The Outcry

Her brows rose as high as his own had ever done. “Do you call Lord John my lover?”

“He was your suitor most assuredly,” Lord Theign inimitably said, though without looking at her; “and as strikingly encouraged as he was respectfully ardent!”

“Encouraged by you, dear father, beyond doubt!”

“Encouraged—er—by every one: because you were (yes, you were!) encouraging. And what I ask of you now is a word of common candour as to whether you didn’t, on your honour, turn him off because of your just then so stimulated views on the person who has been with us.”

Grace replied but after an instant, as moved by more things than she could say—moved above all, in her trouble and her pity for him, by other things than harshness: “Oh father, father, father–!”

He searched her through all the compassion of her cry, but appeared to give way to her sincerity. “Well then if I have your denial I take it as answering my whole question—in a manner that satisfies me. If there’s nothing, on your word, of that sort between you, you can all the more drop him.”

“But you said a moment ago that I should all the more in the other case—that of there being something!”

He brushed away her logic-chopping. “If you’re so keen then for past remarks I take up your own words—I accept your own terms for your putting an end to Mr. Crimble.” To which, while, turning pale, she said nothing, he added: “You recognise that you profess yourself ready–”

“Not again to see him,” she now answered, “if you tell me the picture’s safe? Yes, I recognise that I was ready—as well as how scornfully little you then were!”

“Never mind what I then was—the question’s of what I actually am, since I close with you on it The picture’s therefore as safe as you please,” Lord Theign pursued, “if you’ll do what you just now engaged to.”

“I engaged to do nothing,” she replied after a pause; and the face she turned to him had grown suddenly tragic. “I’ve no word to take back, for none passed between us; but I won’t do what I mentioned and what you at once laughed at Because,” she finished, “the case is different.”

“Different?” he almost shouted—“how, different?”

She didn’t look at him for it, but she was none the less strongly distinct “He has been here—and that has done it He knows,” she admirably emphasised.

“Knows what I think of him, no doubt—for a brazen young prevaricator! But what else?”

She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. “What he will have seen—that I feel we’re too good friends.”

“Then your denial of it’s false,” her father fairly thundered—“and you are infatuated?”

It made her the more quiet. “I like him very much.”

“So that your row about the picture,” he demanded with passion, “has been all a blind?” And then as her quietness still held her: “And his a blind as much—to help him to get at you?”

She looked at him again now. “He must speak for himself. I’ve said what I mean.”

“But what the devil do you mean?” Lord Theign, taking in the hour, had reached the door as in supremely baffled conclusion and with a sense of time lamentably lost.

Their eyes met upon it all dreadfully across the wide space, and, hurried and incommoded as she saw him, she yet made him still stand a minute. Then she let everything go. “Do what you like with the picture!”

He jerked up his arm and guarding hand as before a levelled blow at his face, and with the other hand flung open the door, having done with her now and immediately lost to sight. Left alone she stood a moment looking before her; then with a vague advance, held apparently by a quickly growing sense of the implication of her act, reached a table where she remained a little, deep afresh in thought—only the next thing to fall into a chair close to it and there, with her elbows on it, yield to the impulse of covering her flushed face with her hands.

BOOK THIRD

I

HUGH CRIMBLE waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room—this time at the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at things about him without seeing them; all he saw, all he outwardly studied, was his own face and figure as he stopped an instant before a long glass suspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief and perhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace—that he had sent up his name to whom was immediately apparent—presented herself at the entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon no instant exchange of words; their exchange was mute—they but paused where they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the other for full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would have appeared, to Hugh; though he then at once asked for confirmation of it.

“Am I right, Lady Grace, am I right?—to have come, I mean, after so many days of not hearing, not knowing, and perhaps, all too stupidly, not trying.” And he went on as, still with her eyes on him, she didn’t speak; though, only, we should have guessed, from her stress of emotion. “Even if I’m wrong, let me tell you, I don’t care—simply because, whatever new difficulty I may have brought about for you here a fortnight ago, there’s something that to-day adds to my doubt and my fear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear the suspense of them as they are.”

