"What you"ve set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight against me?"
But she persisted without heat. "What we"ve set our hearts on is working for England."
"And pray who in the world"s "England,"" he cried in his stupefaction, "unless I am?"
"Dear, dear father," she pleaded, "that"s all we _want_ you to be! I mean"--she didn"t fear firmly to force it home--"in the real, the right, the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours."
""Ours"?"--he couldn"t but again throw back her word at her. "Isn"t it, d.a.m.n you, just _in_ ours--?"
"No, no," she interrupted--"not in _ours!_" She smiled at him still, though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.
But he glared as at a senseless juggle. "What and who the devil are you talking about? What are "we," the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking--and riding!--straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs?" So he let her "have" the stout sound truth, as it were--and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have made her reel. "You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, G.o.d be thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly lot of us, take us together--make us numerous enough without any foreign aid or mixture: if that"s what I understand you to mean!"
"You don"t understand me at all--evidently; and above all I see you don"t want to!" she had the bravery to add, "By "our" sense of what"s due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble"s and mine--and n.o.body"s else at all; since, as I tell you, it"s only with him I"ve talked."
It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque measure of the scandal he faced. "So that "you and Mr. Crimble"
represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and duties of our house?"
Well, she was too earnest--as she clearly wished to let him see--to mind his perversion of it. "I express to you the way we feel."
"It"s most striking to hear, certainly, what you express"--he had positively to laugh for it; "and you speak of him, with your insufferable "we," as if you were presenting him as your--G.o.d knows what! You"ve enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity." And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and reb.u.t.ted nothing: "You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!"
"Yes, we"re fellow-critics, father"--she accepted this opening. "I perfectly adopt your term." But it took her a minute to go further. "I saw Mr. Crim-ble here half an hour ago."
"Saw him "here"?" Lord Theign amazedly asked. "He _comes_ to you here--and Amy Sandgate has been silent?"
"It wasn"t her business to tell you--since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect," Lady Grace then produced, "that he"ll come again."
It brought down with a bang all her father"s authority. "Then I simply exact of you that you don"t see him."
The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a br.i.m.m.i.n.g cup. "Is that what you _really_ meant by your condition just now--that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?"
"What I "really meant" is what I really mean--that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether."
"Have nothing to do with him at all?"
"Have nothing to do with him at all."
"In fact"--she took it in--"give him wholly up."
He had an impatient gesture. "You sound as if I asked you to give up a fortune!" And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation--verily as if it had been in the balance for her--he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. "You"re so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is like _that_ sort of thing?"
Lady Grace took her time--but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him, what _had_ gathered. "I like Mr. Crimble exceedingly, father--I think him clever, intelligent, good; I want what he wants--I want it, I think, really, as much; and I don"t at all deny that he has helped to make me so want it. But that doesn"t matter. I"ll wholly cease to see him, I"ll give him up forever, if--if--!" She faltered, however, she hung fire with a smile that anxiously, intensely appealed. Then she began and stopped again, "If--if--!" while her father caught her up with irritation.
""If," my lady? If _what_, please?"
"If you"ll withdraw the offer of our picture to Mr. Bender--and never make another to any one else!"
He stood staring as at the size of it--then translated it into his own terms. "If I"ll obligingly announce to the world that I"ve made an a.s.s of myself you"ll kindly forbear from your united effort--the charming pair of you--to show me up for one?"
Lady Grace, as if consciously not caring or attempting to answer this, simply gave the first flare of his criticism time to drop. It wasn"t till a minute pa.s.sed that she said: "You don"t agree to my compromise?"
Ah, the question but fatally sharpened at a stroke the stiffness of his spirit. "Good G.o.d, I"m to "compromise" on top of everything?--I"m to let you browbeat me, haggle and bargain with me, over a thing that I"m ent.i.tled to settle with you as things have ever _been_ settled among us, by uttering to you my last parental word?"
"You don"t care enough then for what you name?"--she took it up as scarce heeding now what he said.
