These young persons were thus at once confronted across the room, and
the girl explained her preparation. “I was listening hard--for your
knock and your voice.”
“Then know that, thank God, it’s all right!”--Hugh was breathless,
jubilant, radiant.
“A Mantovano?” she delightedly cried.
“A Mantovano!” he proudly gave back.
“A Mantovano!”--it carried even Lady Sandgate away.
“A Mantovano--a sure thing?” Mr. Bender jumped up from his business, all
gaping attention to Hugh.
“I’ve just left our blest Bardi,” said that young man--“who hasn’t the
shadow of a doubt and is delighted to publish it everywhere.”
“Will he publish it right here to _me?_” Mr. Bender hungrily asked.
“Well,” Hugh smiled, “you can try him.”
“But try him how, where?” The great collector, straining to instant
action, cast about for his hat “Where _is_ he, hey?”
“Don’t you wish I’d tell you?” Hugh, in his personal elation, almost
cynically answered.
“Won’t you wait for the Prince?” Lady Sandgate had meanwhile asked of
her friend; but had turned more inspectingly to Lady Grace before he
could reply. “My dear child--though you’re lovely!--are you sure you’re
ready for him?”
“For the Prince!”--the girl was vague. “Is he coming?”
“At five-forty-five.” With which she consulted her bracelet watch, but
only at once to wail for alarm. “Ah, it _is_ that, and I’m not dressed!”
She hurried off through the other room.
Mr. Bender, quite accepting her retreat, addressed himself again
unabashed to Hugh: “It’s your blest Bardi I want first--I’ll take the
Prince after.”
The young man clearly could afford indulgence now. “Then I left him at
Long’s Hotel.”
“Why, right near! I’ll come back.” And Mr. Bender’s flight was on the
wings of optimism.
But it all gave Hugh a quick question for Lady Grace. “Why does the
Prince come, and what in the world’s happening?”
“My father has suddenly returned--it may have to do with that.”
The shadow of his surprise darkened visibly to that of his fear. “Mayn’t
it be more than anything else to give you and me his final curse?”
“I don’t know--and I think I don’t care. I don’t care,” she said, “so
long as you’re right and as the greatest light of all declares you are.”
“He _is_ the greatest”--Hugh was vividly of that opinion now: “I could
see it as soon as I got there with him, the charming creature! There,
_before_ the holy thing, and with the place, by good luck, for those
great moments, practically to ourselves--without Macintosh to take in
what was happening or any one else at all to speak of--it was but a
matter of ten minutes: he had come, he had seen, and _I_ had conquered.”
“Naturally you had!”--the girl hung on him for it; “and what was
happening beyond everything else was that for your original dear
divination, one of the divinations of genius--with every creature all
these ages so stupid--you were being baptized on the spot a great man.”
“Well, he did let poor Pappendick have it at least-he doesn’t think
_he’s_ one: that that eminent judge couldn’t, even with such a leg up,
rise to my level or seize my point. And if you really want to know,”
Hugh went on in his gladness, “what for _us_ has most particularly and
preciously taken place, it is that in his opinion, for my career--”
“Your reputation,” she cried, “blazes out and your fortune’s made?”
He did a happy violence to his modesty. “Well, Bardi adores intelligence
and takes off his hat to me.”
“Then you need take off yours to nobody!”--such was Lady Grace’s proud
opinion. “But I should like to take off mine to _him_,” she added;
“which I seem to have put on--to get out and away with you--expressly
for that.”
Hugh, as he looked her over, took it up in bliss. “Ah, we’ll go forth
together to him then--thanks to your happy, splendid impulse!--and
you’ll back him gorgeously up in the good he thinks of me.”
His friend yet had on this a sombre second thought. “The only thing is
that our awful American----!”
But he warned her with a raised hand. “Not to speak of our awful
Briton!”
