by Henry James
She could but explain her predicament. “I was taking Mr. Crimble to see the pictures.” And then more pointedly, as her manner had been virtually an introduction of that gentleman, an introduction which Lord John’s mere noncommittal stare was as little as possible a response to: “Mr. Crimble’s one of the quite new connoisseurs.”
“Oh, I’m at the very lowest round of the ladder. But I aspire!” Hugh laughed.
“You’ll mount!” said Lady Grace with friendly confidence.
He took it again with gay deprecation. “Ah, if by that time there’s anything left here to mount on!”
“Let us hope there will be at least what Mr. Bender, poor man, won’t have been able to carry off.” To which Lady Grace added, as to strike a helpful spark from the personage who had just joined them, but who had the air of wishing to preserve his detachment: “It’s to Lord John that we owe Mr. Bender’s acquaintance.”
Hugh looked at the gentleman to whom they were so indebted. “Then do you happen to know, sir, what your friend means to do with his spoil?”
The question got itself but dryly treated, as if it might be a commercially calculating or interested one. “Oh, not sell it again.”
“Then ship it to New York?” the inquirer pursued, defining himself somehow as not snubbed and, from this point, not snubbable.
That appearance failed none the less to deprive Lord John of a betrayed relish for being able to displease Lady Grace’s odd guest by large assent. “As fast as ever he can—and you can land things there now, can’t you? in three or four days.”
“I dare say. But can’t he be induced to have a little mercy?” Hugh sturdily pursued.
Lord John pushed out his lips. “A ‘little’? How much do you want?”
“Well, one wants to be able somehow to stay his hand.”
“I doubt if you can any more stay Mr. Bender’s hand than you can empty his purse.”
“Ah, the Despoilers!” said Crimble with strong expression. “But it’s we,” he added, “who are base.”
“‘Base’?”—and Lord John’s surprise was apparently genuine.
“To want only to ‘do business,’ I mean, with our treasures, with our glories.”
Hugh’s words exhaled such a sense of peril as to draw at once Lady Grace. “Ah, but if we’re above that here, as you know––!”
He stood smilingly corrected and contrite. “Of course I know—but you must forgive me if I have it on the brain. And show me first of all, won’t you? the Moretto of Brescia.”
“You know then about the Moretto of Brescia?”
“Why, didn’t you tell me yourself?” It went on between them for the moment quite as if there had been no Lord John.
“Probably, yes,” she recalled; “so how I must have swaggered!” After which she turned to the other visitor with a kindness strained clear of urgency. “Will you also come?”
He confessed to a difficulty—which his whole face begged her also to take account of. “I hoped you’d be at leisure—for something I’ve so at heart!”
This had its effect; she took a rapid decision and turned persuasively to Crimble—for whom, in like manner, there must have been something in her face. “Let Mr. Bender himself then show you. And there are things in the library too.”
“Oh yes, there are things in the library.” Lord John, happy in his gained advantage and addressing Hugh from the strong ground of an initiation already complete, quite sped him on the way.
Hugh clearly made no attempt to veil the penetration with which he was moved to look from one of these counsellors to the other, though with a ready “Thank-you!” for Lady Grace he the next instant started in pursuit of Mr. Bender.
V
“Your friend seems remarkably hot!” Lord John remarked to his young hostess as soon as they had been left together.
“He has cycled twenty miles. And indeed,” she smiled, “he does appear to care for what he cares for!”
Her companion then, during a moment’s silence, might have been noting the emphasis of her assent. “Have you known him long?”
“No—not long.”
“Nor seen him often?”
“Only once—till now.”
“Oh!” said Lord John with another pause. But he soon proceeded. “Let us leave him then to cool! I haven’t cycled twenty miles, but I’ve motored forty very much in the hope of this, Lady Grace—the chance of being able to assure you that I too care very much for what I care for.” To which he added on an easier note, as to carry off a slight awkwardness while she only waited: “You certainly mustn’t let yourself—between us all—be worked to death.”
“Oh, such days as this—I” She made light enough of her burden.
“They don’t come often to me at least, Lady Grace! I hadn’t grasped in advance the scale of your fête,” he went on; “but since I’ve the great luck to find you alone—!” He paused for breath, however, before the full sequence.
She helped him out as through common kindness, but it was a trifle colourless. “Alone or in company, Lord John, I’m always very glad to see you.”
“Then that assurance helps me to wonder if you don’t perhaps gently guess what it is I want to say.” This time indeed she left him to his wonder, so that he had to support himself. “I’ve tried, all considerately—these three months—to let you see for yourself how I feel. I feel very strongly, Lady Grace; so that at last”—and his impatient sincerity took after another instant the jump—”well, I regularly worship you. You’re my absolute ideal. I think of you the whole time.”
