The Outcry

“Ah then,” she said cheerfully, “Mr. Bender will be glad—!” And she became, with this, aware of the approach of another visitor. Banks considered, up and down, the gentleman ushered in, at the left, by the footman who had received him at the main entrance to the house. “Here he must be, my lady.” With which he retired to the spacious opposite quarter, where he vanished, while the footman, his own office performed, retreated as he had come, and Lady Sandgate, all hospitality, received the many-sided author of her specious telegram, of Lord John’s irritating confidence and of Lady Lappington’s massive cheque.

II

Having greeted him with an explicitly gracious welcome and both hands out, she had at once gone on: “You’ll of course have tea?—in the saloon.”

But his mechanism seemed of the type that has to expand and revolve before sounding. “Why; the very first thing?”

She only desired, as her laugh showed, to accommodate. “Ah, have it the last if you like!”

“You see your English teas—!” he pleaded as he looked about him, so immediately and frankly interested in the place and its contents that his friend could only have taken this for the very glance with which he must have swept Lady Lappington’s inferior scene.

“They’re too much for you?”

“Well, they’re too many. I think I’ve had two or three on the road—at any rate my man did. I like to do business before—” But his sequence dropped as his eye caught some object across the wealth of space.

She divertedly picked it up. “Before tea, Mr. Bender?”

“Before everything, Lady Sandgate.” He was immensely genial, but a queer, quaint, rough-edged distinctness somehow kept it safe—for himself.

“Then you’ve come to do business?” Her appeal and her emphasis melted as into a caress—which, however, spent itself on his large high person as he consented, with less of demonstration but more of attention, to look down upon her. She could therefore but reinforce it by an intenser note. “To tell me you will treat?”

Mr. Bender had six feet of stature and an air as of having received benefits at the hands of fortune. Substantial, powerful, easy, he shone as with a glorious cleanness, a supplied and equipped and appointed sanity and security; aids to action that might have figured a pair of very ample wings—wide pinions for the present conveniently folded, but that he would certainly on occasion agitate for great efforts and spread for great flights. These things would have made him quite an admirable, even a worshipful, image of full-blown life and character, had not the affirmation and the emphasis halted in one important particular. Fortune, felicity, nature, the perverse or interfering old fairy at his cradle-side—whatever the ministering power might have been—had simply overlooked and neglected his vast wholly-shaven face, which thus showed not so much for perfunctorily scamped as for not treated, as for neither formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled “mug” rather than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the same time add that its wearer carried this featureless disk as with the warranted confidence that might have attended a warning headlight or a glaring motor-lamp. The object, however one named it, showed you at least where he was, and most often that he was straight upon you. It was fearlessly and resistingly across the path of his advance that Lady Sandgate had thrown herself, and indeed with such success that he soon connected her demonstration with a particular motive. “For your grandmother, Lady Sandgate?” he then returned.

“For my grandmother’s mother, Mr. Bender—the most beautiful woman of her time and the greatest of all Lawrences, no matter whose; as you quite acknowledged, you know, in our talk in Bruton Street.”

Mr. Bender bethought himself further—yet drawing it out; as if the familiar fact of his being “made up to” had never had such special softness and warmth of pressure. “Do you want very, very much–?”

She had already caught him up. “‘Very, very much’ for her? Well, Mr. Bender,” she smilingly replied, “I think I should like her full value.”

“I mean”—he kindly discriminated—“do you want so badly to work her off?”

“It would be an intense convenience to me—so much so that your telegram made me at once fondly hope you’d be arriving to conclude.”

Such measure of response as he had good-naturedly given her was the mere frayed edge of a mastering detachment, the copious, impatient range elsewhere of his true attention. Somehow, however, he still seemed kind even while, turning his back upon her, he moved off to look at one of the several, the famous Dedborough pictures—stray specimens, by every presumption, lost a little in the whole bright bigness. “‘Conclude’?” he echoed as he approached a significantly small canvas. “You ladies want to get there before the road’s so much as laid or the country’s safe! Do you know what this here is?” he at once went on.

“Oh, you can’t have that!” she cried as with full authority—“and you must really understand that you can’t have everything. You mustn’t expect to ravage Dedborough.”

He had his nose meanwhile close to the picture. “I guess it’s a bogus Cuyp—but I know Lord Theign has things. He won’t do business?”

“He’s not in the least, and can never be, in my tight place,” Lady Sandgate replied; “but he’s as proud as he’s kind, dear man, and as solid as he’s proud; so that if you came down under a different impression—!” Well, she could only exhale the folly of his error with an unction that represented, whatever he might think of it, all her competence to answer for their host.

He scarce thought of it enough, on any side, however, to be diverted from prior dispositions. “I came on an understanding that I should find my friend Lord John, and that Lord Theign would, on his introduction, kindly let me look round. But being before lunch in Bruton Street I knocked at your door–”

“For another look,” she quickly interposed, “at my Lawrence?”

“For another look at you, Lady Sandgate—your great-grandmother wasn’t required. Informed you were here, and struck with the coincidence of my being myself presently due,” he went on, “I despatched you my wire, on coming away, just to keep up your spirits.”

