The Outcry

“You ask me,” Mr. Bender returned, “for a general assurance to that effect?”

“Well, a particular one—so it be particular enough,” Hugh said—“will do just for now. Let me put in my plea for the issue—well, of the value that’s actually in the scales.”

“The Mantovano-Moretto?”

“The Moretto-Mantovano!”

Mr. Bender carnivorously smiled. “Hadn’t we better know which it is first?”

Hugh had a motion of practical indifference for this. “The public interest—playing so straight on the question—may help to settle it. By which I mean that it will profit enormously—the question of probability, of identity itself will—by the discussion it will create. The discussion will promote certainty–”

“And certainty,” Mr. Bender massively mused, “will kick up a row.”

“Of course it will kick up a row!”—Hugh thoroughly guaranteed that. “You’ll be, for the month, the best-abused man in England—if you venture to remain here at all; except, naturally, poor Lord Theign.”

“Whom it won’t be my interest, at the same time, to worry into backing down.”

“But whom it will be exceedingly mine to practise on”—and Hugh laughed as at the fun before them—“if I may entertain the sweet hope of success. The only thing is—from my point of view,” he went on—“that backing down before what he will call vulgar clamour isn’t in the least in his traditions, nothing less so; and that if there should be really too much of it for his taste or his nerves he’ll set his handsome face as a stone and never budge an inch. But at least again what I appeal to you for will have taken place—the picture will have been seen by a lot of people who’ll care.”

“It will have been seen,” Mr. Bender amended—“on the mere contingency of my acquisition of it—only if its present owner consents.”

“‘Consents’?” Hugh almost derisively echoed; “why, he’ll propose it himself, he’ll insist on it, he’ll put it through, once he’s angry enough—as angry, I mean, as almost any public criticism of a personal act of his will be sure to make him; and I’m afraid the striking criticism, or at least animadversion, of this morning, will have blown on his flame of bravado.”

Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion. “Yes, I guess he’s pretty mad.”

“They’ve imputed to him”—Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense—“an intention of which after all he isn’t guilty.”

“So that”—his listener glowed with interested optimism—“if they don’t look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he’ll just go and be guilty!”

Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped. “You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?” And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound him: “The strongest thing in such a type—one does make out—is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to be such a liberty.”

Mr. Bender participated thus at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. “Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them do, over here; and to have to quit it on account of unpleasant remark—”

But he gave up thoughtfully trying to express what this must be; reduced to the mere synthetic interjection “My!”

“That’s it, Mr. Bender,” Hugh said for the consecration of such a moral; “he won’t quit it without a hard struggle.”

Mr. Bender hereupon at last gave himself quite gaily away as to his high calculation of impunity. “Well, I guess he won’t struggle too hard for me to hold on to him if I want to!”

“In the thick of the conflict then, however that may be,” Hugh returned, “don’t forget what I’ve urged on you—the claim of our desolate country.”

But his friend had an answer to this. “My natural interest, Mr. Crimble—considering what I do for it—is in the claim of ours. But I wish you were on my side!”

“Not so much,” Hugh hungrily and truthfully laughed, “as I wish you were on mine!” Decidedly, none the less, he had to go. “Good-bye—for another look here!”

He reached the doorway of the second room, where, however, his companion, freshly alert at this, stayed him by a gesture. “How much is she really worth?”

“‘She’?” Hugh, staring a moment, was miles at sea. “Lady Sandgate?”

“Her great-grandmother.”

A responsible answer was prevented—the butler was again with them; he had opened wide the other door and he named to Mr. Bender the personage under his convoy. “Lord John!”

Hugh caught this from the inner threshold, and it gave him his escape. “Oh, ask that friend!” With which he sought the further passage to the staircase and street, while Lord John arrived in charge of Mr. Gotch, who, having remarked to the two occupants of the front drawing-room that her ladyship would come, left them together.

IV

“Then Theign’s not yet here!” Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. “But he told me I should find you.”

“He has kept me waiting,” that gentleman returned—“but what’s the matter with him anyway?”

“The matter with him”—Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating—“must of course be this beastly thing in the ‘Journal.’”

Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. “What’s the matter with the beastly thing?”

“Why, aren’t you aware that the stiffest bit of it is a regular dig at you?”

“If you call that a regular dig you can’t have had much experience of the Papers. I’ve known them to dig much deeper.”

“I’ve had no experience of such horrid attacks, thank goodness; but do you mean to say,” asked Lord John with the surprise of his own delicacy, “that you don’t unpleasantly feel it?”

“Feel it where, my dear sir?”

“Why, God bless me, such impertinence, everywhere!”

“All over me at once?”—Mr. Bender took refuge in easy humour. “Well, I’m a large man—so when I want to feel so much I look out for something good. But what, if he suffers from the blot on his ermine—ain’t that what you wear?—does our friend propose to do about it?”

Lord John had a demur, which was immediately followed by the apprehension of support in his uncertainty. Lady Sandgate was before them, having reached them through the other room, and to her he at once referred the question. “What will Theign propose, do you think, Lady Sandgate, to do about it?”

She breathed both her hospitality and her vagueness. “To ‘do’–?”

“Don’t you know about the thing in the ‘Journal’—awfully offensive all round?”

“There’d be even a little pinch for you in it,” Mr. Bender said to her—“if you were bent on fitting the shoe!”

Well, she met it all as gaily as was compatible with a firm look at her elder guest while she took her place with them. “Oh, the shoes of such monsters as that are much too big for poor me!” But she was more specific for Lord John. “I know only what Grace has just told me; but since it’s a question of footgear dear Theign will certainly—what you may call—take his stand!”

Lord John welcomed this assurance. “If I know him he’ll take it splendidly!”

Mr. Bender’s attention was genial, though rather more detached. “And what—while he’s about it—will he take it particularly on?”

“Oh, we’ve plenty of things, thank heaven,” said Lady Sandgate, “for a man in Theign’s position to hold fast by!”

Lord John freely confirmed it. “Scores and scores—rather! And I will say for us that, with the rotten way things seem going, the fact may soon become a real convenience.”

Mr. Bender seemed struck—and not unsympathetic. “I see that your system would be rather a fraud if you hadn’t pretty well fixed that!”

Lady Sandgate spoke as one at present none the less substantially warned and convinced. “It doesn’t, however, alter the fact that we’ve thus in our ears the first growl of an outcry.”