by Henry James
I
HUGH CRIMBLE waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room--this timeat the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at thingsabout 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 glasssuspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief andperhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace--that he had sentup his name to whom was immediately apparent--presented herself atthe entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon noinstant exchange of words; their exchange was mute--they but pausedwhere they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the otherfor full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would haveappeared, 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 somany 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'tspeak; 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 afortnight ago, there's something that to-day adds to my doubt and myfear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear thesuspense of them as they are."
The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yetdeclined a dread. "Of what suspense do you speak? Your still beingwithout 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, whatsituation, what complication that last scene of ours with your fatherhere has let you in for; and yet at the same time--having no sign norsound from you!--to see the importance of not making anything possiblyworse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I've been in thedark," he pursued, "and feeling that I must leave _you_ there; so thatnow--just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at anycost--I don't know whether I most want or most fear what I may learnfrom you."
Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between differentways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture,marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of whatshe gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. "Have youhad--first of all--any news yet of Bardi?"
"That I have is what has driven me straight _at_ you again--since I'veshown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hopedand like a regular good 'un," Hugh was able to state; "I've just methim at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in CliffordStreet, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to myextreme exasperation, to 'sample' Canterbury, and I leave him to abath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to BondStreet, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension,oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be theflash-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 theone sitter!"
"That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything soto the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the goldennail of authenticity, and"--he quite glowed through his gloom forit--"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 ofa cloud. "That is if the flash-light comes!"
"That is if it comes indeed, confound it!"--he had to enlarge a littleunder the recall of past experience. "So now, at any rate, you see mytension!"
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 headopted it only to provide: "It might if he didn't now wear goggles, soto say!--clapped on him too hard by Pappendick's so damnably perverseopinion." With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. "Ah, ofcourse, these wretched days, you haven't known of Pappendick's personalvisit. 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 fullassurance, 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--andto declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, toBender 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--oron!--anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silverlight on earth; never quite gone, yet never _all_ there--save forinappreciable moments. He _would_ be in eclipse as a peril, I grant,"Hugh went on--"if the question had struck him as really closed. Butluckily the blessed Press--which is a pure heavenly joy and now quiteimmense on it--keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly."
"Which makes, however," Lady Grace discriminated, "for the danger of agrab."
"Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admitthat 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 givenmoment, as against that signal, is to be found one's self by the animalin the line of its trajectory. That's exactly," he laughed, "where weare!"
She cast about as intelligently to note the place. "Your great idea, youmean, _has_ so worked--with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed tocome to us here?"
"All beyond my wildest hope," Hugh returned; "since the sight of thepicture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully _tells_. Thatwe must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to ittight, is the cry that fills the air--to the tune of ten letters a dayin the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothingof more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfullywild, but all of it wind in our sails."
"I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see thething in its new light," Lady Grace said. "But I couldn't stay--fortears!"
"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 thefellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him,cling to him, and there's talk of a 'Ladies' League of Protest'--all ofwhich keeps up the pitch."
"Poor Amy and I are a ladies' league," the girl joylessly joked--"as wenow take in the 'Journal' regardless of expense."
"Oh then you practically _have_ it all--since," Hugh, added aftera brief hesitation, "I suppose Lord Theign himself doesn't languishuninformed."
"At far-off Salsomaggiore--by the papers? No doubt indeed he isn'tspared even the worst," said Lady Grace--"and no doubt too it's a dragon his cure."
Her companion seemed struck with her lack of assurance. "Then youdon'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 thequestion as a shade evasive.
"I've asked her not to tell me," his friend replied--"that is if hesimply holds out."
"So that as she doesn't tell you"--Hugh
was clear for the inference--"heof course does hold out." To which he added almost accusingly while hiseyes searched her: "But your case is really bad."
She confessed to it after a moment, but as if vaguely enjoying it. "Mycase 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, onthe contrary--!" But here she checked her emphasis.
"Ah, I've so _wanted_, through our horrid silence, to help you!" And hepressed to get more at the truth. "You've so quite fatally displeasedhim?"
"To the last point--as I tell you. But it's not to that I refer," sheexplained; "it's to the ground of complaint I've given _you_." And thenas this but left him blank, "It's time--it was at once time--that youshould know," she pursued; "and yet if it's hard for me to speak, as yousee, it was impossible for me to write. But there it is." She made hersad and beautiful effort. "The last thing before he left us I let thepicture go."
"You mean--?" But he could only wonder--till, however, it glimmered uponhim. "You gave up your protest?"
"I gave up my protest. I told him that--so far as I'm concerned!--hemight do as he liked."
Her poor friend turned pale at the sharp little shock of it; but if hisface thus showed the pang of too great a surprise he yet wreathed theconvulsion in a gay grimace. "You leave me to struggle alone?"
"I leave you to struggle alone."