For the door had opened from the lobby, admitting Lord Theign,
unattended, who, at sight of his daughter and her companion, pulled
up and held them a minute in reprehensive view--all at least till Hugh
undauntedly, indeed quite cheerfully, greeted him.
“Since you find me again in your path, my lord, it’s because I’ve a
small, but precious document to deliver you, if you’ll allow me to do
so; which I feel it important myself to place in your hand.” He drew
from his breast a pocket-book and extracted thence a small unsealed
envelope; retaining the latter a trifle helplessly in his hand while
Lord Theign only opposed to this demonstration an unmitigated blankness.
He went none the less bravely on. “I mentioned to you the last time we
somewhat infelicitously met that I intended to appeal to another and
probably more closely qualified artistic authority on the subject of
your so-called Moretto; and I in fact saw the picture half an hour ago
with Bardi of Milan, who, there in presence of it, did absolute, did
ideal justice, as I had hoped, to the claim I’ve been making. I then
went with him to his hotel, close at hand, where he dashed me off this
brief and rapid, but quite conclusive, Declaration, which, if you’ll be
so good as to read it, will enable you perhaps to join us in regarding
the vexed question as settled.”
His lordship, having faced this speech without a sign, rested on the
speaker a somewhat more confessed intelligence, then looked hard at
the offered note and hard at the floor--all to avert himself actively
afterward and, with his head a good deal elevated, add to his distance,
as it were, from every one and everything so indelicately thrust on
his attention. This movement had an ambiguous makeshift air, yet his
companions, under the impression of it, exchanged a hopeless look. His
daughter none the less lifted her voice. “If you won’t take what he has
for you from Mr. Crimble, father, will you take it from me?” And then as
after some apparent debate he appeared to decide to heed her, “It may be
so long again,” she said, “before you’ve a chance to do a thing I ask.”
“The chance will depend on yourself!” he returned with high dry
emphasis. But he held out his hand for the note Hugh had given her and
with which she approached him; and though face to face they seemed more
separated than brought near by this contact without commerce. She turned
away on one side when he had taken the missive, as Hugh had turned away
on the other; Lord Theign drew forth the contents of the envelope and
broodingly and inexpressively read the few lines; after which, as having
done justice to their sense, he thrust the paper forth again till his
daughter became aware and received it. She restored it to her friend
while her father dandled off anew, but coming round this time, almost as
by a circuit of the room, and meeting Hugh, who took advantage of it to
repeat by a frank gesture his offer of Bardi’s attestation. Lord Theign
passed with the young man on this a couple of mute minutes of the same
order as those he had passed with Lady Grace in the same connection;
their eyes dealt deeply with their eyes--but to the effect of his
lordship’s accepting the gift, which after another minute he had slipped
into his breast-pocket. It was not till then that he brought out a curt
but resonant “Thank you!” While the others awaited his further pleasure
he again bethought himself--then he addressed Lady Grace. “I must let
Mr. Bender know----”
“Mr. Bender,” Hugh interposed, “does know. He’s at the present moment
with the author of that note at Long’s Hotel.”
“Then I must now write him”--and his lordship, while he spoke and from
where he stood, looked in refined disconnectedness out of the window.
“Will you write _there?_”--and his daughter indicated Lady Sandgate’s
desk, at which we have seen Mr. Bender so importantly seated.
Lord Theign had a start at her again speaking to him; but he bent his
view on the convenience awaiting him and then, as to have done with so
tiresome a matter, took advantage of it. He went and placed himself, and
had reached for paper and a pen when, struck apparently with the display
of some incongruous object, he uttered a sharp “Hallo!”
“You don’t find things?” Lady Grace asked--as remote from him in one
quarter of the room as Hugh was in another.
“On the contrary!” he oddly replied. But plainly suppressing any
further surprise he committed a few words to paper and put them into an
envelope, which he addressed and brought away.
“If you like,” said Hugh urbanely, “I’ll carry him that myself.”
“But how do you know what it consists of?”
