by Henry James
“Yes, but alas not near her!”
“Once then at a private view?—when, with the squash they usually are, you might have been very near her indeed!”
The young man, his hilarity quickened, took but a moment for the truth. “Yes—it was a squash!”
“And once,” his hostess pursued, “in the lobby of the opera?”
“After ‘Tristan’—yes; but with some awful grand people I didn’t know.”
She recognised; she estimated the grandeur. “Oh, the Pennimans are nobody! But now,” she asked, “you’ve come, you say, on ‘business’?”
“Very important, please—which accounts for the hour I’ve ventured and the appearance I present.”
“I don’t ask you too much to ‘account,’” Lady Sandgate kindly said; “but I can’t not wonder if she hasn’t told you what things have happened.”
He cast about. “She has had no chance to tell me anything—beyond the fact of her being here.”
“Without the reason?”
“‘The reason’?” he echoed.
She gave it up, going straighter. “She’s with me then as an old firm friend. Under my care and protection.”
“I see”—he took it, with more penetration than enthusiasm, as a hint in respect to himself. “She puts you on your guard.”
Lady Sandgate expressed it more graciously. “She puts me on my honour—or at least her father does.”
“As to her seeing me”
“As to my seeing at least—what may happen to her.”
“Because—you say—things have happened?”
His companion fairly sounded him. “You’ve only talked—when you’ve met—of ‘art’?”
“Well,” he smiled, “‘art is long’!”
“Then I hope it may see you through! But you should know first that Lord Theign is presently due—”
“Here, back already from abroad?”—he was all alert.
“He has not yet gone—he comes up this morning to start.”
“And stops here on his way?”
“To take the train de luxe this afternoon to his annual Salsomaggiore. But with so little time to spare,” she went on reassuringly, “that, to simplify—as he wired me an hour ago from Dedborough—he has given rendezvous here to Mr. Bender, who is particularly to wait for him.”
“And who may therefore arrive at any moment?”
She looked at her bracelet watch. “Scarcely before noon. So you’ll just have your chance—”
“Thank the powers then!”—Hugh grasped at it. “I shall have it best if you’ll be so good as to tell me first—well,” he faltered, “what it is that, to my great disquiet, you’ve further alluded to; what it is that has occurred.”
Lady Sandgate took her time, but her good-nature and other sentiments pronounced. “Haven’t you at least guessed that she has fallen under her father’s extreme reprobation?”
“Yes, so much as that—that she must have greatly annoyed him—I have been supposing. But isn’t it by her having asked me to act for her? I mean about the Mantovano—which I have done.”
Lady Sandgate wondered. “You’ve ‘acted’?”
“It’s what I’ve come to tell her at last—and I’m all impatience.”
“I see, I see”—she had caught a clue. “He hated that—yes; but you haven’t really made out,” she put to him, “the other effect of your hour at Dedborough?” She recognised, however, while she spoke, that his divination had failed, and she didn’t trouble him to confess it. “Directly you had gone she ‘turned down’ Lord John. Declined, I mean, the offer of his hand in marriage.”
Hugh was clearly as much mystified as anything else. “He proposed there—?”
“He had spoken, that day, before—before your talk with Lord Theign, who had every confidence in her accepting him. But you came, Mr. Crimble, you went; and when her suitor reappeared, just after you had gone, for his answer—”
“She wouldn’t have him?” Hugh asked with a precipitation of interest.
But Lady Sandgate could humour almost any curiosity. “She wouldn’t look at him.”
He bethought himself. “But had she said she would?”
“So her father indignantly considers.”
“That’s the ground of his indignation?”
“He had his reasons for counting on her, and it has determined a painful crisis.”
Hugh Crimble turned this over—feeling apparently for something he didn’t find. “I’m sorry to hear such things, but where’s the connection with me?”
“Ah, you know best yourself, and if you don’t see any–!” In that case, Lady Sandgate’s motion implied, she washed her hands of it.
Hugh had for a moment the air of a young man treated to the sweet chance to guess a conundrum—which he gave up. “I really don’t see any, Lady Sandgate. But,” he a little inconsistently said, “I’m greatly obliged to you for telling me.”
“Don’t mention it!—though I think it is good of me,” she smiled, “on so short an acquaintance.” To which she added more gravely: “I leave you the situation—but I’m willing to let you know that I’m all on Grace’s side.”
“So am I, rather!—please let me frankly say.”
He clearly refreshed, he even almost charmed her. “It’s the very least you can say!—though I’m not sure whether you say it as the simplest or as the very subtlest of men. But in case you don’t know as I do how little the particular candidate I’ve named–-“
“Had a right or a claim to succeed with her?” he broke in—all quick intelligence here at least. “No, I don’t perhaps know as well as you do—but I think I know as well as I just yet require.”
