by Henry James
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 assuredly," 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 compassion 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 passed 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 passion, "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 space, 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.
BOOK THIRD
I
HUGH CRIMBLE waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room—this time at the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at things about 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 glass suspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief and perhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace—that he had sent up his name to whom was immediately apparent—presented herself at the entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon no instant exchange of words; their exchange was mute—they but paused where they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the other for full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would have appeared, 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 so many 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't speak; 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 a fortnight ago, there's something that to-day adds to my doubt and my fear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear the suspense of them as they are."
The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet declined a dread. "Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being without 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, what situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father here has let you in for; and yet at the same time—having no sign nor sound from you!—to see the importance of not making anything possibly worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I've been in the dark," he pursued, "and feeling that I must leave you there; so that now—just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any cost—I don't know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn from you."
Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture, marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. "Have you had—first of all—any news yet of Bardi?"
"That I have is what has driven me straight at you again—since I've shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped and like a regular good 'un," Hugh was able to state; "I've just met him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my extreme exasperation, to 'sample' Canterbury, and I leave him to a bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to Bond Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension, oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the flash-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 the one sitter!"
"That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden nail of authenticity, and"—he quite glowed through his gloom for it—"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 of a cloud. "That is if the flash-light comes!"
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 he adopted it only to provide: "It might if he didn't now wear goggles, so to say!—clapped on him too hard by Pappendick's so damnably perverse opinion." With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. "Ah, of course, these wretched days, you haven't known of Pappendick's personal visit. 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 full assurance, 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—and to declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, to Bender 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—or on!—anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silver light on earth; never quite gone, yet never all there—save for inappreciable moments. He would be in eclipse as a peril, I grant," Hugh went on—"if the question had struck him as really closed. But luckily the blessed Press—which is a pure heavenly joy and now quite immense on it—keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly."
"Which makes, however," Lady Grace discriminated, "for the danger of a grab."
"Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admit that 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 given moment, as against that signal, is to be found one's self by the animal in the line of its trajectory. That's exactly," he laughed, "where we are!"
She cast about as intelligently to note the place. "Your great idea, you mean, has so worked—with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to come to us here?"
"All beyond my wildest hope," Hugh returned; "since the sight of the picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully tells. That we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it tight, is the cry that fills the air—to the tune of ten letters a day in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing of more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfully wild, but all of it wind in our sails."
"I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see the thing in its new light," Lady Grace said. "But I couldn't stay—for tears!"
"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 the fellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him, cling to him, and there's talk of a 'Ladies' League of Protest'—all of which keeps up the pitch."
"Poor Amy and I are a ladies' league," the girl joylessly joked—"as we now take in the 'Journal' regardless of expense."
"Oh then you practically have it all—since," Hugh, added after a brief hesitation, "I suppose Lord Theign himself doesn't languish uninformed."
"At far-off Salsomaggiore—by the papers? No doubt indeed he isn't spared even the worst," said Lady Grace—"and no doubt too it's a drag on his cure."
Her companion seemed struck with her lack of assurance. "Then you don'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 the question as a shade evasive.
"I've asked her not to tell me," his friend replied—"that is if he simply holds out."
"So that as she doesn't tell you"—Hugh was clear for the inference—"he of course does hold out." To which he added almost accusingly while his eyes searched her: "But your case is really bad."
She confessed to it after a moment, but as if vaguely enjoying it. "My case 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, on the contrary—!" But here she checked her emphasis.
"Ah, I've so wanted, through our horrid silence, to help you!" And he pressed to get more at the truth. "You've so quite fatally displeased him?"
"To the last point—as I tell you. But it's not to that I refer," she explained; "it's to the ground of complaint I've given you." And then as this but left him blank, "It's time—it was at once time—that you should know," she pursued; "and yet if it's hard for me to speak, as you see, it was impossible for me to write. But there it is." She made her sad and beautiful effort. "The last thing before he left us I let the picture go."
"You mean—?" But he could only wonder—till, however, it glimmered upon him. "You gave up your protest?"
"I gave up my protest. I told him that—so far as I'm concerned!—he might do as he liked."
Her poor friend turned pale at the sharp little shock of it; but if his face thus showed the pang of too great a surprise he yet wreathed the convulsion 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 personal ground."
"Yes; a reason came up, a reason I hadn't to that extent looked for and which of a sudden—quickly, before he went—I had somehow to deal with. So to give him my word in the dismal sense I mention was my only way 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 stand I 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; so he made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. "Ah, that was nice of you. And natural. That's all right!"
"No"—she spoke from a deeper depth—"it's altogether wrong. For whatever happens I must now accept it."
"Well, say you must"—he really declined not to treat it almost as rather a "lark"—"if we can at least go on talking."
"Ah, we can at least go on talking!" she perversely sighed. "I can say anything 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 still pray."
He set free again with a joyous gesture all his confidence. "Well, what more 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—"is the harm done you at our last meeting by my irruption; so that if you got his consent to see me——!"
"I didn't get his consent!"—she had turned away from the searching eyes, but she faced them again to rectify: "I see you against his express command."
"Ah then thank God I came!"—it was like a bland breath on a feu de joie: he flamed so much higher.
"'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't stomach?"
"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 so different 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 came straighter and straighter now—"those moments had brought you home to me as they had also brought him; making such a difference, I felt, for what he veered round to agree to."
"The difference"—Hugh wanted it so adorably definite—"that you didn't see 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 young face, "as impossible."
He kept her eyes—he clearly liked so to make her repeat it. "And not even for the sake of the picture—?" After he had given her time, however, her silence, with her beautiful look in it, seemed to admonish him not to force her for his pleasure; as if what she had already told him didn't make him throb enough for the wonder of it. He had it, and let her see by his high flush how he made it his own—while, the next thing, as it was but part of her avowal, the rest of that illumination called for a different intelligence. "Your father's reprobation of me personally is on the ground that you're all such great people?"