The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet declined a dread. “Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being without the other opinion—?”

“Ah, that worries me, yes; and all the more, at this hour, as I say, that—” He dropped it, however: “I’ll tell you in a moment! My real torment, all the while, has been not to know, from day to day, what situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father here has let you in for; and yet at the same time—having no sign nor sound from you!—to see the importance of not making anything possibly worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I’ve been in the dark,” he pursued, “and feeling that I must leave you there; so that now—just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any cost—I don’t know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn from you.”

Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture, marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. “Have you had—first of all—any news yet of Bardi?”

“That I have is what has driven me straight at you again—since I’ve shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped and like a regular good ‘un,” Hugh was able to state; “I’ve just met him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my extreme exasperation, to ‘sample’ Canterbury, and I leave him to a bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to Bond Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension, oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the flash-light projected—well,” said the young man, to wind up handsomely, but briefly and reasonably, “over the whole field of our question.”

She panted with comprehension. “That of the two portraits being but the one sitter!”

“That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden nail of authenticity, and”—he quite glowed through his gloom for it—“we take our stand in glory on the last Mantovano in the world.”

It was a presumption his friend visibly yearned for—but over which, too, with her eyes away from him, she still distinguished the shadow of a cloud. “That is if the flash-light comes!”

“That is if it comes indeed, confound it!”—he had to enlarge a little under the recall of past experience. “So now, at any rate, you see my tension!”

She looked at him again as with a vision too full for a waste of words. “While you on your side of course keep well in view Mr. Bender’s.”

“Yes, while I keep well in view Mr. Bender’s; though he doesn’t know, you see, of Bardi’s being at hand.”

“Still,” said the girl, always all lucid for the case, “if the ‘flash-light’ does presently break–!”

“It will first take him in the eye?” Hugh had jumped to her idea, but he adopted it only to provide: “It might if he didn’t now wear goggles, so to say!—clapped on him too hard by Pappendick’s so damnably perverse opinion.” With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. “Ah, of course, these wretched days, you haven’t known of Pappendick’s personal visit. After that wire from Verona I wired him back defiance—”

“And that brought him?” she cried.

“To do the honest thing, yes—I will say for him: to renew, for full assurance, his early memory of our picture.”

She hung upon it. “But only to stick then to what he had telegraphed?”

“To declare that for him, lackaday! our thing’s a pure Moretto—and to declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, to Bender himself, who of course made a point of seeing him.”

“So that Bender”—she followed and wondered—“is, as a consequence, wholly off?”

It made her friend’s humour play up in his acute-ness. “Bender, Lady Grace, is, by the law of his being, never ‘wholly’ off—or on!—anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silver light on earth; never quite gone, yet never all there—save for inappreciable moments. He would be in eclipse as a peril, I grant,” Hugh went on—“if the question had struck him as really closed. But luckily the blessed Press—which is a pure heavenly joy and now quite immense on it—keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly.”

“Which makes, however,” Lady Grace discriminated, “for the danger of a grab.”

“Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admit that when it’s a question of a life spent, like his, in waiting, acquisitively, for the cat to jump, the only thing for one, at a given moment, as against that signal, is to be found one’s self by the animal in the line of its trajectory. That’s exactly,” he laughed, “where we are!”

She cast about as intelligently to note the place. “Your great idea, you mean, has so worked—with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to come to us here?”

“All beyond my wildest hope,” Hugh returned; “since the sight of the picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully tells. That we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it tight, is the cry that fills the air—to the tune of ten letters a day in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing of more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfully wild, but all of it wind in our sails.”

“I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see the thing in its new light,” Lady Grace said. “But I couldn’t stay—for tears!”

“Ah,” Hugh insisted on his side for comfort, “we’ll crow loudest yet! And don’t meanwhile, just don’t, those splendid strange eyes of the fellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him, cling to him, and there’s talk of a ‘Ladies’ League of Protest’—all of which keeps up the pitch.”