The Outcry
Book I
Chapter 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.