The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  Well, she was too earnest—as she clearly wished to let him see—to mind his perversion of it. “I express to you the way we feel.”

  “It’s most striking to hear, certainly, what you express”—he had positively to laugh for it; “and you speak of him, with your insufferable ‘we,’ as if you were presenting him as your—God knows what! You’ve enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity.” And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and rebutted nothing: “You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!”

  “Yes, we’re fellow-critics, father”—she accepted this opening. “I perfectly adopt your term.” But it took her a minute to go further. “I saw Mr. Crim-ble here half an hour ago.”

  “Saw him ‘here’?” Lord Theign amazedly asked. “He comes to you here—and Amy Sandgate has been silent?”

  “It wasn’t her business to tell you—since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect,” Lady Grace then produced, “that he’ll come again.”

  It brought down with a bang all her father’s authority. “Then I simply exact of you that you don’t see him.”

  The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a brimming cup. “Is that what you really meant by your condition just now—that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?”

  “What I ‘really meant’ is what I really mean—that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether.”

  “Have nothing to do with him at all?”

  “Have nothing to do with him at all.”

  “In fact”—she took it in—”give him wholly up.”

  He had an impatient gesture. “You sound as if I asked you to give up a fortune!” And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation—verily as if it had been in the balance for her—he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. “You’re so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is like that sort of thing?”

  Lady Grace took her time—but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him, what had gathered. “I like Mr. Crimble exceedingly, father—I think him clever, intelligent, good; I want what he wants—I want it, I think, really, as much; and I don’t at all deny that he has helped to make me so want it. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll wholly cease to see him, I’ll give him up forever, if—if—!” She faltered, however, she hung fire with a smile that anxiously, intensely appealed. Then she began and stopped again, “If—if—!” while her father caught her up with irritation.

  “‘If,’ my lady? If what, please?”

  “If you’ll withdraw the offer of our picture to Mr. Bender—and never make another to any one else!”

  He stood staring as at the size of it—then translated it into his own terms. “If I’ll obligingly announce to the world that I’ve made an ass of myself you’ll kindly forbear from your united effort—the charming pair of you—to show me up for one?”

  Lady Grace, as if consciously not caring or attempting to answer this, simply gave the first flare of his criticism time to drop. It wasn’t till a minute passed that she said: “You don’t agree to my compromise?”

  Ah, the question but fatally sharpened at a stroke the stiffness of his spirit. “Good God, I’m to ‘compromise’ on top of everything?—I’m to let you browbeat me, haggle and bargain with me, over a thing that I’m entitled to settle with you as things have ever been settled among us, by uttering to you my last parental word?”

  “You don’t care enough then for what you name?”—she took it up as scarce heeding now what he said.

  “For putting an end to your odious commerce—? I give you the measure, on the contrary,” said Lord Theign, “of how much I care: as you give me, very strangely indeed, it strikes me, that of what it costs you—!” But his other words were lost in the hard long look at her from which he broke off in turn as for disgust.

  It was with an effect of decently shielding herself—the unuttered meaning came so straight—that she substituted words of her own. “Of what it costs me to redeem the picture?”

  “To lose your tenth-rate friend”—he spoke without scruple now.

  She instantly broke into ardent deprecation, pleading at once and warning. “Father, father, oh—! You hold the thing in your hands.”

  He pulled up before her again as to thrust the responsibility straight back. “My orders then are so much rubbish to you?”

  Lady Grace held her ground, and they remained face to face in opposition and accusation, neither making the other the sign of peace. But the girl at least had, in her way, held out the olive-branch, while Lord Theign had but reaffirmed his will. It was for her acceptance of this that he searched her, her last word not having yet come. Before it had done so, however, the door from the lobby opened and Mr. Gotch had regained their presence. This appeared to determine in Lady Grace a view of the importance of delay, which she signified to her companion in a “Well—I must think!” For the butler positively resounded, and Hugh was there.

  “Mr. Crimble!” Mr. Gotch proclaimed—with the further extravagance of projecting the visitor straight upon his lordship.

  VII

  Our young man showed another face than the face his friend had lately seen him carry off, and he now turned it distressfully from that source of inspiration to Lord Theign, who was flagrantly, even from this first moment, no such source at all, and then from his noble adversary back again, under pressure of difficulty and effort, to Lady Grace, whom he directly addressed. “Here I am again, you see—and I’ve got my news, worse luck!” But his manner to her father was the next instant more brisk. “I learned you were here, my lord; but as the case is important I told them it was all right and came up. I’ve been to my club,” he added for the girl, “and found the tiresome thing—!” But he broke down breathless.

  “And it isn’t good?” she cried with the highest concern.

  Ruefully, yet not abjectly, he confessed, “Not so good as I hoped. For I assure you, my lord, I counted—”

  “It’s the report from Pappendick about the picture at Verona,” Lady Grace interruptingly explained.

  Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarrassment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in his thought, for a more awkward force than any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. “The man I told you about also,” he said to his formidable patron; “whom I went to Brussels to talk with and who, most kindly, has gone for us to Verona. He has been able to get straight at their Mantovano, but the brute horribly wires me that he doesn’t quite see the thing; see, I mean”—and he gathered his two hearers together now in his overflow of chagrin, conscious, with his break of the ice, more exclusively of that—”my vivid vital point, the absolute screaming identity of the two persons represented. I still hold,” he persuasively went on, “that our man is their man, but Pappendick decides that he isn’t—and as Pappendick has so much to be reckoned with of course I’m awfully abashed.”

  Lord Theign had remained what he had begun by being, immeasurably and inaccessibly detached—only with his curiosity more moved than he could help and as, on second thought, to see what sort of a still more offensive fool the heated youth would really make of himself. “Yes—you seem indeed remarkably abashed!”

  Hugh clearly was thrown again, by the cold “cut” of this, colder than any mere social ignoring, upon a sense of the damnably poor figure he did offer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek tingle. “I backed my own judgment strongly, I know—and I’ve got my snub. But I don’t in the least knock under.”

  “Only the first authority in Europe doesn’t care, I suppose, whether you do or not!”

  “He isn’t the first authority in Europe, thank God,” the young man returned—”though he is, I admit, one
of the three or four first. And I mean to appeal—I’ve another shot in my locker,” he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. “I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi.”

  “Bardi of Milan?”—she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father’s presence.

  It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. “You know of him?—how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel,” he quickly explained, “he must have most the instinct—and it has come over me since that he’d have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture.”

  She had fairly hung on his lips. “But does he know ours?”

  “No—not ours yet. That is”—he consciously and quickly took himself up—”not yours! But as Pap-pendick went to Verona for us I’ve asked Bardi to do us the great favour to come here—if Lord Theign will be so good,” he said, bethinking himself with a turn, “as to let him examine the Moretto.” He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly “elected,” as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. “It’s not at all impossible—for such curious effects have been!—that the Dedborough picture seen after the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough.”

  “And so awfully long after—wasn’t it?” Lady Grace asked.

  “Awfully long after—it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible.”

  “Oh of course we don’t see every one!“—she heroically kept it up.

  “You don’t see every one,” Hugh bravely laughed, “and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi,” he pursued, “to go again to Verona–-“

  “The last thing before coming here?”—she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. “How happy they should like so to work for you!”

  “Ah, we’re a band of brothers,” he returned—“‘we few, we happy few’—from country to country”; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: “though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping interest of it all; since,” he developed and explained, for his elder friend’s benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, “when we’re really ‘hit’ over a case we’ll do almost anything in life.”

  Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. “It must be so lovely to feel so hit!”

  “It does spoil one,” Hugh laughed, “for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance—putting it at the merest chance—of Bardi’s own wet blanket! But that’s again so very small—though,” he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, “you’ll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick’s veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you’ll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!” he sublimely insisted.

  “How can we prevent your using it?” Lady Grace again interrupted; “or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst—”

  “The thing”—he at once pursued—”will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah,” he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, “the worst sha’n’t come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express”—and he faced Lord Theign again—”for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!”

  Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene—so that it was of this full view his participation had effectively consisted, “I haven’t the least idea, sir, what you’re talking about!” And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had passed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.

  There ensued upon his words and movement a vivid mute passage, the richest of commentaries, between his companions; who, deeply divided by the width of the ample room, followed him with their eyes and then used for their own interchange these organs of remark, eloquent now over Hugh’s unmistakable dismissal at short order, on which obviously he must at once act. Lady Grace’s young arms conveyed to him by a despairing contrite motion of surrender that she had done for him all she could do in his presence and that, however sharply doubtful the result, he was to leave the rest to herself. They communicated thus, the strenuous pair, for their full moment, without speaking; only with the prolonged, the charged give and take of their gaze and, it might well have been imagined, of their passion. Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation—of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance. It was the girl’s raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter on the spot from which she had not moved. It presently ended in his lordship’s turn about as if inferring by the silence that the intruder had withdrawn.

  “Is that young man your lover?” he said as he drew again near.

  Lady Grace waited a little, but spoke as quietly as if she had been prepared. “Has the question a bearing on the promise you a short time ago demanded of me?”

  “It has a bearing on the so extraordinary appearance of your intimacy with him!”

  “You mean that if he should be—what you ask me about—your exaction would then be modified?”

  “My request that you break it short off? That request would, on the contrary,” Lord Theign pronounced, “rest on an immense new ground. Therefore I insist on your telling me the truth.”

  “Won’t the truth be before you, father, if you’ll think a moment—without extravagance?” After which, while, as stiffly as ever—and it probably seemed to her impatience as stupidly—he didn’t rise to it, she went on: “If I offered you not again to see him, does that make for you the appearance—?”

  “If you offered it, you mean, on your condition—my promising not to sell? I promised,” said Lord Theign, “absolutely nothing at all!”

  She took him up with all expression. “So I promised as little! But that I should have been able to say what I did sufficiently meets your curiosity.”

  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 fortunat
e 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.”