The Outcry
Book I
Chapter IV
Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at
once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words.
"So awfully kind of you—in the midst of the great doings I noticed—to
have found a beautiful minute for me."
"I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one's relief,
I think," the girl returned, "so that your precious time shouldn't be
taken to hunt for me."
It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand
were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. "You came in from your
revels on purpose—with the same charity you showed me from that first
moment?" They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy
already confessed—and even as if finding that their relation had grown
during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had
originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly
long oval of her essentially quiet face—quiet in spite of certain vague
depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved
and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process—kept in range
from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the
directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from
the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their
mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his
indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly
inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this
contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main
physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung
and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a
suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr.
Bender—though without the appearance consequent in the latter's case,
that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other
exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so
superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently
under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out
some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of
this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed
to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with
it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another
and no less refined a speculation—the question of whether the surest
seat of his good looks mightn't after all be his high, fair, if somewhat
narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after
a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after
they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. "I
haven't forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak
occasion."
"Bleak do you call it?" she laughed. "Why I found it, rather,
tropical—'lush.' My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of
the White City."
"Then you made it doubtless bleak for him, let us say. I couldn't
let you alone, I remember, about this—it was like a shipwrecked
signal to a sail on the horizon." "This" obviously meant for the young
man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be
conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye—and much more
than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he
broke—characteristically, you would have been sure—into a great free
gaiety of recognition.
"Oh, we've nothing particular in the hall," Lady Grace amiably objected.
"Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I'm an ogre," he said—"before a
new and rare feast!"
She happily took up his figure. "Then won't you begin—as a first
course—with tea after your ride? If the other, that is—for there has
been an ogre before you—has left any."
"Some tea, with pleasure"—he looked all his longing; "though when you
talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day
as this especially, you'd find yourselves running a continuous table
d'hôte."
"Ah, we can't work sports in our gallery and saloon—the banging or
whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for;
unless, perhaps," Lady Grace went on, "your own peculiar one, as I
understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions
and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old
idiotic superstitions."
Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his
fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. "The names and stories
and styles—the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious—of author
or subject or school?" But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a
cause sometimes lost. "Ah, that's a game at which we all can play!"
"Though scarcely," Lady Grace suggested, "at which we all can score."
The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression
of the place and its charm—of the number of objects, treasures of art,
that pressed for appreciation of their importance. "Certainly," he said,
"no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of this order—which
express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their
assurance!"
"We've had great luck," she granted—"as I've just been reminded;
but ever since those terrible things you told me in town—about the
tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools'
paradise in which so many of us live—I've gone about with my heart in
my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn't be pulling us to
pieces?"
Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. "Mr. Bender?"
"The rich American who's going round."
It gave him a sharper shock. "The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington's
Longhi?"
Lady Grace showed surprise. "Is he a wretch?"
Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. "Rather—the scoundrel. He
offered his infernal eight thousand down."
"Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!"
"I wish he had—he could then have been collared."
"Well," Lady Grace peacefully smiled, "it's no use his offering us
eight thousand—or eighteen or even eighty!"
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance,
almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one
would have indecently made. "Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man
surely doesn't suppose you'd traffic."
She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the
friendly horror she produced. "I don't quite know what he supposes. But
people have trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round."
"Ah," Hugh Crimble cried, "that's what deprives me of my rest and, as
a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours.
That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of
stopping." She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent
flood might almost at any moment become copious. "Precious things are
going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very
quickest—a century and more ago—of their ever coming in."
She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom
stirred thought soon found connections and relations. "Well, I suppose
our art-wealth came in—save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!—mainly
by purchase too, didn't it? We ourselves largely took it away from
somewhere, didn't we? We didn't grow it all."
"We grew some of the loveliest flowers—and on the whole to-day the most
exposed." He had been pulled up but for an instant. "Great Gainsboroughs
and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables
and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you'll recognise, a vast garden in
themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than
your splendid 'Duchess of Waterbridge'?"
The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence
anything he would. "Yes—it's our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender
has proclaimed himself particularly 'after.'"
It brought a cloud to her friend's face. "Then he'll be capable of
anything."
"Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable—! And you
haven't at any rate," she said, "so much as seen the picture."
"I beg your pardon—I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am
almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a
livelier sense of its danger."
Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford
pity. "Poor baffled Mr. Bender!"
"Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!" Crimble cried. "Once given his
money, his confidence is a horrid engine in itself—there's the rub!
I dare say"—the young man saw it all—"he has brought his poisonous
cheque."
She gave it her less exasperated wonder. "One has heard of that, but
only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer."
"And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn't a particularly pushing
dealer?"
"No," Lady Grace judiciously returned; "I think he's not a dealer at
all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being."
He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. "A fond true lover?"
"As we all were in our lucky time—when we rum-aged Italy and Spain."
He appeared to recognise this complication—of Bender's voracious
integrity; but only to push it away. "Well, I don't know whether the
best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers—but I feel to-day that
they're the best keepers."
The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl's
dimmer fire. "It's as if it were suddenly in the air that you've brought
us some light or some help—that you may do something really good for
us."
"Do you mean 'mark down,' as they say at the shops, all your greatest
claims?"
His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and
not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest.
This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. "I dare say that
if you did even that we should have to take it from you."
"Then it may very well be," he laughed back, "the reason why I feel,
under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and
afraid."
"That shows," she returned, "that you suspect us of horrors hiding from
justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us
over!"
Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked—it all came back to his
being more charmed. "Heaven knows I've wanted a chance at you, but what
should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so
apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply
to mount my 'bike' again and spin away?"
"I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you'd turn right round
and come back. You'd think again of Mr. Bender."
"Whom I don't, however, you see—if he's prowling off there—in the
least want to meet." Crimble made the point with gaiety. "I don't
know what I mightn't do to him—and yet it's not of my temptation to
violence, after all, that I'm most afraid. It's of the brutal mistake
of one's breaking—with one's priggish, precious modernity and
one's possibly futile discriminations—into a general situation or
composition, as we say, so serene and sound and right. What should one
do here, out of respect for that felicity, but hold one's breath and
walk on tip-toe? The very celebrations and consecrations, as you tell
me, instinctively stay outside. I saw that all," the young man went on
with more weight in his ardour, "I saw it, while we talked in London,
as your natural setting and your native air—and now ten minutes on the
spot have made it sink into my spirit. You're a case, all together, of
enchanted harmony, of perfect equilibrium—there's nothing to be done or
said."
His friend listened to this eloquence with her eyes lowered, then
raising them to meet, with a vague insistence, his own; after which
something she had seen there appeared to determine in her another
motion. She indicated the small landscape that Mr. Bender had, by Lady
Sandgate's report, rapidly studied and denounced. "For what do you take
that little picture?"
Hugh Crimble went over and looked. "Why, don't you know? It's a jolly
little Vandermeer of Delft."
"It's not a base imitation?"
He looked again, but appeared at a loss. "An imitation of Vandermeer?"
"Mr. Bender thinks of Cuyp."
It made the young man ring out: "Then Mr. Bender's doubly dangerous!"
"Singly is enough!" Lady Grace laughed. "But you see you have to
speak."
"Oh, to him, rather, after that—if you'll just take me to him."
"Yes then," she said; but even while she spoke Lord John, who had
returned, by the terrace, from his quarter of an hour passed with Lady
Imber, was there practically between them; a fact that she had to notice
for her other visitor, to whom she was hastily reduced to naming him.
His lordship eagerly made the most of this tribute of her attention,
which had reached his ear; he treated it—her "Oh Lord John!"—as a
direct greeting. "Ah Lady Grace! I came back particularly to find you."
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.