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 told _you_ about 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 at _their_ Mantovano, 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 so _much_ to 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’t _the_ first 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 have _most_ the 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 seen _after_
the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the
Dedborough.”
“And so awfully _long_ after--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 see _every 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 ripping
_interest_ of 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 to _feel_
so hit!”
“It does spoil one,” Hugh laughed, “for milder joys. Of course what I
have to consider is the chance--putting it at the _merest_ chance--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 he _should_ be--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’ll _think_ a
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 I _offered_ you 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 see
_how_ wronged; 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 by _you_, dear father, beyond doubt!”
“Encouraged--er--by every one: because you were (yes, you _were!_)
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 I _have_ your 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 there _being_ something!”
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 I _was_ ready--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 I _won’t_ do 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 has _been_ here--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 you
_are_ infatuated?”
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 get _at_ you?”
She looked at him again now. “He must speak for himself. I’ve said what
I mean.”
“But what the devil _do_ you 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.