The Outcry

“Then you’ll brand us—expose us for it?”

“No, I’ll let you off—I’ll be quiet if you’re good, if you go straight. I’ll only hold it in terrorem. One can’t be sure in these dreadful days—that’s always to remember; so that if you’re not good I’ll come down on you with it. But to balance against that threat,” he went on, “I’ve made the very grandest find. At least I believe I have!”

She was all there for this news. “Of the Manto-vano—hidden in the other thing?”

Hugh wondered—almost as if she had been before him. “You don’t mean to say you’ve had the idea of that?”

“No, but my father has told me.”

“And is your father,” he eagerly asked, “really gratified?”

With her conscious eyes on him—her eyes could clearly be very conscious about her father—she considered a moment. “He always prefers old associations and appearances to new; but I’m sure he’ll resign himself if you see your way to a certainty.”

“Well, it will be a question of the weight of expert opinion that I shall invoke. But I’m not afraid,” he resolutely said, “and I shall make the thing, from its splendid rarity, the crown and flower of your glory.”

Her serious face shone at him with a charmed gratitude. “It’s awfully beautiful then your having come to us so. It’s awfully beautiful your having brought us this way, in a flash—as dropping out of a chariot of fire—more light and what you apparently feel with myself as more honour.”

“Ah, the beauty’s in your having yourself done it!” he returned. He gave way to the positive joy of it. “If I’ve brought the ‘light’ and the rest—that’s to say the very useful information—who in the world was it brought me?”

She had a gesture of protest “You’d have come in some other way.”

“I’m not so sure! I’m beastly shy—little as I may seem to show it: save in great causes, when I’m horridly bold and hideously offensive. Now at any rate I only know what has been.” She turned off for it, moving away from him as with a sense of mingled things that made for unrest; and he had the next moment grown graver under the impression. “But does anything in it all,” he asked, “trouble you?”

She faced about across the wider space, and there was a different note in what she brought out. “I don’t know what forces me so to tell you things.”

“‘Tell’ me?” he stared. “Why, you’ve told me nothing more monstrous than that I’ve been welcome!”

“Well, however that may be, what did you mean just now by the chance of our not ‘going straight’? When you said you’d expose our bad—or is it our false?—Rubens in the event of a certain danger.”

“Oh, in the event of your ever being bribed”—he laughed again as with relief. And then as her face seemed to challenge the word: “Why, to let anything—of your best!—ever leave Dedborough. By which I mean really of course leave the country.” She turned again on this, and something in her air made him wonder. “I hope you don’t feel there is such a danger? I understood from you half an hour ago that it was unthinkable.”

“Well, it was, to me, half an hour ago,” she said as she came nearer. “But if it has since come up?”

“‘If’ it has! But has it? In the form of that monster? What Mr. Bender wants is the great Duchess,” he recalled.

“And my father won’t sell her? No, he won’t sell the great Duchess—there I feel safe. But he greatly needs a certain sum of money—or he thinks he does—and I’ve just had a talk with him.”

“In which he has told you that?”

“He has told me nothing,” Lady Grace said—“or else told me quite other things. But the more I think of them the more it comes to me that he feels urged or tempted—”

“To despoil and denude these walls?” Hugh broke in, looking about in his sharper apprehension.

“Yes, to satisfy, to save my sister. Now do you think our state so ideal?” she asked—but without elation for her hint of triumph.

He had no answer for this save “Ah, but you terribly interest me. May I ask what’s the matter with your sister?”

Oh, she wanted to go on straight now! “The matter is—in the first place—that she’s too dazzlingly, dreadfully beautiful.”

“More beautiful than you?” his sincerity easily risked.

“Millions of times.” Sad, almost sombre, she hadn’t a shade of coquetry. “Kitty has debts—great heaped-up gaming debts.”

“But to such amounts?”

“Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws herself all on our father.”

“And he has to pay them? There’s no one else?” Hugh asked.

She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently didn’t, “He’s only afraid there may be some else—that’s how she makes him do it,” she said. And “Now do you think,” she pursued, “that I don’t tell you things?”

He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she told him. “Oh, oh, oh!” And then, in the great place, while as, just spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he took them all in. “That’s the situation that, as you say, may force his hand.”

“It absolutely, I feel, does force it.” And the renewal of her appeal brought her round. “Isn’t it too lovely?”

His frank disgust answered. “It’s too damnable!”

“And it’s you,” she quite terribly smiled, “who—by the ‘irony of fate’!—have given him help.”

He smote his head in the light of it. “By the Mantovano?”

“By the possible Mantovano—as a substitute for the impossible Sir Joshua. You’ve made him aware of a value.”

“Ah, but the value’s to be fixed!”

“Then Mr. Bender will fix it!”

“Oh, but—as he himself would say—I’ll fix Mr. Bender!” Hugh declared. “And he won’t buy a pig in a poke.”

This cleared the air while they looked at each other; yet she had already asked: “What in the world can you do, and how in the world can you do it?”

Well, he was too excited for decision. “I don’t quite see now, but give me time.” And he took out his watch as already to measure it. “Oughtn’t I before I go to say a word to Lord Theign?”

“Is it your idea to become a lion in his path?”

“Well, say a cub—as that’s what I’m afraid he’ll call me! But I think I should speak to him.”

She drew a conclusion momentarily dark. “He’ll have to learn in that case that I’ve told you of my fear.”

“And is there any good reason why he shouldn’t?”

She kept her eyes on him and the darkness seemed to clear. “No!” she at last replied, and, having gone to touch an electric bell, was with him again. “But I think I’m rather sorry for you.”

“Does that represent a reason why I should be so for you?”

For a little she said nothing; but after that: “None whatever!”

“Then is the sister of whom you speak Lady Imber?”