"An alibi?"
"By "raving," as you say, the saddle on the wrong horse. I don"t think you at all believe you"ll get the Sir Joshua--but meanwhile we shall have cleared up the question of the Moretto."
Mr. Bender, imperturbable, didn"t speak till he had done justice to this picture of his subtlety. "Then, why on earth do you want to boom the Moretto?"
"You ask that," said Hugh, "because it"s the boomed thing that"s most in peril."
"Well, it"s the big, the bigger, the biggest things, and if you drag their value to the light why shouldn"t we want to grab them and carry them off--the same as all of _you_ originally did?"
"Ah, not quite the same," Hugh smiled--"that I _will_ say for you!"
"Yes, you stick it on now--you _have_ got an eye for the rise in values.
But I grant you your unearned increment, and you ought to be mighty glad that, to such a time, I"ll pay it you."
Our young man kept, during a moment"s thought, his eyes on his companion, and then resumed with all intensity and candour: "You may easily, Mr. Bender, be too much for me--as you appear too much for far greater people. But may I ask you, very earnestly, for your word on _this_, as to any case in which that happens--that when precious things, things we are to lose here, _are_ knocked down to you, you"ll let us at least take leave of them, let us have a sight of them in London, before they"re borne off?"
Mr. Bender"s big face fell almost with a crash. "Hand them over, you mean, to the sandwich men on Bond Street?"
"To one or other of the placard and poster men--I don"t insist on the inserted human slice! Let the great values, as a compensation to us, be on view for three or four weeks."
"You ask me," Mr. Bender returned, "for a _general_ a.s.surance to that effect?"
"Well, a particular one--so it be particular enough," Hugh said--"will do just for now. Let me put in my plea for the issue--well, of the value that"s actually in the scales."
"The Mantovano-Moretto?"
"The Moretto-Mantovano!"
Mr. Bender carnivorously smiled. "Hadn"t we better know which it is first?"
Hugh had a motion of practical indifference for this. "The public interest--playing so straight on the question--may help to settle it.
By which I mean that it will profit enormously--the question of probability, of ident.i.ty itself will--by the discussion it will create.
The discussion will promote certainty----"
"And certainty," Mr. Bender ma.s.sively mused, "will kick up a row."
"_Of course_ it will kick up a row!"--Hugh thoroughly guaranteed that.
"You"ll be, for the month, the best-abused man in England--if you venture to remain here at all; except, naturally, poor Lord Theign."
"Whom it won"t be my interest, at the same time, to worry into backing down."
"But whom it will be exceedingly _mine_ to practise on"--and Hugh laughed as at the fun before them--"if I may entertain the sweet hope of success. The only thing is--from my point of view," he went on--"that backing down before what he will call vulgar clamour isn"t in the least in his traditions, nothing less so; and that if there should be really too much of it for his taste or his nerves he"ll set his handsome face as a stone and never budge an inch. But at least again what I appeal to you for will have taken place--the picture will have been seen by a lot of people who"ll care."
"It will have been seen," Mr. Bender amended--"on the mere contingency of my acquisition of it--only if its present owner consents."
""Consents"?" Hugh almost derisively echoed; "why, he"ll propose it himself, he"ll insist on it, he"ll put it through, once he"s angry enough--as angry, I mean, as almost any public criticism of a personal act of his will be sure to make him; and I"m afraid the striking criticism, or at least animadversion, of this morning, will have blown on his flame of bravado."
Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion.
"Yes, I guess he"s pretty mad."
"They"ve imputed to him"--Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense--"an intention of which after all he isn"t guilty."
"So that"--his listener glowed with interested optimism--"if they don"t look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he"ll just go and be guilty!"
Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped.
"You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?" And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound _him_: "The strongest thing in such a type--one does make out--is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to _be_ such a liberty."
Mr. Bender partic.i.p.ated thus at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. "Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them _do_, over here; and to have to quit it on account of unpleasant remark--"
But he gave up thoughtfully trying to express what this must be; reduced to the mere synthetic interjection "My!"
"That"s it, Mr. Bender," Hugh said for the consecration of such a moral; "he won"t quit it without a hard struggle."
Mr. Bender hereupon at last gave himself quite gaily away as to his high calculation of impunity. "Well, I guess he won"t struggle too hard for me to hold on to him if I _want_ to!"
"In the thick of the conflict then, however that may be," Hugh returned, "don"t forget what I"ve urged on you--the claim of our desolate country."
But his friend had an answer to this. "My natural interest, Mr.
Crimble--considering what I do for it--is in the claim of ours. But I wish you were on my side!"
"Not so much," Hugh hungrily and truthfully laughed, "as I wish you were on mine!" Decidedly, none the less, he had to go. "Good-bye--for another look here!"
He reached the doorway of the second room, where, however, his companion, freshly alert at this, stayed him by a gesture. "How much is she really worth?"
""She"?" Hugh, staring a moment, was miles at sea. "Lady Sandgate?"
"Her great-grandmother."
A responsible answer was prevented--the butler was again with them; he had opened wide the other door and he named to Mr. Bender the personage under his convoy. "Lord John!"
Hugh caught this from the inner threshold, and it gave him his escape.
"Oh, ask _that_ friend!" With which he sought the further pa.s.sage to the staircase and street, while Lord John arrived in charge of Mr. Gotch, who, having remarked to the two occupants of the front drawing-room that her ladyship would come, left them together.
IV
"Then Theign"s not yet here!" Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. "But he told me I should find you."
"He has kept me waiting," that gentleman returned--"but what"s the matter with him anyway?"
"The matter with him"--Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating--"must of course be this beastly thing in the "Journal.""
Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. "What"s the matter with the beastly thing?"
"Why, aren"t you aware that the stiffest bit of it is a regular dig at you?"