“There you are then! And if you did prevent,” his hostess maturely pursued, “what wouldn’t have been—well, good or nice, I’m quite on your side too.”
Our young man seemed to feel the shade of ambiguity, but he reached at a meaning. “You’re with me in my plea for our defending at any cost of effort or ingenuity—”
“The precious picture Lord Theign exposes?”—she took his presumed sense faster than he had taken hers. But she hung fire a moment with her reply to it. “Well, will you keep the secret of everything I’ve said or say?”
“To the death, to the stake, Lady Sandgate!”
“Then,” she momentously returned, “I only want, too, to make Bender impossible. If you ask me,” she pursued, “how I arrange that with my deep loyalty to Lord Theign–-“
“I don’t ask you anything of the sort,” he interrupted—”I wouldn’t ask you for the world; and my own bright plan for achieving the coup you mention––”
“You’ll have time, at the most,” she said, consulting afresh her bracelet watch, “to explain to Lady Grace.” She reached an electric bell, which she touched—facing then her visitor again with an abrupt and slightly embarrassed change of tone. “You do think my great portrait splendid?”
He had strayed far from it and all too languidly came back. “Your Lawrence there? As I said, magnificent.”
But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of whom she made her request. “Let her ladyship know—Mr. Crimble.”
Gotch looked hard at Hugh and the crumpled hat—almost as if having an option. But he resigned himself to repeating, with a distinctness that scarce fell short of the invidious, “Mr. Crimble,” and departed on his errand.
Lady Sandgate’s fair flush of diplomacy had meanwhile not faded. “Couldn’t you, with your immense cleverness and power, get the Government to do something?”
“About your picture?” Hugh betrayed on this head a graceless detachment. “You too then want to sell?”
Oh she righted herself. “Never to a private party!”
“Mr. Bender’s not after it?” he asked—though scarce lighting his reluctant interest with a forced smile.
“Most intensely after it. But never,” cried the proprietress, “to a bloated alien!”
“Then I applaud your pat
riotism. Only why not,” he asked, “carrying that magnanimity a little further, set us all an example as splendid as the object itself?”
“Give it you for nothing?” She threw up shocked hands. “Because I’m an aged female pauper and can’t make every sacrifice.”
Hugh pretended—none too convincingly—to think. “Will you let them have it very cheap?”
“Yes—for less than such a bribe as Bender’s.”
“Ah,” he said expressively, “that might be, and still–-!”
“Well,” she had a flare of fond confidence. “I’ll find out what he’ll offer—if you’ll on your side do what you can—and then ask them a third less.” And she followed it up—as if suddenly conceiving him a prig. “See here, Mr. Crimble, I’ve been—and this very first time I—charming to you.”
“You have indeed,” he returned; “but you throw back on it a lurid light if it has all been for that!”
“It has been—well, to keep things as I want them; and if I’ve given you precious information mightn’t you on your side—”
“Estimate its value in cash?”—Hugh sharply took her up. “Ah, Lady Sandgate, I am in your debt, but if you really bargain for your precious information I’d rather we assume that I haven’t enjoyed it.”
She made him, however, in reply, a sign for silence; she had heard Lady Grace enter the other room from the back landing, and, reaching the nearer door, she disposed of the question with high gay bravery. “I won’t bargain with the Treasury!”—she had passed out by the time Lady Grace arrived.
II
As Hugh recognised in this friend’s entrance and face the light of welcome he went, full of his subject, straight to their main affair. “I haven’t been able to wait, I’ve wanted so much to tell you—I mean how I’ve just come back from Brussels, where I saw Pappen-dick, who was free and ready, by the happiest chance, to start for Verona, which he must have reached some time yesterday.”
The girl’s responsive interest fairly broke into rapture. “Ah, the dear sweet thing!”
“Yes, he’s a brick—but the question now hangs in the balance. Allowing him time to have got into relation with the picture, I’ve begun to expect his wire, which will probably come to my club; but my fidget, while I wait, has driven me”—he threw out and dropped his arms in expression of his soft surrender—”well, just to do this: to come to you here, in my fever, at an unnatural hour and uninvited, and at least let you know I’ve ‘acted.’”
“Oh, but I simply rejoice,” Lady Grace declared, “to be acting with you.”
“Then if you are, if you are,” the young man cried, “why everything’s beautiful and right!”
“It’s all I care for and think of now,” she went on in her bright devotion, “and I’ve only wondered and hoped!”
Well, Hugh found for it all a rapid, abundant lucidity. “He was away from home at first, and I had to wait—but I crossed last week, found him and settled incoming home by Paris, where I had a grand four days’ jaw with the fellows there and saw their great specimen of our master: all of which has given him time.”
