by Henry James
"Well," said Lord John, "go into it."
"Hanged if I won't!" his friend broke out after a moment. "It would suit me. I mean"—the explanation came after a brief intensity of thought—"the possible size of his cheque would."
"Oh," said Lord John gaily, "I guess there's no limit to the possible size of his cheque!"
"Yes, it would suit me, it would suit me!" the elder man, standing there, audibly mused. But his air changed and a lighter question came up to him as he saw his daughter reappear at the door from the terrace. "Well, the infant horde?" he immediately put to her.
Lady Grace came in, dutifully accounting for them. "They've marched off—in a huge procession."
"Thank goodness! And our friends?"
"All playing tennis," she said—"save those who are sitting it out." To which she added, as to explain her return: "Mr. Crimble has gone?"
Lord John took upon him to say. "He's in the library, to which you addressed him—making discoveries."
"Not then, I hope," she smiled, "to our disadvantage!"
"To your very great honour and glory." Lord John clearly valued the effect he might produce.
"Your Moretto of Brescia—do you know what it really and spendidly is?" And then as the girl, in her surprise, but wondered: "A Mantovano, neither more nor less. Ever so much more swagger."
"A Mantovano?" Lady Grace echoed. "Why, how tremendously jolly!"
Her father was struck. "Do you know the artist—of whom I had never heard?"
"Yes, something of the little that is known." And she rejoiced as her knowledge came to her. "He's a tremendous swell, because, great as he was, there are but seven proved examples——"
"With this of yours," Lord John broke in, "there are eight."
"Then why haven't I known about him?" Lord Theign put it as if so many other people were guilty for this.
His daughter was the first to plead for the vague body. "Why, I suppose in order that you should have exactly this pleasure, father."
"Oh, pleasures not desired are like acquaintances not sought—they rather bore one!" Lord Theign sighed. With which he moved away from her.
Her eyes followed him an instant—then she smiled at their guest. "Is he bored at having the higher prize—if you're sure it is the higher?"
"Mr. Crimble is sure—because if he isn't," Lord John added, "he's a wretch."
"Well," she returned, "as he's certainly not a wretch it must be true. And fancy," she exclaimed further, though as more particularly for herself, "our having suddenly incurred this immense debt to him!"
"Oh, I shall pay Mr. Crimble!" said her father, who had turned round.
The whole question appeared to have provoked in Lord John a rise of spirits and a flush of humour. "Don't you let him stick it on."
His host, however, bethinking himself, checked him. "Go you to Mr. Bender straight!"
Lord John saw the point. "Yes—till he leaves. But I shall find you here, shan't I?" he asked with all earnestness of Lady Grace.
She had an hesitation, but after a look at her father she assented. "I'll wait for you."
"Then à tantôt!" It made him show for happy as, waving his hand at her, he proceeded to seek Mr. Bender in presence of the object that most excited that gentleman's appetite—to say nothing of the effect involved on Lord John's own.
IX
Lord Theign, when he had gone, revolved—it might have been nervously—about the place a little, but soon broke ground. "He'll have told you, I understand, that I've promised to speak to you for him. But I understand also that he has found something to say for himself."
"Yes, we talked—a while since," the girl said. "At least he did."
"Then if you listened I hope you listened with a good grace."
"Oh, he speaks very well—and I've never disliked him."
It pulled her father up. "Is that all—when I think so much of him?"
She seemed to say that she had, to her own mind, been liberal and gone far; but she waited a little. "Do you think very, very much?"
"Surely I've made my good opinion clear to you!"
Again she had a pause. "Oh yes, I've seen you like him and believe in him—and I've found him pleasant and clever."
"He has never had," Lord Theign more or less ingeniously explained, "what I call a real show." But the character under discussion could after all be summed up without searching analysis. "I consider nevertheless that there's plenty in him."
It was a moderate claim, to which Lady Grace might assent. "He strikes me as naturally quick and—well, nice. But I agree with you than he hasn't had a chance."
"Then if you can see your way by sympathy and confidence to help him to one I dare say you'll find your reward."
For a third time she considered, as if a certain curtness in her companion's manner rather hindered, in such a question, than helped. Didn't he simplify too much, you would have felt her ask, and wasn't his visible wish for brevity of debate a sign of his uncomfortable and indeed rather irritated sense of his not making a figure in it? "Do you desire it very particularly?" was, however, all she at last brought out.
"I should like it exceedingly—if you act from conviction. Then of course only; but of one thing I'm myself convinced—of what he thinks of yourself and feels for you."
"Then would you mind my waiting a little?" she asked. "I mean to be absolutely sure of myself." After which, on his delaying to agree, she added frankly, as to help her case: "Upon my word, father, I should like to do what would please you."
But it determined in him a sharper impatience. "Ah, what would please me! Don't put it off on 'me'! Judge absolutely for yourself"—he slightly took himself up—"in the light of my having consented to do for him what I always hate to do: deviate from my normal practice of never intermeddling. If I've deviated now you can judge. But to do so all round, of course, take—in reason!—your time."
"May I ask then," she said, "for still a little more?"
He looked for this, verily, as if it was not in reason. "You know," he then returned, "what he'll feel that a sign of."