He took it in bewilderingly, but tried again, even to the heroic,for optimism. "Ah well, you decided, I suppose, on some new personalground."
"Yes; a reason came up, a reason I hadn't to that extent looked forand which of a sudden--quickly, before he went--I _had_ somehow to dealwith. So to give him my word in the dismal sense I mention was my onlyway to meet the strain." She paused; Hugh waited for something further,and "I gave him my word I wouldn't help you," she wound up.
He turned it over. "To _act_ in the matter--I see."
"To act in the matter"--she went through with it--"after the high standI had taken."
Still he studied it. "I see--I see. It's between you and your father."
"It's between him and me--yes. An engagement not again to trouble him."
Hugh, from his face, might have feared a still greater complication; sohe made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. "Ah, thatwas nice of you. And natural. _That's_ all right!"
"No"--she spoke from a deeper depth--"it's altogether wrong. Forwhatever happens I must now accept it."
"Well, say you must"--he really declined not to treat it almost asrather a "lark"--"if we can at least go on talking."
"Ah, we _can_ at least go on talking!" she perversely sighed. "I can sayanything I like so long as I don't say it to _him_" she almost wailed.But she added with more firmness: "I can still hope--and I can stillpray."
He set free again with a joyous gesture all his confidence. "Well, whatmore _could_ you do, anyhow? So isn't that enough?"
It took her a moment to say, and even then she didn't. "Is it enough for_you_, Mr. Crimble?"
"What _is_ enough for me"--he could for his part readily name it--"isthe harm done you at our last meeting by my irruption; so that if yougot his consent to see me----!"
"I didn't get his consent!"--she had turned away from the searchingeyes, but she faced them again to rectify: "I see you against hisexpress command."
"Ah then thank God I came!"--it was like a bland breath on a _feu dejoie_: he flamed so much higher.
"Thank God you've come, yes--for my deplorable exposure." And to justifyher name for it before he could protest, "I _offered_ him here not tosee you," she rigorously explained.
"'Offered him?"--Hugh did drop for it. "Not to see me--ever again?"
She didn't falter. "Never again."
Ah then he understood. "But he wouldn't let that serve----?"
"Not for the price I put on it."
"His yielding on the picture?"
"His yielding on the picture."
Hugh lingered before it all. "Your proposal wasn't 'good enough'?"
"It wasn't good enough."
"I see," he repeated--"I see." But he was in that light again mystified."Then why are you therefore not free?"
"Because--just after--you came back, and I _did_ see you again!"
Ah, it was all present. "You found you were too sorry for me?"
"I found I was too sorry for you--as he himself found I was."
Hugh had got hold of it now. "And _that_, you mean, he couldn'tstomach?"
"So little that when you had gone (and _how_ you had to go you remember)he at once proposed, rather than that I should deceive you in a way sodifferent from his own----"
"To do all we want of him?"
"To do all I did at least."
"And it was _then_," he took in, "that you wouldn't deal?"
"Well"--try though she might to keep the colour out, it all camestraighter and straighter now--"those moments had brought you home tome as they had also brought _him_; making such a difference, I felt, forwhat he veered round to agree to."
"The difference"--Hugh wanted it so adorably definite--"that you didn'tsee your way to accepting----?"
"No, not to accepting the condition he named."
"Which was that he'd keep the picture for you if you'd treat me as too'low'----?"
"If I'd treat you," said Lady Grace with her eyes on his fine youngface, "as impossible."
He kept her eyes--he clearly liked so to make her repeat it. "Andnot even for the sake of the picture--?" After he had given her time,however, her silence, with her beautiful look in it, seemed to admonishhim not to force her for his pleasure; as if what she had already toldhim didn't make him throb enough for the wonder of it. He _had_ it, andlet her see by his high flush how he made it his own--while, the nextthing, as it was but part of her avowal, the rest of that illuminationcalled for a different intelligence. "Your father's reprobation of mepersonally is on the ground that you're all such great people?"
She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, hiseagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the "ground" that hisquestion laid bare the light veil of an evasion, "'Great people,' I'velearned to see, mustn't--to remain great--do what my father's doing."
"It's indeed on the theory of their not so behaving," Hugh returned,"that we see them--all the inferior rest of us--in the grand glamour oftheir greatness!"
If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beautyin her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of thejourney. "You won't see them in it for long--if they don't now, undersuch tests and with such opportunities, begin to take care."
This had given him, at a stroke, he clearly felt, all freedom for thecloser criticism. "Lord Theign perhaps recognises some such canny truth,but 'takes care,' with the least trouble to himself and the finest shortcut--does it, if you'll let me say so, rather on the cheap--by finding'the likes' of me, as his daughter's trusted friend, out of thequestion."
"Well, you won't mind that, will you?" Lady Grace asked, "if he findshis daughter herself, in any such relation to you, quite as much so."