“And now his time’s up?” the girl eagerly asked.
“It must be—and we shall see.” But Hugh postponed that question to a matter of more moment still. “The thing is that at last I’m able to tell you how I feel the trouble I’ve brought you.”
It made her, quickly colouring, rest grave eyes on him. “What do you know—when I haven’t told you—about my ‘trouble’?”
“Can’t I have guessed, with a ray of intelligence?”—he had his answer ready. “You’ve sought asylum with this good friend from the effects of your father’s resentment.”
“‘Sought asylum’ is perhaps excessive,” Lady Grace returned—”though it wasn’t pleasant with him after that hour, no,” she allowed. “And I couldn’t go, you see, to Kitty.”
“No indeed, you couldn’t go to Kitty.” He smiled at her hard as he added: “I should have liked to see you go to Kitty! Therefore exactly is it that I’ve set you adrift—that I’ve darkened and poisoned your days. You’re paying with your comfort, with your peace, for having joined so gallantly in my grand remonstrance.”
She shook her head, turning from him, but then turned back again—as if accepting, as if even relieved by, this version of the prime cause of her state. “Why do you talk of it as ‘paying’—if it’s all to come back to my being paid? I mean by your blest success—if you really do what you want.”
“I have your word for it,” he searchingly said, “that our really pulling it off together will make up to you–-?”
“I should be ashamed if it didn’t, for everything!”—she took the question from his mouth. “I believe in such a cause exactly as you do—and found a lesson, at Dedborough, in your frankness and your faith.”
“Then you’ll help me no end,” he said all simply and sincerely.
“You’ve helped me already”—that she gave him straight back. And on it they stayed a moment, their strenuous faces more intensely communing.
“You’re very wonderful—for a girl!” Hugh brought out.
“One has to be a girl, naturally, to be a daughter of one’s house,” she laughed; “and that’s all I am of ours—but a true and a right and a straight one.”
He glowed with his admiration. “You’re splendid!”
That might be or not, her light shrug intimated; she gave it, at any rate, the go-by and more exactly stated her case. “I see our situation.”
“So do I, Lady Grace!” he cried with the strongest emphasis. “And your father only doesn’t.”
“Yes,” she said for intelligent correction—”he sees it, there’s nothing in life he sees so much. But unfortunately he sees it all wrong.”
Hugh seized her point of view as if there had been nothing of her that he wouldn’t have seized. “He sees it all wrong then! My appeal the other day he took as a rude protest. And any protest–-“
“Any protest,” she quickly and fully agreed, “he takes as an offence, yes. It’s his theory that he still has rights,” she smiled, “though he is a miserable peer.”
“How should he not have rights,” said Hugh, “when he has really everything on earth?”
“Ah, he doesn’t even know that—he takes it so much for granted.” And she sought, though as rather sadly and despairingly, to explain. “He lives all in his own world.”
“He lives all in his own, yes; but he does business all in ours—quite as much as the people who come up to the city in the Tube.” With which Hugh had a still sharper recall of the stiff actual. “And he must be here to do business to-day.”
“You know,” Lady Grace asked, “that he’s to meet Mr. Bender?”
“Lady Sandgate kindly warned me, and,” her companion saw as he glanced at the clock on the chimney, “I’ve only ten minutes, at best. The ‘Journal’ won’t have been good for him,” he added—”you doubtless have seen the ‘Journal’?”
“No”—she was vague. “We live by the ‘Morning Post.’”
“That’s why our friend here didn’t speak then,” Hugh said with a better light—”which, out of a dim consideration for her, I didn’t do, either. But they’ve a leader this morning about Lady Lappington and her Longhi, and on Bender and his hauls, and on the certainty—if we don’t do something energetic—of more and more Benders to come: such a conquering horde as invaded the old civilisation, only armed now with huge cheque-books instead of with spears and battle-axes. They refer to the rumour current—as too horrific to believe—of Lord Theign’s putting up his Moretto; with the question of how properly to qualify any such sad purpose in him should the further report prove true of a new and momentous opinion about the picture entertained by several eminent authorities.”
“Of whom,” said the girl, intensely attached to this recital, “you’re of course seen as not the least.”
“Of whom, of course, Lady Grace, I’m as yet—however I’m ‘seen’—the whole collection. But we’ve time
”—he rested on that “The fat, if you’ll allow me the expression, is on the fire—which, as I see the matter, is where this particular fat should be.”
“Is the article, then,” his companion appealed, “very severe?”
“I prefer to call it very enlightened and very intelligent—and the great thing is that it immensely ‘marks,’ as they say. It will have made a big public difference—from this day; though it’s of course aimed not so much at persons as at conditions; which it calls upon us all somehow to tackle.”