"I met him at the club at luncheon; he had had your letter--but for which chance, my dear man, I should have known nothing. You"ll see him all right at this house; but I"m glad, if I may say so, Theign," the speaker pursued with some emphasis--"I"m glad, you know, to get hold of you first."
Lord Theign seemed about to ask for the meaning of this remark, but his other companion"s apprehension had already overflowed. "You haven"t come back, have you--to whatever it may be!--for _trouble_ of any sort with Breckenridge?"
His lordship transferred his penetration to this fair friend, "Have you become so intensely absorbed--these remarkable days!--in "Breckenridge"?"
She felt the shadow, you would have seen, of his claimed right, or at least privilege, of search--yet easily, after an instant, emerged clear.
"I"ve thought and dreamt but of _you_--suspicious man!--in proportion as the clamour has spread; and Mr. Bender meanwhile, if you want to know, hasn"t been near me once!"
Lord John came in a manner, and however unconsciously, to her aid.
"You"d have seen, if he had been, what"s the matter with him, I think--and what perhaps Theign has seen from his own letter: since," he went on to his fellow-visitor, "I understood him a week ago to have been much taken up with writing you."
Lord Theign received this without comment, only again with an air of expertly sounding the speaker; after which he gave himself afresh for a moment to Lady Sandgate. "I"ve not come home for any clamour, as you surely know me well enough to believe; or to notice for a minute the cheapest insolence and aggression--which frankly scarce reached me out there; or which, so far as it did, I was daily washed clean of by those blest waters. I returned on Mr. Bender"s letter," he then vouchsafed to Lord John--"three extraordinarily vulgar pages about the egregious Pap-pend.i.c.k!"
"About his having suddenly turned up in person, yes, and, as Breckenridge says, marked the picture down?"--the young man was clearly all-knowing. "That _has_ of course weighed on Bender--being confirmed apparently, on the whole, by the drift of public opinion."
Lord Theign took, on this, with a frank show of reaction from some of his friend"s terms, a sharp turn off; he even ironically indicated the babbler or at least the blunderer in question to Lady Sandgate. "He too has known me so long, and he comes here to talk to me of "the drift of public opinion"!" After which he quite charged at his vain informant.
"Am I to tell you again that I snap my fingers at the drift of public opinion?--which is but another name for the chatter of all the fools one doesn"t know, in addition to all those (and plenty of "em!) one d.a.m.nably does."
Lady Sandgate, by a turn of the hand, dropped oil from her golden cruse.
"Ah, you did _that_, in your own grand way, before you went abroad!"
"I don"t speak of the matter, my dear man, in the light of its effect on _you_," Lord John importantly explained--"but in the light of its effect on Bender; who so consumedly wants the picture, if he _is_ to have it, to be a Mantovano, but seems unable to get it taken at last for anything but the fine old Moretto that of course it has always been."
Lord Theign, in growing disgust at the whole beastly complication, betrayed more and more the odd pitch of the temper that had abruptly restored him with such incalculable weight to the scene of action.
"Well, isn"t a fine old Moretto good enough for him; confound him?"
It pulled up not a little Lord John, who yet made his point. "A fine old Moretto, you know, was exactly what he declined at Dedborough--for its comparative, strictly comparative, insignificance; and he only thought of the picture when the wind began to rise for the enormous rarity--"
"That that mendacious young cad who has bamboozled Grace," Lord Theign broke in, "tried to befool us, for his beggarly reasons, into claiming for it?"
Lady Sandgate renewed her mild influence. "Ah, the knowing people haven"t had their last word--the possible Mantovano isn"t exploded _yet!_" Her n.o.ble friend, however, declined the offered spell. "I"ve had enough of the knowing people--the knowing people are serpents! My picture"s to take or to leave--and it"s what I"ve come back, if you please, John, to say to your man to his face."
This declaration had a report as sharp and almost as multiplied as the successive cracks of a discharged revolver; yet when the light smoke cleared Lady Sand-gate at least was still left standing and smiling.
"Yes, why in mercy"s name can"t he choose _which?_--and why does he write him, dreadful Breckenridge, such tiresome argumentative letters?"
Lord John took up her idea as with the air of something that had been working in him rather vehemently, though under due caution too, as a consequence of this exchange, during which he had apprehensively watched his elder. "I don"t think I quite see _how_, my dear Theign, the poor chap"s letter was so offensive."
In that case his dear Theign could tell him. "Because it was a tissue of expressions that may pa.s.s current--over counters and in awful newspapers--in _his_ extraordinary world or country, but that I decline to take time to puzzle out here."
"If he didn"t make himself understood," Lord John took leave to laugh, "it must indeed have been an unusual production for Bender."
"Oh, I often, with the wild beauty, if you will, of so many of his turns, haven"t a notion," Lady Sandgate confessed with an equal gaiety, "of what he"s talking about."
"I think I never miss his weird sense," her younger guest again loyally contended--"and in fact as a general thing I rather like it!"
"I happen to like nothing that I don"t enjoy," Lord Theign rejoined with some asperity--"and so far as I do follow the fellow he a.s.sumes on my part an interest in his expenditure of purchase-money that I neither feel nor pretend to. He doesn"t want--by what I spell out--the picture he refused at Dedborough; he may possibly want--if one reads it so--the picture on view in Bond Street; and he yet appears to make, with great emphasis, the stupid ambiguous point that these two "articles" (the greatest of Morettos an "article"!) haven"t been "by now" proved different: as if I engaged with him that I myself would so prove them!"
