The Outcry

Lord John stared as if she had shaken some odd bright fluttering object in his face; but then recovering himself: “He hasn’t perhaps an absolutely boundless confidence—”

“In any one in the world but himself?”—she had taken him straight up. “He hasn’t indeed, and that’s what we must come to; so that even if he likes you as much as you doubtless very justly feel, it won’t be because you are right about your being nice, but because he is!”

“You mean that if I were wrong about it he would still insist that he isn’t?”

Lady Grace was indeed sure. “Absolutely—if he had begun so! He began so with Kitty—that is with allowing her everything.”

Lord John appeared struck. “Yes—and he still allows her two thousand.”

“I’m glad to hear it—she has never told me how much!” the girl undisguisedly smiled.

“Then perhaps I oughtn’t!”—he glowed with the light of contrition.

“Well, you can’t help it now,” his companion remarked with amusement.

“You mean that he ought to allow you as much?” Lord John inquired. “I’m sure you’re right, and that he will,” he continued quite as in good faith; “but I want you to understand that I don’t care in the least what it may be!”

The subject of his suit took the longest look at him she had taken yet. “You’re very good to say so!”

If this was ironic the touch fell short, thanks to his perception that they had practically just ceased to be alone. They were in presence of a third figure, who had arrived from the terrace, but whose approach to them was not so immediate as to deprive Lord John of time for another question. “Will you let him tell you, at all events, how good he thinks me?—and then let me come back and have it from you again?”

Lady Grace’s answer to this was to turn, as he drew nearer, to the person by whom they were now joined. “Lord John desires you should tell me, father, how good you think him.”

“‘Good,’ my dear?—good for what?” said Lord Theign a trifle absurdly, but looking from one of them to the other.

“I feel I must ask him to tell you.”

“Then I shall give him a chance—as I should particularly like you to go back and deal with those overwhelming children.”

“Ah, they don’t overwhelm you, father!”—the girl put it with some point.

“If you mean to say I overwhelmed them, I dare say I did,” he replied—“from my view of that vast collective gape of six hundred painfully plain and perfectly expressionless faces. But that was only for the time: I pumped advice—oh such advice!—and they held the large bucket as still as my pet pointer, when I scratch him, holds his back. The bucket, under the stream—”

“Was bound to overflow?” Lady Grace suggested.

“Well, the strong recoil of the wave of intelligence has been not unnaturally followed by the formidable break. You must really,” Lord Theign insisted, “go and deal with it.”

His daughter’s smile, for all this, was perceptibly cold. “You work people up, father, and then leave others to let them down.”

“The two things,” he promptly replied, “require different natures.” To which he simply added, as with the habit of authority, though not of harshness, “Go!”

It was absolute and she yielded; only pausing an instant to look as with a certain gathered meaning from one of the men to the other. Faintly and resignedly sighing she passed away to the terrace and disappeared.

“The nature that can let you down—I rather like it, you know!” Lord John threw off. Which, for an airy elegance in them, were perhaps just slightly rash words—his companion gave him so sharp a look as the two were left together.

VI

Face to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the impression his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn’t want to go?” And then before Lord John could reply: “What the deuce is the matter with her?”

Lord John took his time. “I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble.”

“And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?”

“A young man who was just with her—and whom she appears to have invited.”

“Where is he then?” Lord Theign demanded.

“Off there among the pictures—which he seems partly to have come for.”

“Oh!”—it made his lordship easier. “Then he’s all right—on such a day.”

His companion could none the less just wonder. “Hadn’t Lady Grace told you?”

“That he was coming? Not that I remember.” But Lord Theign, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve had other fish to fry, and you know the freedom I allow her.”

His friend had a vivid gesture. “My dear man, I only ask to profit by it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John’s face a light of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.

Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score—at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also—to know the time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of whom I’ve but just heard?”

“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord John’s difficulties. “I mustn’t appear to Bender to have failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn’t been perhaps,” he continued, “quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if I’m not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without abhorrence. Only I’ve led her to expect—for our case—that you’ll be so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her yourself.”