"Well, I'll tell him what I mean."
"Then I'll send him to you."
He glanced at his watch and was going, but after a "Thanks, father," she had stopped him. "There's one thing more." An embarrassment showed in her manner, but at the cost of some effect of earnest abruptness she surmounted it. "What does your American—Mr. Bender—want?"
Lord Theign plainly felt the challenge. "'My' American? He's none of mine!"
"Well then Lord John's."
"He's none of his either—more, I mean, than any one else's. He's every one's American, literally—to all appearance; and I've not to tell you, surely, with the freedom of your own visitors, how people stalk in and out here."
"No, father—certainly," she said. "You're splendidly generous."
His eyes seemed rather sharply to ask her then how he could improve on that; but he added as if it were enough: "What the man must by this time want more than anything else is his car."
"Not then anything of ours?" she still insisted.
"Of 'ours'?" he echoed with a frown. "Are you afraid he has an eye to something of yours?"
"Why, if we've a new treasure—which we certainly have if we possess a Mantovano—haven't we all, even I, an immense interest in it?" And before he could answer, "Is that exposed?" she asked.
Lord Theign, a little unready, cast about at his storied halls; any illusion to the "exposure" of the objects they so solidly sheltered was obviously unpleasant to him. But then it was as if he found at a stroke both his own reassurance and his daughter's. "How can there be a question of it when he only wants Sir Joshuas?"
"He wants ours?" the girl gasped.
"At absolutely any price."
"But you're not," she cried, "discussing it?"
He hesitated as between chiding and contenting her—then he handsomely chose. "My dear child, for what do you take me?" With which he impatiently started, through the
long and stately perspective, for the saloon.
She sank into a chair when he had gone; she sat there some moments in a visible tension of thought, her hands clasped in her lap and her dropped eyes fixed and unperceiving; but she sprang up as Hugh Crimble, in search of her, again stood before her. He presented himself as with winged sandals.
"What luck to find you! I must take my spin back."
"You've seen everything as you wished?"
"Oh," he smiled, "I've seen wonders."
She showed her pleasure. "Yes, we've got some things."
"So Mr. Bender says!" he laughed. "You've got five or six—"
"Only five or six?" she cried in bright alarm.
"'Only'?" he continued to laugh. "Why, that's enormous, five or six things of the first importance! But I think I ought to mention to you," he added, "a most barefaced 'Rubens' there in the library."
"It isn't a Rubens?"
"No more than I'm a Ruskin."
"Then you'll brand us—expose us for it?"
"No, I'll let you off—I'll be quiet if you're good, if you go straight. I'll only hold it in terrorem. One can't be sure in these dreadful days—that's always to remember; so that if you're not good I'll come down on you with it. But to balance against that threat," he went on, "I've made the very grandest find. At least I believe I have!"
She was all there for this news. "Of the Manto-vano—hidden in the other thing?"
Hugh wondered—almost as if she had been before him. "You don't mean to say you've had the idea of that?"
"No, but my father has told me."
"And is your father," he eagerly asked, "really gratified?"
With her conscious eyes on him—her eyes could clearly be very conscious about her father—she considered a moment. "He always prefers old associations and appearances to new; but I'm sure he'll resign himself if you see your way to a certainty."
"Well, it will be a question of the weight of expert opinion that I shall invoke. But I'm not afraid," he resolutely said, "and I shall make the thing, from its splendid rarity, the crown and flower of your glory."
Her serious face shone at him with a charmed gratitude. "It's awfully beautiful then your having come to us so. It's awfully beautiful your having brought us this way, in a flash—as dropping out of a chariot of fire—more light and what you apparently feel with myself as more honour."
"Ah, the beauty's in your having yourself done it!" he returned. He gave way to the positive joy of it. "If I've brought the 'light' and the rest—that's to say the very useful information—who in the world was it brought me?"
She had a gesture of protest "You'd have come in some other way."
"I'm not so sure! I'm beastly shy—little as I may seem to show it: save in great causes, when I'm horridly bold and hideously offensive. Now at any rate I only know what has been." She turned off for it, moving away from him as with a sense of mingled things that made for unrest; and he had the next moment grown graver under the impression. "But does anything in it all," he asked, "trouble you?"
She faced about across the wider space, and there was a different note in what she brought out. "I don't know what forces me so to tell you things."
"'Tell' me?" he stared. "Why, you've told me nothing more monstrous than that I've been welcome!"
"Well, however that may be, what did you mean just now by the chance of our not 'going straight'? When you said you'd expose our bad—or is it our false?—Rubens in the event of a certain danger."
"Oh, in the event of your ever being bribed"—he laughed again as with relief. And then as her face seemed to challenge the word: "Why, to let anything—of your best!—ever leave Dedborough. By which I mean really of course leave the country." She turned again on this, and something in her air made him wonder. "I hope you don't feel there is such a danger? I understood from you half an hour ago that it was unthinkable."
"Well, it was, to me, half an hour ago," she said as she came nearer. "But if it has since come up?"
"'If' it has! But has it? In the form of that monster? What Mr. Bender wants is the great Duchess," he recalled.