“I don’t know. But I risk it.”
His lordship weighed the proposition in a high impersonal manner--he
even nervously weighed his letter, shaking it with one hand upon the
finger-tips of the other; after which, as finally to acquit himself
of any measurable obligation, he allowed Hugh, by a surrender of the
interesting object, to redeem his offer of service. “Then you’ll learn,”
he simply said.
“And may _I_ learn?” asked Lady Grace.
“You?” The tone made so light of her that it was barely interrogative.
“May I go _with_ him?”
Her father looked at the question as at some cup of supreme
bitterness--a nasty and now quite regular dose with which his lips were
familiar, but before which their first movement was always tightly to
close. “_With_ me, my lord,” said Hugh at last, thoroughly determined
they should open and intensifying the emphasis.
He had his effect, and Lord Theign’s answer, addressed to Lady Grace,
made indifference very comprehensive. “You may do what ever you
dreadfully like!”
At this then the girl, with an air that seemed to present her choice as
absolutely taken, reached the door which Hugh had come across to open
for her.
Here she paused as for another, a last look at her father, and her
expression seemed to say to him unaidedly that, much as she would have
preferred to proceed to her act without this gross disorder, she could
yet find inspiration too in the very difficulty and the old faiths
themselves that he left her to struggle with. All this made for depth
and beauty in her serious young face--as it had indeed a force that,
not indistinguishably, after an instant, his lordship lost any wish for
longer exposure to. His shift of his attitude before she went out was
fairly an evasion; if the extent of the levity of one of his daughter’s
made him afraid, what might have been his present strange sense but a
fear of the other from the extent of her gravity? Lady Grace passes from
us at any rate in her laced and pearled and plumed slimness and her pale
concentration--leaving her friend a moment, however, with his hand on
the door.
“You thanked me just now for Bardi’s opinion after all,” Hugh said with
a smile; “and it seems to me that--after all as well--I’ve grounds for
thanking you!” On which he left his benefactor alone.
“Tit for tat!” There broke from Lord Theign, in his solitude, with the
young man out of earshot, that vague ironic comment; which only served
his turn, none the less, till, bethinking himself, he had gone back to
the piece of furniture used for his late scribble and come away from it
again the next minute delicately holding a fair slip that we naturally
recognise as Mr. Bender’s forgotten cheque. This apparently surprising
value he now studied at his ease and to the point of its even drawing
from him an articulate “What in damnation--?” His speculation dropped
before the return of his hostess, whose approach through the other room
fell upon his ear and whom he awaited after a quick thrust of the cheque
into his waistcoat.
Lady Sandgate appeared now in due--that is in the most happily
adjusted--splendour; she had changed her dress for something smarter
and more appropriate to the entertainment of Princes, “Tea will be
downstairs,” she said. “But you’re alone?”
“I’ve just parted,” her friend replied, “with Grace and Mr. Crimble.”
“‘Parted’ with them?”--the ambiguity struck her.
“Well, they’ve gone out together to flaunt their monstrous connection!”
“You speak,” she laughed, “as if it were too gross--I They’re surely
coming back?”
“Back to you, if you like--but not to me.”
“Ah, what are you and I,” she tenderly argued, “but one and the same
quantity? And though you may not as yet absolutely rejoice in--well,
whatever they’re doing,” she cheerfully added, “you’ll get beautifully
used to it.”
“That’s just what I’m afraid of--what such horrid matters make of one!”
“At the worst then, you see”--she maintained her optimism--“the
recipient of royal attentions!”
“Oh,” said her companion, whom his honour seemed to leave comparatively
cold, “it’s simply as if the gracious Personage were coming to condole!”
Impatient of the lapse of time, in any case, she assured herself again
of the hour. “Well, if he only does come!”
“John--the wretch!” Lord Theign returned--“will take care of that: he
has nailed him and will bring him.”