She measured out consideration as if it had been a yard of pretty ribbon. “Are you sure you know me enough?”
“I think I know a perfect woman when I see one!” Nothing now at least could have been more prompt, and while a decent pity for such a mistake showed in her smile he followed it up. “Isn’t what you rather mean that you haven’t cared sufficiently to know me? If so, that can be little by little mended, Lady Grace.” He was in fact altogether gallant about it. “I’m aware of the limits of what I have to show or to offer, but I defy you to find a limit to my possible devotion.”
She deferred to that, but taking it in a lower key. “I believe you’d be very good to me.”
“Well, isn’t that something to start with?”—he fairly pounced on it. “I’ll do any blest thing in life you like, I’ll accept any condition you impose, if you’ll only tell me you see your way.”
“Shouldn’t I have a little more first to see yours?” she asked. “When you say you’ll do anything in life I like, isn’t there anything you yourself want strongly enough to do?”
He cast a stare about on the suggestions of the scene. “Anything that will make money, you mean?”
“Make money or make reputation—or even just make the time pass.”
“Oh, what I have to look to in the way of a career?” If that was her meaning he could show after an instant that he didn’t fear it. “Well, your father, dear delightful man, has been so good as to give me to understand that he backs me for a decent deserving creature; and I’ve noticed, as you doubtless yourself have, that when Lord Theign backs a fellow–-!”
He left the obvious moral for her to take up—which she did, but all interrogatively. “The fellow at once comes in for something awfully good?”
“I don’t in the least mind your laughing at me,” Lord John returned, “for when I put him the question of the lift he’d give me by speaking to you first he bade me simply remember the complete personal liberty in which he leaves you, and yet which doesn’t come—take my word!” said the young man sagely—”from his being at all indifferent.”
“No,” she answered—”father isn’t indifferent. But father’s ‘great’”
“Great indeed!”—her friend took it as with full comprehension. This appeared not to prevent, however, a second and more anxious thought. “Too great for you?”
“Well, he makes me feel—even as his daughter—my extreme comparative smallness
.”
It was easy, Lord John indicated, to see what she meant “He’s a grand seigneur, and a serious one—that’s what he is: the very type and model of it, down to the ground. So you can imagine,” the young man said, “what he makes me feel—most of all when he’s so awfully good-natured to me. His being as ‘great’ as you say and yet backing me—such as I am!—doesn’t that strike you as a good note for me, the best you could possibly require? For he really would like what I propose to you.”
She might have been noting, while she thought, that he had risen to ingenuity, to fineness, on the wings of his argument; under the effect of which her reply had the air of a concession. “Yes—he would like it.”
“Then he has spoken to you?” her suitor eagerly asked.
“He hasn’t needed—he has ways of letting one know.”
“Yes, yes, he has ways; all his own—like everything else he has. He’s wonderful.”
She fully agreed. “He’s wonderful.”
The tone of it appeared somehow to shorten at once for Lord John the rest of his approach to a conclusion. “So you do see your way?”
“Ah—!” she said with a quick sad shrinkage.
“I mean,” her visitor hastened to explain, “if he does put it to you as the very best idea he has for you. When he does that—as I believe him ready to do—will you really and fairly listen to him? I’m certain, honestly, that when you know me better—!” His confidence in short donned a bravery.
“I’ve been feeling this quarter of an hour,” the girl returned, “that I do know you better.”
“Then isn’t that all I want?—unless indeed I ought perhaps to ask rather if it isn’t all you do! At any rate,” said Lord John, “I may see you again here?”
She waited a moment. “You must have patience with me.”
“I am having it But after your father’s appeal.”
“Well,” she said, “that must come first.”
“Then you won’t dodge it?”
She looked at him straight “I don’t dodge, Lord John.”
He admired the manner of it “You look awfully handsome as you say so—and you see what that does to me.” As to attentuate a little the freedom of which he went on: “May I fondly hope that if Lady Imber too should wish to put in another word for me–-?”
“Will I listen to her?”—it brought Lady Grace straight down. “No, Lord John, let me tell you at once that I’ll do nothing of the sort Kitty’s quite another affair, and I never listen to her a bit more than I can help.”
Lord John appeared to feel, on this, that he mustn’t too easily, in honour, abandon a person who had presented herself to him as an ally. “Ah, you strike me as a little hard on her. Your father himself—in his looser moments!—takes pleasure in what she says.”