"And my father won't sell her? No, he won't sell the great Duchess—there I feel safe. But he greatly needs a certain sum of money—or he thinks he does—and I've just had a talk with him."
"In which he has told you that?"
"He has told me nothing," Lady Grace said—"or else told me quite other things. But the more I think of them the more it comes to me that he feels urged or tempted—"
"To despoil and denude these walls?" Hugh broke in, looking about in his sharper apprehension.
"Yes, to satisfy, to save my sister. Now do you think our state so ideal?" she asked—but without elation for her hint of triumph.
He had no answer for this save "Ah, but you terribly interest me. May I ask what's the matter with your sister?"
Oh, she wanted to go on straight now! "The matter is—in the first place—that she's too dazzlingly, dreadfully beautiful."
"More beautiful than you?" his sincerity easily risked.
"Millions of times." Sad, almost sombre, she hadn't a shade of coquetry. "Kitty has debts—great heaped-up gaming debts."
"But to such amounts?"
"Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws herself all on our father."
"And he has to pay them? There's no one else?" Hugh asked.
She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently didn't, "He's only afraid there may be some else—that's how she makes him do it," she said. And "Now do you think," she pursued, "that I don't tell you things?"
He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she told him. "Oh, oh, oh!" And then, in the great place, while as, just spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he took them all in. "That's the situation that, as you say, may force his hand."
"It absolutely, I feel, does force it." And the renewal of her appeal brought her round. "Isn't it too lovely?"
His frank disgust answered. "It's too damnable!"
"And it's you," she quite terribly smiled, "who—by the 'irony of fate'!—have given him help."
He smote his head in the light of it. "By the Mantovano?"
"By the possible Mantovano—as a substitute for the impossible Sir Joshua. You've made him aware of a value."
"Ah, but the value's to be fixed!"
"Then Mr. Bender will fix it!"
"Oh, but—as he himself would say—I'll fix Mr. Bender!" Hugh declared. "And he won't buy a pig in a poke."
This cleared the air while they looked at each other; yet she had already asked: "What in the world can you do, and how in the world can you do it?"
Well, he was too excited for decision. "I don't quite see now, but give me time." And he took out his watch as already to measure it. "Oughtn't I before I go to say a word to Lord Theign?"
"Is it your idea to become a lion in his path?"
"Well, say a cub—as that's what I'm afraid he'll call me! But I think I should speak to him."
She drew a conclusion momentarily dark. "He'll have to learn in that case that I've told you of my fear."
"And is there any good reason why he shouldn't?"
She kept her eyes on him and the darkness seemed to clear. "No!" she at last replied, and, having gone to touch an electric bell, was with him again. "But I think I'm rather sorry for you."
"Does that represent a reason why I should be so for you?"
For a little she said nothing; but after that: "None whatever!"
"Then is the sister of whom you speak Lady Imber?"
Lady Grace, at this, raised her hand in caution: the butler had arrived, with due gravity, in answer to her ring; to whom she made known her desire. "Please say to his lordship—in the saloon or wherever—that Mr. Crimble must go." When Banks had departed, however, accepting the responsibility of this mission, she answered her friend's question. "The sister of whom I speak is Lady Imber."
&
nbsp; "She loses then so heavily at bridge?"
"She loses more than she wins."
Hugh gazed as with interest at these oddities of the great. "And yet she still plays?"
"What else, in her set, should she do?"
This he was quite unable to say; but he could after a moment's exhibition of the extent to which he was out of it put a question instead. "So you're not in her set?"
"I'm not in her set."
"Then decidedly," he said, "I don't want to save her. I only want—"
He was going on, but she broke in: "I know what you want!"
He kept his eyes on her till he had made sure—and this deep exchange between them had a beauty. "So you're now with me?"
"I'm now with you!"
"Then," said Hugh, "shake hands on it"
He offered her his hand, she took it, and their grasp became, as you would have seen in their fine young faces, a pledge in which they stood a minute locked. Lord Theign came upon them from the saloon in the midst of the process; on which they separated as with an air of its having consisted but of Hugh's leave-taking. With some such form of mere civility, at any rate, he appeared, by the manner in which he addressed himself to Hugh, to have supposed them occupied.
"I'm sorry my daughter can't keep you; but I must at least thank you for your interesting view of my picture."
Hugh indulged in a brief and mute, though very grave, acknowledgment of this expression; presently speaking, however, as on a resolve taken with a sense of possibly awkward consequences: "May I—before you're sure of your indebtedness—put you rather a straight question, Lord Theign?" It sounded doubtless, and of a sudden, a little portentous—as was in fact testified to by his lordship's quick stiff stare, full of wonder at so free a note. But Hugh had the courage of his undertaking. "If I contribute in ny modest degree to establishing the true authorship of the work you speak of, may I have from you an assurance that my success isn't to serve as a basis for any peril—or possibility—of its leaving the country?"
Lord Theign was visibly astonished, but had also, independently of this, turned a shade pale. "You ask of me an 'assurance'?"
Hugh had now, with his firmness and his strained smile, quite the look of having counted the cost of his step. "I'm afraid I must, you see."