"No--not ours yet. That is"--he consciously and quickly took himself up--"not yours! But as Pap-pend.i.c.k went to Verona for us I"ve asked Bardi to do us the great favour to come here--if Lord Theign will be so good," he said, bethinking himself with a turn, "as to let him examine the Moretto." He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly "elected," as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. "It"s not at all impossible--for such curious effects have been!--that the Dedborough picture seen _after_ the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough."
"And so awfully _long_ after--wasn"t it?" Lady Grace asked.
"Awfully long after--it was years ago that Pappen-d.i.c.k, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible."
"Oh of course we don"t see _every one!_"--she heroically kept it up.
"You don"t see every one," Hugh bravely laughed, "and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi," he pursued, "to go again to Verona----"
"The last thing before coming here?"--she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for a.s.sent. "How happy they should like so to work for you!"
"Ah, we"re a band of brothers," he returned--""we few, we happy few"--from country to country"; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: "though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappend.i.c.k and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping _interest_ of it all; since," he developed and explained, for his elder friend"s benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an a.s.surance superficially at least recovered, "when we"re really "hit" over a case we"ll do almost anything in life."
Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. "It must be so lovely to _feel_ so hit!"
"It does spoil one," Hugh laughed, "for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance--putting it at the _merest_ chance--of Bardi"s own wet blanket! But that"s again so very small--though," he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, "you"ll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappend.i.c.k"s veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you"ll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!" he sublimely insisted.
"How can we prevent your using it?" Lady Grace again interrupted; "or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst--"
"The thing"--he at once pursued--"will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah," he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, "the worst sha"n"t come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express"--and he faced Lord Theign again--"for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!"
Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that att.i.tude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene--so that it was of this full view his partic.i.p.ation had effectively consisted, "I haven"t the least idea, sir, what you"re talking about!" And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had pa.s.sed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.
There ensued upon his words and movement a vivid mute pa.s.sage, the richest of commentaries, between his companions; who, deeply divided by the width of the ample room, followed him with their eyes and then used for their own interchange these organs of remark, eloquent now over Hugh"s unmistakable dismissal at short order, on which obviously he must at once act. Lady Grace"s young arms conveyed to him by a despairing contrite motion of surrender that she had done for him all she could do in his presence and that, however sharply doubtful the result, he was to leave the rest to herself. They communicated thus, the strenuous pair, for their full moment, without speaking; only with the prolonged, the charged give and take of their gaze and, it might well have been imagined, of their pa.s.sion. Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation--of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance.
It was the girl"s raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter on the spot from which she had not moved. It presently ended in his lordship"s turn about as if inferring by the silence that the intruder had withdrawn.
"Is that young man your lover?" he said as he drew again near.
Lady Grace waited a little, but spoke as quietly as if she had been prepared. "Has the question a bearing on the promise you a short time ago demanded of me?"
"It has a bearing on the so extraordinary appearance of your intimacy with him!"
"You mean that if he _should_ be--what you ask me about--your exaction would then be modified?"
"My request that you break it short off? That request would, on the contrary," Lord Theign p.r.o.nounced, "rest on an immense new ground.
Therefore I insist on your telling me the truth."
"Won"t the truth be before you, father, if you"ll _think_ a moment--without extravagance?" After which, while, as stiffly as ever--and it probably seemed to her impatience as stupidly--he didn"t rise to it, she went on: "If I _offered_ you not again to see him, does that make for you the appearance--?"
"If you offered it, you mean, on your condition--my promising not to sell? I promised," said Lord Theign, "absolutely nothing at all!"
She took him up with all expression. "So I promised as little! But that I should have been able to say what I did sufficiently meets your curiosity."
She might, wronged as she held herself, have felt him stupid not to see _how_ wronged; but he was in any case acute for an evasion. "You risked your offer for the great equivalent over which you"ve so wildly worked yourself up."
"Yes, I"ve worked myself--that, I grant you and don"t blush for! But hardly so much as to renounce my "lover"--if," she prodigiously smiled, "I were so fortunate as to have one!"
"You renounced poor John mightily easily--whom you were so fortunate as to have!"
Her brows rose as high as his own had ever done. "Do you call Lord John my lover?"
"He was your suitor most a.s.suredly," Lord Theign inimitably said, though without looking at her; "and as strikingly encouraged as he was respectfully ardent!"
"Encouraged by _you_, dear father, beyond doubt!"
"Encouraged--er--by every one: because you were (yes, you _were!_) encouraging. And what I ask of you now is a word of common candour as to whether you didn"t, on your honour, turn him off because of your just then so stimulated views on the person who has been with us."
Grace replied but after an instant, as moved by more things than she could say--moved above all, in her trouble and her pity for him, by other things than harshness: "Oh father, father, father----!"
He searched her through all the compa.s.sion of her cry, but appeared to give way to her sincerity. "Well then if I _have_ your denial I take it as answering my whole question--in a manner that satisfies me. If there"s nothing, on your word, of that sort between you, you can all the more drop him."
"But you said a moment ago that I should all the more in the other case--that of there _being_ something!"
He brushed away her logic-chopping. "If you"re so keen then for past remarks I take up your own words--I accept your own terms for your putting an end to Mr. Crimble." To which, while, turning pale, she said nothing, he added: "You recognise that you profess yourself ready----"
"Not again to see him," she now answered, "if you tell me the picture"s safe? Yes, I recognise that I _was_ ready--as well as how scornfully little you then were!"
"Never mind what I then was--the question"s of what I actually am, since I close with you on it The picture"s therefore as safe as you please,"
Lord Theign pursued, "if you"ll do what you just now engaged to."
"I engaged to do nothing," she replied after a pause; and the face she turned to him had grown suddenly tragic. "I"ve no word to take back, for none pa.s.sed between us; but I _won"t_ do what I mentioned and what you at once laughed at Because," she finished, "the case is different."
"Different?" he almost shouted--"_how_, different?"
She didn"t look at him for it, but she was none the less strongly distinct "He has _been_ here--and that has done it He knows," she admirably emphasised.
"Knows what I think of him, no doubt--for a brazen young prevaricator!
But what else?"
She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. "What he will have seen--that I feel we"re too good friends."
"Then your denial of it"s false," her father fairly thundered--"and you _are_ infatuated?"
It made her the more quiet. "I like him very much."
"So that your row about the picture," he demanded with pa.s.sion, "has been all a blind?" And then as her quietness still held her: "And his a blind as much--to help him to get _at_ you?"
She looked at him again now. "He must speak for himself. I"ve said what I mean."
"But what the devil _do_ you mean?" Lord Theign, taking in the hour, had reached the door as in supremely baffled conclusion and with a sense of time lamentably lost.
Their eyes met upon it all dreadfully across the wide s.p.a.ce, and, hurried and incommoded as she saw him, she yet made him still stand a minute. Then she let everything go. "Do what you like with the picture!"
He jerked up his arm and guarding hand as before a levelled blow at his face, and with the other hand flung open the door, having done with her now and immediately lost to sight. Left alone she stood a moment looking before her; then with a vague advance, held apparently by a quickly growing sense of the implication of her act, reached a table where she remained a little, deep afresh in thought--only the next thing to fall into a chair close to it and there, with her elbows on it, yield to the impulse of covering her flushed face with her hands.