Our young woman’s eyes, as they rested on him after this remark, had no mercy for its extreme feebleness. “If you mean that she’s the most reckless rattle one knows, and that she never looks so beautiful as when she’s at her worst, and that, always clever for where she makes out her interest, she has learnt to ‘get round’ him till he only sees through her eyes—if you mean that I understand you perfectly. But even if you think me horrid for reflecting so on my nearest and dearest, it’s not on the side on which he has most confidence in his elder daughter that his youngest is moved to have most confidence in him.”
Lord John stared as if she had shaken some odd bright fluttering object in his face; but then recovering himself: “He hasn’t perhaps an absolutely boundless confidence—”
“In any one in the world but himself?”—she had taken him straight up. “He hasn’t indeed, and that’s what we must come to; so that even if he likes you as much as you doubtless very justly feel, it won’t be because you are right about your being nice, but because he is!”
“You mean that if I were wrong about it he would still insist that he isn’t?”
Lady Grace was indeed sure. “Absolutely—if he had begun so! He began so with Kitty—that is with allowing her everything.”
Lord John appeared struck. “Yes—and he still allows her two thousand.”
“I’m glad to hear it—she has never told me how much!” the girl undisguisedly smiled.
“Then perhaps I oughtn’t!”—he glowed with the light of contrition.
“Well, you can’t help it now,” his companion remarked with amusement.
“You mean that he ought to allow you as much?” Lord John inquired. “I’m sure you’re right, and that he will,” he continued quite as in good faith; “but I want you to understand that I don’t care in the least what it may be!”
The subject of his suit took the longest look at him she had taken yet. “You’re very good to say so!”
If this was ironic the touch fell short, thanks to his perception that they had practically just ceased to be alone. They were in presence of a third figure, who had arrived from the terrace, but whose approach to them was not so immediate as to deprive Lord John of time for another question. “Will you let him tell you, at all events, how good he thinks me?—and then let me come back and have it from you again?”
Lady Grace’s answer to this was to turn, as he drew nearer, to the person by whom they were now joined. “Lord John desires you should tell me, father, how good you think him.”
“‘Good,’ my dear?—good for what?” said Lord Theign a trifle absurdly, but looking from one of them to the other.
“I feel I must ask him to tell you.”
“Then I shall give him a chance—as I should particularly like you to go back and deal with those overwhelming children.”
“Ah, they don’t overwhelm you, father!”—the girl put it with some point.
“If you mean to say I overwhelmed them, I dare say I did,” he replied—”from my view of that vast collective gape of six hundred painfully plain and perfectly expressionless faces. But that was only for the time: I pumped advice—oh such advice!—and they held the large bucket as still as my pet pointer, when I scratch him, holds his back. The bucket, under the stream—”
“Was bound to overflow?” Lady Grace suggested.
“Well, the strong recoil of the wave of intelligence has been not unnaturally followed by the formidable break. You must really,” Lord Theign insisted, “go and deal with it.”
His daughter’s smile, for all this, was perceptibly cold. “You work people up, father, and then leave others to let them down.”
“The two things,” he promptly replied, “require different natures.” To which he simply added, as with the habit of authority, though not of harshness, “Go!”
It was absolute and she yielded; only pausing an instant to look as with a certain gathered meaning from one of the men to the other. Faintly and resignedly sighing she passed away to the terrace and disappeared.
“The nature that can let you down—I rather like it, you know!” Lord John threw off. Which, for an airy elegance in them, were perhaps just slightly rash words—his companion gave him so sharp a look as the two were left together.
VI
Face to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the impression his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn’t want to go?” And then before Lord John could reply: “What the deuce is the matter with her?”
Lord John took his time. “I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble.”
“And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?”
“A young man who was just with her—and whom she appears to have invited.”
“Where is he then?” Lord Theign demanded.
“Off there among the pictures—which he seems partly to have come for.”
“Oh!”—it made his lordship easier. “Then he’s all right—on such a day.”
His companion could none the less just wonder. “Hadn’t Lady Grace told you?”
“That he was coming? Not that I remember.” But Lord Theign, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve had other fish to fry, and you
know the freedom I allow her.”
His friend had a vivid gesture. “My dear man, I only ask to profit by it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John’s face a light of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.
Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score—at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also—to know the time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of whom I’ve but just heard?”
“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord John’s difficulties. “I mustn’t appear to Bender to have failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn’t been perhaps,” he continued, “quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if I’m not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without abhorrence. Only I’ve led her to expect—for our case—that you’ll be so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her yourself.”