"Different enough, from position to position and person to person," hebrightly brooded, "is the view that gets itself _most_ comfortably takenof the implications of Honour!"
"Yes," the girl returned; "my father, in the act of despoiling usall, all who are interested, without apparently the least unpleasantconsciousness, keeps the balance showily even, to his mostly so fine,so delicate sense, by suddenly discovering that he's scandalised at mycaring for your friendship."
Hugh looked at her, on this, as with the gladness verily of possessionpromised and only waiting--or as if from that moment forth he had herassurance of everything that most concerned him and that mightmost inspire. "Well, isn't the moral of it all simply that what hisperversity of pride, as we can only hold it, will have most done for usis to bring u
s--and to keep us--blessedly together?"
She seemed for a moment to question his "simply." "Do you regard us asso much 'together' when you remember where, in spite of everything, I'veput myself?"
"By telling him to do what he likes?" he recalled without embarrassment."Oh, that wasn't in spite of 'everything'--it was only in spite of theManto-vano."
"'Only'?" she flushed--"when I've given the picture up?"
"Ah," Hugh cried, "I don't care a hang for the picture!" And then as shelet him, closer, close to her with this, possess himself of her hands:"We both only care, don't we, that we're given to each other thus? Weboth only care, don't we, that nothing can keep us apart?"
"Oh, if you've forgiven me--!" she sighed into his fond face.
"Why, since you gave the thing up _for_ me," he pleadingly laughed, "itisn't as if you had given _me_ up----!"
"For anything, anything? Ah never, never!" she breathed.
"Then why aren't we all right?"
"Well, if you will----!"
"Oh for ever and ever and ever!"--and with this ardent cry of hisdevotion his arms closed in their strength and she was clasped to hisbreast and to his lips.
The next moment, however, she had checked him with the warning "AmySandgate!"--as if she had heard their hostess enter the other room. LadySand-gate was in fact almost already upon them--their disjunction hadscarce been effected and she had reached the nearer threshold. Theyhad at once put the widest space possible between them--a little ofthe flurry of which transaction agitated doubtless their clutch atcomposure. They gave back a shade awkwardly and consciously, on one sideand the other, the speculative though gracious attention she for a fewmoments made them and their recent intimate relation the subject of;from all of which indeed Lady Grace sought and found cover in a promptand responsible address to Hugh. "Mustn't you go without more delay toClifford Street?"
He came back to it all alert "At once!" He had recovered his hat andreached the other door, whence he gesticulated farewell to the elderlady. "Please pardon me"--and he disappeared.
Lady Sandgate hereupon stood for a little silently confronted with thegirl. "Have you freedom of mind for the fact that your father's suddenlyat hand?"
"He has come back?"--Lady Grace was sharply struck.
"He arrives this afternoon and appears to go straight toKitty--according to a wire that I find downstairs on coming backlate from my luncheon. He has returned with a rush--as," said hiscorrespondent in the elation of triumph, "I was _sure_ he would!"
Her young friend was more at sea. "Brought back, you mean, by theoutcry--even though he so hates it?"
But she was more and more all lucidity--save in so far as she was nowalmost all authority. "Ah, hating still more to seem afraid, he has comeback to face the music!"
Lady Grace, turning away as in vague despair for the manner in whichthe music might affect him, yet wheeled about again, after thought, toa positive recognition and even to quite an inconsequent pride."Yes--that's dear old father!"
And what was Lady Sandgate moreover but mistress now of the subject?"At the point the row has reached he couldn't stand it another day; sohe has thrown up his cure and--lest we should oppose him!--not evenannounced his start."
"Well," her companion returned, "now that I've _done_ it all I shallnever oppose him again!"
Lady Sandgate appeared to show herself as still under the impression shemight have received on entering. "He'll only oppose _you!_"
"If he does," said Lady Grace, "we're at present two to bear it."
"Heaven save us then"--the elder woman was quick, was even cordial, forthe sense of this--"your good friend _is_ clever!"
Lady Grace honoured the remark. "Mr. Crim-ble's remarkably clever."
"And you've arranged----?"
"We haven't arranged--but we've understood. So that, dear Amy, if _you_understand--!" Lady Grace paused, for Gotch had come in from the hall.
"His lordship has arrived?" his mistress immediately put to him.
"No, my lady, but Lord John has--to know if he's expected _here_, and inthat case, by your ladyship's leave, to come up."
Her ladyship turned to the girl. "May Lord John--as we do await yourfather--come up?"
"As suits _you_, please!"
"He may come up," said Lady Sandgate to Gotch. "His lordship'sexpected." She had a pause till they were alone again, when she wenton to her companion: "You asked me just now if I understood. Well--I dounderstand!"
Lady Grace, with Gotch's withdrawal, which left the door open, hadreached the passage to the other room. "Then you'll excuse me!"--shemade her escape.