“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 so _wanted_, 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 given _you_.” 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--I _had_ somehow 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. “To _act_ in 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’s_ all 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, we _can_ at least go on talking!” she perversely sighed. “I can say
anything I like so long as I don’t say it to _him_” 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
more _could_ you do, anyhow? So isn’t that enough?”
It took her a moment to say, and even then she didn’t. “Is it enough for
_you_, Mr. Crimble?”
“What _is_ enough 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 a _feu 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, “I _offered_ him 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 I _did_ see 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. “And _that_, you mean, he couldn’t
stomach?”
“So little that when you had gone (and _how_ you 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 was _then_,” 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 brought _him_; 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. He _had_ it, 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 itself _most_ comfortably 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 up _for_ me,” he pleadingly laughed, “it
isn’t as if you had given _me_ up----!”
“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 was _sure_ he 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’ve _done_ it 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 oppose _you!_”
“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 friend _is_ clever!”
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, if _you_
understand--!” 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 expected _here_, 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 suits _you_, 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.