The Outcry

Hugh was clearly as much mystified as anything else. “He proposed there—?”

“He had spoken, that day, before—before your talk with Lord Theign, who had every confidence in her accepting him. But you came, Mr. Crimble, you went; and when her suitor reappeared, just after you had gone, for his answer—”

“She wouldn’t have him?” Hugh asked with a precipitation of interest.

But Lady Sandgate could humour almost any curiosity. “She wouldn’t look at him.”

He bethought himself. “But had she said she would?”

“So her father indignantly considers.”

“That’s the ground of his indignation?”

“He had his reasons for counting on her, and it has determined a painful crisis.”

Hugh Crimble turned this over—feeling apparently for something he didn’t find. “I’m sorry to hear such things, but where’s the connection with me?”

“Ah, you know best yourself, and if you don’t see any–!” In that case, Lady Sandgate’s motion implied, she washed her hands of it.

Hugh had for a moment the air of a young man treated to the sweet chance to guess a conundrum—which he gave up. “I really don’t see any, Lady Sandgate. But,” he a little inconsistently said, “I’m greatly obliged to you for telling me.”

“Don’t mention it!—though I think it is good of me,” she smiled, “on so short an acquaintance.” To which she added more gravely: “I leave you the situation—but I’m willing to let you know that I’m all on Grace’s side.”

“So am I, rather!—please let me frankly say.”

He clearly refreshed, he even almost charmed her. “It’s the very least you can say!—though I’m not sure whether you say it as the simplest or as the very subtlest of men. But in case you don’t know as I do how little the particular candidate I’ve named–”

“Had a right or a claim to succeed with her?” he broke in—all quick intelligence here at least. “No, I don’t perhaps know as well as you do—but I think I know as well as I just yet require.”

“There you are then! And if you did prevent,” his hostess maturely pursued, “what wouldn’t have been—well, good or nice, I’m quite on your side too.”

Our young man seemed to feel the shade of ambiguity, but he reached at a meaning. “You’re with me in my plea for our defending at any cost of effort or ingenuity—”

“The precious picture Lord Theign exposes?”—she took his presumed sense faster than he had taken hers. But she hung fire a moment with her reply to it. “Well, will you keep the secret of everything I’ve said or say?”

“To the death, to the stake, Lady Sandgate!”

“Then,” she momentously returned, “I only want, too, to make Bender impossible. If you ask me,” she pursued, “how I arrange that with my deep loyalty to Lord Theign–”

“I don’t ask you anything of the sort,” he interrupted—“I wouldn’t ask you for the world; and my own bright plan for achieving the coup you mention–”

“You’ll have time, at the most,” she said, consulting afresh her bracelet watch, “to explain to Lady Grace.” She reached an electric bell, which she touched—facing then her visitor again with an abrupt and slightly embarrassed change of tone. “You do think my great portrait splendid?”

He had strayed far from it and all too languidly came back. “Your Lawrence there? As I said, magnificent.”

But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of whom she made her request. “Let her ladyship know—Mr. Crimble.”

Gotch looked hard at Hugh and the crumpled hat—almost as if having an option. But he resigned himself to repeating, with a distinctness that scarce fell short of the invidious, “Mr. Crimble,” and departed on his errand.

Lady Sandgate’s fair flush of diplomacy had meanwhile not faded. “Couldn’t you, with your immense cleverness and power, get the Government to do something?”

“About your picture?” Hugh betrayed on this head a graceless detachment. “You too then want to sell?”

Oh she righted herself. “Never to a private party!”

“Mr. Bender’s not after it?” he asked—though scarce lighting his reluctant interest with a forced smile.

“Most intensely after it. But never,” cried the proprietress, “to a bloated alien!”

“Then I applaud your patriotism. Only why not,” he asked, “carrying that magnanimity a little further, set us all an example as splendid as the object itself?”

“Give it you for nothing?” She threw up shocked hands. “Because I’m an aged female pauper and can’t make every sacrifice.”

Hugh pretended—none too convincingly—to think. “Will you let them have it very cheap?”

“Yes—for less than such a bribe as Bender’s.”

“Ah,” he said expressively, “that might be, and still–!”

“Well,” she had a flare of fond confidence. “I’ll find out what he’ll offer—if you’ll on your side do what you can—and then ask them a third less.” And she followed it up—as if suddenly conceiving him a prig. “See here, Mr. Crimble, I’ve been—and this very first time I—charming to you.”

“You have indeed,” he returned; “but you throw back on it a lurid light if it has all been for that!”

“It has been—well, to keep things as I want them; and if I’ve given you precious information mightn’t you on your side—”

“Estimate its value in cash?”—Hugh sharply took her up. “Ah, Lady Sandgate, I am in your debt, but if you really bargain for your precious information I’d rather we assume that I haven’t enjoyed it.”

She made him, however, in reply, a sign for silence; she had heard Lady Grace enter the other room from the back landing, and, reaching the nearer door, she disposed of the question with high gay bravery. “I won’t bargain with the Treasury!”—she had passed out by the time Lady Grace arrived.

II

As Hugh recognised in this friend’s entrance and face the light of welcome he went, full of his subject, straight to their main affair. “I haven’t been able to wait, I’ve wanted so much to tell you—I mean how I’ve just come back from Brussels, where I saw Pappen-dick, who was free and ready, by the happiest chance, to start for Verona, which he must have reached some time yesterday.”

The girl’s responsive interest fairly broke into rapture. “Ah, the dear sweet thing!”

“Yes, he’s a brick—but the question now hangs in the balance. Allowing him time to have got into relation with the picture, I’ve begun to expect his wire, which will probably come to my club; but my fidget, while I wait, has driven me”—he threw out and dropped his arms in expression of his soft surrender—“well, just to do this: to come to you here, in my fever, at an unnatural hour and uninvited, and at least let you know I’ve ‘acted.’”

“Oh, but I simply rejoice,” Lady Grace declared, “to be acting with you.”

“Then if you are, if you are,” the young man cried, “why everything’s beautiful and right!”

“It’s all I care for and think of now,” she went on in her bright devotion, “and I’ve only wondered and hoped!”

Well, Hugh found for it all a rapid, abundant lucidity. “He was away from home at first, and I had to wait—but I crossed last week, found him and settled incoming home by Paris, where I had a grand four days’ jaw with the fellows there and saw their great specimen of our master: all of which has given him time.”

“And now his time’s up?” the girl eagerly asked.

“It must be—and we shall see.” But Hugh postponed that question to a matter of more moment still. “The thing is that at last I’m able to tell you how I feel the trouble I’ve brought you.”