Lord John indulged in a pause--but also in a suggestion. "He must allude to your hoping--when you allowed us to place the picture with Mackintosh--that it would show to all London in the most precious light conceivable."
"Well, if it hasn"t so shown"--and Lord Theign stared as if mystified--"what in the world"s the meaning of this preposterous racket?"
"The racket is largely," his young friend explained, "the vociferation of the people who contradict each other about it."
On which their hostess sought to enliven the gravity of the question.
"Some--yes--shouting on the housetops that"s a Mantovano of the Mantovanos, and others shrieking back at them that they"re donkeys if not criminals."
"He may take it for whatever he likes," said Lord Theign, heedless of these contributions, "he may father it on Michael Angelo himself if he"ll but clear out with it and let me alone!"
"What he"d _like_ to take it for," Lord John at this point saw his way to remark, "is something in the nature of a Hundred Thousand."
"A Hundred Thousand?" cried his astonished friend.
"Quite, I dare say, a Hundred Thousand"--the young man enjoyed clearly handling even by the lips so round a sum.
Lady Sandgate disclaimed however with agility any appearance of having gaped. "Why, haven"t you yet realised, Theign, that those are the American figures?"
His lordship looked at her fixedly and then did the same by Lord John, after which he waited a little. "I"ve nothing to do with the American figures--which seem to me, if you press me, you know, quite intolerably vulgar."
"Well, I"d be as vulgar as anybody for a Hundred Thousand!" Lady Sandgate hastened to proclaim.
"Didn"t he let us know at Dedborough," Lord John asked of the master of that seat, "that he had no use, as he said, for lower values?"
"I"ve heard him remark myself," said their companion, rising to the monstrous memory, "that he wouldn"t take a cheap picture--even though a "handsome" one--as a present."
"And does he call the thing round the corner a cheap picture?" the proprietor of the work demanded.
Lord John threw up his arms with a grin of impatience. "All he wants to do, don"t you see? is to prevent your _making_ it one!"
Lord Theign glared at this imputation to him of a low ductility. "I offered the thing, as it was, at an estimate worthy of it--and of _me_."
"My dear reckless friend," his young adviser protested, "you named no figure _at all_ when it came to the point----!"
"It _didn"t_ come to the point! Nothing came to the point but that I put a Moretto on view; as a thing, yes, perfectly"--Lord Theign accepted the reminding gesture--"on which a rich American had an eye and in which he had, so to speak, an interest. That was what I wanted, and so we left it--parting each of us ready but neither of us bound."
"Ah, Mr. Bender"s bound, as he"d say," Lady Sand-gate interposed--""bound" to make you swallow the enormous luscious plum that your appet.i.te so morbidly rejects!"
"My appet.i.te, as morbid as you like"--her old friend had shrewdly turned on her--"is my own affair, and if the fellow must deal in enormities I warn him to carry them elsewhere!"
Lord John, plainly, by this time, was quite exasperated at the absurdity of him. "But how can"t you see that it"s only a plum, as she says, for a plum and an eye for an eye--since the picture itself, with this huge ventilation, is now quite a different affair?"
"How the deuce a different affair when just what the man himself confesses is that, in spite of all the chatter of the prigs and pedants, there"s no really established ground for treating it as anything but the same?" On which, as having so unanswerably spoken, Lord Theign shook himself free again, in his high petulance, and moved restlessly to where the pa.s.sage to the other room appeared to offer his nerves an issue; all moreover to the effect of suggesting to us that something still other than what he had said might meanwhile work in him behind and beneath that quant.i.ty. The spectators of his trouble watched him, for the time, in uncertainty and with a mute but a.s.sociated comment on the perversity and oddity he had so suddenly developed; Lord John giving a shrug of almost bored despair and Lady Sandgate signalling caution and tact for their action by a finger flourished to her lips, and in fact at once proceeding to apply these arts. The subject of her attention had still remained as in worried thought; he had even mechanically taken up a book from a table--which he then, after an absent glance at it, tossed down.
"You"re so detached from reality, you adorable dreamer," she began--"and unless you stick to _that_ you might as well have done nothing. What you call the pedantry and priggishness and all the rest of it is exactly what poor Breckenridge asked almost on his knees, wonderful man, to be _allowed_ to pay you for; since even if the meddlers and chatterers haven"t settled anything for those who know--though which of the elect themselves after all _does_ seem to know?--it"s a great service rendered him to have started such a hare to run!"
Lord John took freedom to throw off very much the same idea. "Certainly his connection with the whole question and agitation makes no end for his glory."
It didn"t, that remark, bring their friend back to him, but it at least made his indifference flash with derision. "His "glory"--Mr. Bender"s glory? Why, they quite universally loathe him--judging by the stuff they print!"
"Oh, here--as a corrupter of our morals and a promoter of our decay, even though so many are flat on their faces to him--yes! But it"s another affair over there where the eagle screams like a thousand steam-whistles and the newspapers flap like the leaves of the forest: _there_ he"ll be, if you"ll only let him, the biggest thing going; since sound, in that air, seems to mean size, and size to be all that counts.