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;
and _his_ people, 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 on _me?_”
“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 put _me_ into
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 from _him_
again,” 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, for _this_, 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 actively _incurred_ your 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 gratify _your_ hope: 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 I
_can_ answer 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 terms
_have_ my 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 him
_was_ purely 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. But _we_
have 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 to _me!_”
“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’s_ a mercy!” he interrupted, riding his irony hard; “and
I’m glad to hear you at least let me off _such_ efforts! 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 any _one_ of 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 I _may_ so 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 upon _my_ self--”
“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 is
_the_ question we care about: it’s our very ground of conversation.”
“Then,” her father decreed, “your conversation will please to _dispense_
with 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 be _done_ in 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 you _will_ be 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 we _want_ you 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, just _in_ ours--?”
“No, no,” she interrupted--“not in _ours!_” 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. “He _comes_ to 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 you _really_ meant 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 like _that_ sort of
thing?”
Lady Grace took her time--but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him,
what _had_ gathered. “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? If _what_, 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 ever _been_ settled 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 least _had_, 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.