"For putting an end to your odious commerce--? I give you the measure, on the contrary," said Lord Theign, "of how much I care: as you give me, very strangely indeed, it strikes me, that of what it costs you--!" But his other words were lost in the hard long look at her from which he broke off in turn as for disgust.
It was with an effect of decently shielding herself--the unuttered meaning came so straight--that she subst.i.tuted words of her own. "Of what it costs me to redeem the picture?"
"To lose your tenth-rate friend"--he spoke without scruple now.
She instantly broke into ardent deprecation, pleading at once and warning. "Father, father, oh--! You hold the thing in your hands."
He pulled up before her again as to thrust the responsibility straight back. "My orders then are so much rubbish to you?"
Lady Grace held her ground, and they remained face to face in opposition and accusation, neither making the other the sign of peace. But the girl at least _had_, in her way, held out the olive-branch, while Lord Theign had but reaffirmed his will. It was for her acceptance of this that he searched her, her last word not having yet come. Before it had done so, however, the door from the lobby opened and Mr. Gotch had regained their presence. This appeared to determine in Lady Grace a view of the importance of delay, which she signified to her companion in a "Well--I must think!" For the butler positively resounded, and Hugh was there.
"Mr. Crimble!" Mr. Gotch proclaimed--with the further extravagance of projecting the visitor straight upon his lordship.
VII
Our young man showed another face than the face his friend had lately seen him carry off, and he now turned it distressfully from that source of inspiration to Lord Theign, who was flagrantly, even from this first moment, no such source at all, and then from his n.o.ble adversary back again, under pressure of difficulty and effort, to Lady Grace, whom he directly addressed. "Here I am again, you see--and I"ve got my news, worse luck!" But his manner to her father was the next instant more brisk. "I learned you were here, my lord; but as the case is important I told them it was all right and came up. I"ve been to my club," he added for the girl, "and found the tiresome thing--!" But he broke down breathless.
"And it isn"t good?" she cried with the highest concern.
Ruefully, yet not abjectly, he confessed, "Not so good as I hoped. For I a.s.sure you, my lord, I counted--"
"It"s the report from Pappend.i.c.k about the picture at Verona," Lady Grace interruptingly explained.
Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarra.s.sment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in his thought, for a more awkward force than any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. "The man I told _you_ about also," he said to his formidable patron; "whom I went to Brussels to talk with and who, most kindly, has gone for us to Verona. He has been able to get straight at _their_ Mantovano, but the brute horribly wires me that he doesn"t quite see the thing; see, I mean"--and he gathered his two hearers together now in his overflow of chagrin, conscious, with his break of the ice, more exclusively of that--"my vivid vital point, the absolute screaming ident.i.ty of the two persons represented. I still hold," he persuasively went on, "that our man is their man, but Pappend.i.c.k decides that he isn"t--and as Pappend.i.c.k has so _much_ to be reckoned with of course I"m awfully abashed."
Lord Theign had remained what he had begun by being, immeasurably and inaccessibly detached--only with his curiosity more moved than he could help and as, on second thought, to see what sort of a still more offensive fool the heated youth would really make of himself. "Yes--you seem indeed remarkably abashed!"
Hugh clearly was thrown again, by the cold "cut" of this, colder than any mere social ignoring, upon a sense of the d.a.m.nably poor figure he did offer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek tingle. "I backed my own judgment strongly, I know--and I"ve got my snub. But I don"t in the least knock under."
"Only the first authority in Europe doesn"t care, I suppose, whether you do or not!"
"He isn"t _the_ first authority in Europe, thank G.o.d," the young man returned--"though he is, I admit, one of the three or four first. And I mean to appeal--I"ve another shot in my locker," he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. "I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi."
"Bardi of Milan?"--she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father"s presence.
It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. "You know of him?--how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel," he quickly explained, "he must have _most_ the instinct--and it has come over me since that he"d have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture."
She had fairly hung on his lips. "But does he know ours?"