoil of the wave of intelligence has been not
unnaturally followed by the formidable break. You must really,” Lord
Theign insisted, “go and deal with it.”
His daughter’s smile, for all this, was perceptibly cold. “You work
people up, father, and then leave others to let them down.”
“The two things,” he promptly replied, “require different natures.” To
which he simply added, as with the habit of authority, though not of
harshness, “Go!”
It was absolute and she yielded; only pausing an instant to look as with
a certain gathered meaning from one of the men to the other. Faintly and
resignedly sighing she passed away to the terrace and disappeared.
“The nature that _can_ let you down--I rather like it, you know!” Lord
John threw off. Which, for an airy elegance in them, were perhaps just
slightly rash words--his companion gave him so sharp a look as the two
were left together.