“What was it then,” his friend found occasion in the particular tone of
this reference to demand, “what was it that, when you sent him off, John
spoke of you in Bond Street as specifically intending?”
Oh he saw it now all lucidly--if not rather luridly--and thereby
the more tragically. “He described me in his nasty rage as
consistently--well, heroic!”
“His rage”--she pieced it sympathetically out--“at your destroying his
cherished credit with Bender?”
Lord Theign was more and more possessed of this view of the manner of
it. “I had come between him and some profit that he doesn’t confess to,
but that made him viciously and vindictively serve me up there, as he
caught the chance, to the Prince--and the People!”
She cast about, in her intimate interest, as for some closer conception
of it. “By saying that you had remarked here that you offered the People
the picture--?”
“As a sacrifice--yes!--to morbid, though respectable scruples.” To which
he sharply added, as if struck with her easy grasp of the scene: “But I
hope you’ve nothing to call a memory for any such extravagance?”
Lady Sandgate waited--then boldly took her line. “None whatever! You had
reacted against Bender--but you hadn’t gone so far as _that!_”
He had it now all vividly before him. “I had reacted--like a gentleman;
but it didn’t thereby follow that I acted--or spoke--like a demagogue;
and my mind’s a complete blank on the subject of my having done so.”
“So that there only flushes through your conscience,” she suggested,
“the fact that he has forced your hand?”
Fevered with the sore sense of it his lordship wiped his brow. “He has
played me, for spite, his damned impertinent trick!”
She found but after a minute--for it wasn’t easy--the right word, or the
least wrong, for the situation. “Well, even if he did so diabolically
commit you, you still don’t want--do you?--to back out?”
Resenting the suggestion, which restored all his nobler form, Lord
Theign fairly drew himself up. “When did I ever in all my life back
out?”
“Never, never in all your life of course!”--she dashed a bucketful at
the flare. “And the picture after all----!”
“The picture after all”--he took her up in cold grim gallant
despair--“has just been pronounced definitely priceless.” And then
to meet her gaping ignorance: “By Mr. Crimble’s latest and apparently
greatest adviser, who strongly stamps it a Mantovano and whose practical
affidavit I now possess.”
Poor Lady Sandgate gaped but the more--she wondered and yearned.
“Definitely priceless?”
“Definitely priceless.” After which he took from its place of lurking,
considerately unfolding it, the goodly slip he had removed from her
blotting-book. “Worth even more therefore than what Bender so blatantly
offers.”
Her attention fell with interest, from the distance at which she
stood, on this confirmatory document, her recognition of which was not
immediate. “And is that the affidavit?”
“This is a cheque to your order, my lady, for ten thousand pounds.”
“Ten thousand?”--she echoed it with a shout.
“Drawn by some hand unknown,” he went on quietly.
“Unknown?”--again, in her muffled joy, she let it sound out.
“Which I found there at your desk a moment ago, and thought best, in
your interest, to rescue from accident or neglect; even though it be,
save for the single stroke of a name begun,” he wound up with his look
like a playing searchlight, “unhappily unsigned.”
“Unsigned?”--the exhibition of her design, of her defeat, kept shaking
her. “Then it isn’t good--?”
“It’s a Barmecide feast, my dear!”--he had still, her kind friend, his
note of grimness and also his penetration of eye. “But who is it writes
you colossal cheques?”
“And then leaves them lying about?” Her case was so bad that you
would have seen how she felt she must _do_ something--something quite
splendid. She recovered herself, she faced the situation with all her
bright bravery of expression and aspect; conscious, you might have
guessed, that she had never more strikingly embodied, on such lines, the
elegant, the beautiful and the true. “Why, who can it have been but poor
Breckenridge too?”
“‘Breckenridge’--?” Lord Theign had _his_ smart echoes. “What in the
world does he owe you money for?”