“Without loss, you mean, of—a—my daughter’s time?” Lord Theign, confessedly and amiably interested, had accepted these intimations—yet with the very blandness that was not accessible to hustling and was never forgetful of its standing privilege of criticism. He had come in from his public duty, a few minutes before, somewhat flushed and blown; but that had presently dropped—to the effect, we should have guessed, of his appearing to Lord John at least as cool as the occasion required. His appearance, we ourselves certainly should have felt, was in all respects charming—with the great note of it the beautiful restless, almost suspicious, challenge to you, on the part of deep and mixed things in him, his pride and his shyness, his conscience, his taste and his temper, to deny that he was admirably simple. Obviously, at this rate, he had a passion for simplicity—simplicity, above all, of relation with you, and would show you, with the last subtlety of displeasure, his impatience of your attempting anything more with himself. With such an ideal of decent ease he would, confound you, “sink” a hundred other attributes—or the recognition at least and the formulation of them—that you might abjectly have taken for granted in him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages, flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective, a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion, you might infer—to cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any opportunity, however convenient, for an unfair pull. Which habit it was that must have produced in him a sort of ripe and radiant fairness; if it be allowed us, that is, to figure in so shining an air a nobleman of fifty-three, of an undecided rather than a certified frame or outline, of a head thinly though neatly covered and not measureably massive, of an almost trivial freshness, of a face marked but by a fine inwrought line or two and lighted by a merely charming expression. You might somehow have traced back the whole character so presented to an ideal privately invoked—that of his establishing in the formal garden of his suffered greatness such easy seats and short perspectives, such winding paths and natural-looking waters, as would mercifully break up the scale. You would perhaps indeed have reflected at the same time that the thought of so much mercy was almost more than anything else the thought of a great option and a great margin—in fine of fifty alternatives. Which remarks of ours, however, leave his lordship with his last immediate question on his hands.

“Well, yes—that, of course, in all propriety,” his companion has meanwhile replied to it. “But I was thinking a little, you understand, of the importance of our own time.”

Divinably Lord Theign put himself out less, as we may say, for the comparatively matter-of-course haunters of his garden than for interlopers even but slightly accredited. He seemed thus not at all to strain to “understand” in this particular connection—it would be his familiarly amusing friend Lord John, clearly, who must do most of the work for him. “‘Our own’ in the sense of yours and mine?”

“Of yours and mine and Lady Imber’s, yes—and a good bit, last not least, in that of my watching and waiting mother’s.” This struck no prompt spark of apprehension from his listener, so that Lord John went on: “The last thing she did this morning was to remind me, with her fine old frankness, that she would like to learn without more delay where, on the whole question, she is, don’t you know? What she put to me”—the younger man felt his ground a little, but proceeded further—“what she put to me, with her rather grand way of looking all questions straight in the face, you see, was: Do we or don’t we, decidedly, take up practically her very handsome offer—‘very handsome’ being, I mean, what she calls it; though it strikes even me too, you know, as rather decent.”

Lord Theign at this point resigned himself to know. “Kitty has of course rubbed into me how decent she herself finds it. She hurls herself again on me—successfully!—for everything, and it suits her down to the ground. She pays her beastly debt—that is, I mean to say,” and he took himself up, though it was scarce more than perfunctory, “discharges her obligations—by her sister’s fair hand; not to mention a few other trifles for which I naturally provide.”

Lord John, a little unexpectedly to himself on the defensive, was yet but briefly at a loss. “Of course we take into account, don’t we? not only the fact of my mother’s desire (intended, I assure you, to be most flattering) that Lady Grace shall enter our family with all honours, but her expressed readiness to facilitate the thing by an understanding over and above–”

“Over and above Kitty’s release from her damnable payment?”—Lord Theign reached out to what his guest had left rather in the air. “Of course we take everything into account—or I shouldn’t, my dear fellow, be discussing with you at all a business one or two of whose aspects so little appeal to me: especially as there’s nothing, you easily conceive, that a daughter of mine can come in for by entering even your family, or any other (as a family) that she wouldn’t be quite as sure of by just staying in her own. The Duchess’s idea, at any rate, if I’ve followed you, is that if Grace does accept you she settles on you twelve thousand; with the condition—”

Lord John was already all there. “Definitely, yes, of your settling the equivalent on Lady Grace.”

“And what do you call the equivalent of twelve thousand?”

“Why, tacked on to a value so great and so charming as Lady Grace herself, I dare say such a sum as nine or ten would serve.”

“And where the mischief, if you please, at this highly inconvenient time, am I to pick up nine or ten thousand?”

Lord John declined, with a smiling, a fairly irritating eye for his friend’s general resources, to consider that question seriously. “Surely you can have no difficulty whatever—!”

“Why not?—when you can see for yourself that I’ve had this year to let poor dear old Hill Street! Do you call it the moment for me to have liked to see myself all but cajoled into planking down even such a matter as the very much lower figure of Kitty’s horrid incubus?”

“Ah, but the inducement and the quid pro quo,” Lord John brightly indicated, “are here much greater! In the case you speak of you will only have removed the incubus—which, I grant you, she must and you must feel as horrid. In this other you pacify Lady Imber and marry Lady Grace: marry her to a man who has set his heart on her and of whom she has just expressed—to himself—a very kind and very high opinion.”