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 gla.s.s 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 Pappend.i.c.k"s so d.a.m.nably perverse opinion." With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. "Ah, of course, these wretched days, you haven"t known of Pappend.i.c.k"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 a.s.surance, 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 pa.s.sionate 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."
"Poor Amy and I are a ladies" league," the girl joylessly joked--"as we now take in the "Journal" regardless of expense."
"Oh then you practically _have_ it all--since," Hugh, added after a brief hesitation, "I suppose Lord Theign himself doesn"t languish uninformed."
"At far-off Salsomaggiore--by the papers? No doubt indeed he isn"t spared even the worst," said Lady Grace--"and no doubt too it"s a drag on his cure."
Her companion seemed struck with her lack of a.s.surance. "Then you don"t--if I may ask--hear from him?"
"I? Never a word."
"He doesn"t write?" Hugh allowed himself to insist.
"He doesn"t write. And I don"t write either."
"And Lady Sandgate?" Hugh once more ventured.
"Doesn"t _she_ write?"
"Doesn"t _she_ hear?" said the young man, treating the other form of the question as a shade evasive.
"I"ve asked her not to tell me," his friend replied--"that is if he simply holds out."
"So that as she doesn"t tell you"--Hugh was clear for the inference--"he of course does hold out." To which he added almost accusingly while his eyes searched her: "But your case is really bad."
She confessed to it after a moment, but as if vaguely enjoying it. "My case is really bad."
He had a vividness of impatience and contrition. 197
"And it"s I who--all too blunderingly!--have made it so?"
"I"ve made it so myself," she said with a high head-shake, "and you, on the contrary--!" But here she checked her emphasis.
"Ah, I"ve so _wanted_, through our horrid silence, to help you!" And he pressed to get more at the truth. "You"ve so quite fatally displeased him?"
"To the last point--as I tell you. But it"s not to that I refer," she explained; "it"s to the ground of complaint I"ve given _you_." And then as this but left him blank, "It"s time--it was at once time--that you should know," she pursued; "and yet if it"s hard for me to speak, as you see, it was impossible for me to write. But there it is." She made her sad and beautiful effort. "The last thing before he left us I let the picture go."