It took her but an instant more--she performed the great repudiation
quite as she might be prepared to sweep, in the Presence impending,
her grandest curtsey. “_Not_, you sweet suspicious thing, for my
great-grandmother!” And then as his glare didn’t fade: “Bender makes my
life a burden--for the love of my precious Lawrence.”
“Which you’re weakly letting him grab?”--nothing could have been
finer with this than Lord Theign’s reprobation unless it had been his
surprise.
She shook her head as in bland compassion for such an idea. “It isn’t
a payment, you goose--it’s a bribe! I’ve withstood him, these trying
weeks, as a rock the tempest; but he wrote that and left it there, the
fiend, to tempt me--to corrupt me!”
“Without putting his name?”--her companion again turned over the cheque.
She bethought herself, clearly with all her genius, as to this anomaly,
and the light of reality broke. “He must have been interrupted in the
artful act--he sprang up with such a bound at Mr. Crimble’s news. At
once then--for his interest in it--he hurried off, leaving the cheque
forgotten and unfinished.” She smiled more intensely, her eyes attached,
as from fascination, to the morsel of paper still handled by her friend.
“But of course on his next visit he’ll _add_ his great signature.”
“The devil he will!”--and Lord Theign, with the highest spirit, tore the
crisp token into several pieces, which fluttered, as worthless now as
pure snowflakes, to the floor.
“Ay, ay, ay!”--it drew from her a wail of which the character, for its
sharp inconsequence, was yet comic.
This renewed his stare at her. “Do _you_ want to back out? I mean from
your noble stand.”
As quickly, however, she had saved herself. “I’d rather do even what
you’re doing--offer my treasure to the Thingumbob!”
He was touched by this even to sympathy. “Will you then _join_ me in
setting the example of a great donation------?”
“To the What-do-you-call-it?” she extravagantly smiled.
“I call it,” he said with dignity, “the ‘National Gallery.’”
She closed her eyes as with a failure of breath. “Ah my dear friend--!”
“It would convince me,” he went on, insistent and persuasive.
“Of the sincerity of my affection?”--she drew nearer to him.
“It would comfort me”--he was satisfied with his own expression. Yet
in a moment, when she had come all rustlingly and fragrantly close, “It
would captivate me,” he handsomely added.
“It would captivate you?” It was for _her_, we should have seen, to be
satisfied with his expression; and, with our more informed observation
of all it was a question of her giving up, she would have struck us as
subtly bargaining.
He gallantly amplified. “It would peculiarly--by which I mean it would
so naturally--unite us!”
Well, that was all she wanted. “Then for a complete union with you--of
fact as well as of fond fancy!” she smiled--“there’s nothing, even to my
one ewe lamb, I’m not ready to surrender.”
“Ah, we don’t surrender,” he urged--“we enjoy!”
“Yes,” she understood: “with the glory of our grand gift thrown in.”
“We quite swagger,” he gravely observed--“though even swaggering would
after this be dull without you.”
“Oh, I’ll _swagger_ with you!” she cried as if it quite settled and made
up for everything; and then impatiently, as she beheld Lord John, whom
the door had burst open to admit: “The Prince?”
“The Prince!”--the young man launched it as a call to arms.
They had fallen apart on the irruption, the pair discovered, but she
flashed straight at her lover: “Then we can swagger now!”
Lord Theign had reached the open door. “I meet him below.”
Demurring, debating, however, she stayed him a moment. “But oughtn’t
I--in my own house?”
His lordship caught her meaning. “You mean he may think--?” But he as
easily pronounced. “He shall think the Truth!” And with a kiss of his
hand to her he was gone.
Lord John, who had gazed in some wonder at these demonstrations, was
quickly about to follow, but she checked him with an authority she
had never before used and which was clearly the next moment to prove
irresistible. “Lord John, be so good as to stop.” Looking about at the
condition of a room on the point of receiving so august a character,
she observed on the floor the fragments of the torn cheque, to which she
sharply pointed. “And please pick up that litter!”