“You don’t keep them up, you depress them to anguish,” she almost passionately protested, “when you don’t tell me you’ll treat!”

He paused in his preoccupation, his perambulation, conscious evidently of no reluctance that was worth a scene with so charming and so hungry a woman. “Well, if it’s a question of your otherwise suffering torments, may I have another interview with the old lady?”

“Dear Mr. Bender, she’s in the flower of her youth; she only yearns for interviews, and you may have,” Lady Sandgate earnestly declared, “as many as you like.”

“Oh, you must be there to protect me!”

“Then as soon as I return–!”

“Well,”—it clearly cost him little to say—“I’ll come right round.”

She joyously registered the vow. “Only meanwhile then, please, never a word!”

“Never a word, certainly. But where all this time,” Mr. Bender asked, “is Lord John?”

Lady Sandgate, as he spoke, found her eyes meeting those of a young woman who, presenting herself from without, stood framed in the doorway to the terrace; a slight fair grave young woman, of middle, stature and simply dressed, whose brow showed clear even under the heavy shade of a large hat surmounted with big black bows and feathers. Her eyes had vaguely questioned those of her elder, who at once replied to the gentleman forming the subject of their inquiry: “Lady Grace must know.” At this the young woman came forward, and Lady Sandgate introduced the visitor. “My dear Grace, this is Mr. Breckenridge Bender.”

The younger daughter of the house might have arrived in preoccupation, but she had urbanity to spare. “Of whom Lord John has told me,” she returned, “and whom I’m glad to see. Lord John,” she explained to his waiting friend, “is detained a moment in the park, open to-day to a big Temperance school-feast, where our party is mostly gathered; so that if you care to go out—!” She gave him in fine his choice.

But this was clearly a thing that, in the conditions, Mr. Bender wasn’t the man to take precipitately; though his big useful smile disguised his prudence. “Are there any pictures in the park?”

Lady Grace’s facial response represented less humour perhaps, but more play. “We find our park itself rather a picture.”

Mr. Bender’s own levity at any rate persisted. “With a big Temperance school-feast?”

“Mr. Bender’s a great judge of pictures,” Lady Sandgate said as to forestall any impression of excessive freedom.

“Will there be more tea?” he pursued, almost presuming on this.

It showed Lady Grace for comparatively candid and literal. “Oh, there’ll be plenty of tea.”

This appeared to determine Mr. Bender. “Well, Lady Grace, I’m after pictures, but I take them ‘neat.’ May I go right round here?”

“Perhaps, love,” Lady Sandgate at once said, “you’ll let me show him.”

“A moment, dear”—Lady Grace gently demurred. “Do go round,” she conformably added to Mr. Bender; “take your ease and your time. Everything’s open and visible, and, with our whole company dispersed, you’ll have the place to yourself.”

He rose, in his genial mass, to the opportunity. “I’ll be in clover—sure!” But present to him was the richest corner of the pasture, which he could fluently enough name. “And I’ll find ‘The Beautiful Duchess of Waterbridge’?”

She indicated, off to the right, where a stately perspective opened, the quarter of the saloon to which we have seen Mr. Banks retire. “At the very end of those rooms.”

He had wide eyes for the vista. “About thirty in a row, hey?” And he was already off. “I’ll work right through!”

III

Left with her friend, Lady Grace had a prompt question. “Lord John warned me he was ‘funny’—but you already know him?”

There might have been a sense of embarrassment in the way in which, as to gain time, Lady Sandgate pointed, instead of answering, to the small picture pronounced upon by Mr. Bender. “He thinks your little Cuyp a fraud.”

“That one?” Lady Grace could but stare. “The wretch!” However, she made, without alarm, no more of it; she returned to her previous question. “You’ve met him before?”

“Just a little—in town. Being ‘after pictures’” Lady Sandgate explained, “he has been after my great-grandmother.”

“She,” said Lady Grace with amusement, “must have found him funny! But he can clearly take care of himself, while Kitty takes care of Lord John, and while you, if you’ll be so good, go back to support father—in the hour of his triumph: which he wants you so much to witness that he complains of your desertion and goes so far as to speak of you as sneaking away.”

Lady Sandgate, with a slight flush, turned it over. “I delight in his triumph, and whatever I do is at least above board; but if it’s a question of support, aren’t you yourself failing him quite as much?”

This had, however, no effect on the girl’s confidence. “Ah, my dear, I’m not at all the same thing, and as I’m the person in the world he least misses—” Well, such a fact spoke for itself.

“You’ve been free to return and wait for Lord John?”—that was the sense in which the elder woman appeared to prefer to understand it as speaking.

The tone of it, none the less, led her companion immediately, though very quietly, to correct her. “I’ve not come back to wait for Lord John.”

“Then he hasn’t told you—if you’ve talked—with what idea he has come?”

Lady Grace had for a further correction the same shade of detachment. “Kitty has told me—what it suits her to pretend to suppose.”

“And Kitty’s pretensions and suppositions always go with what happens—at the moment, among all her wonderful happenings—to suit her?”

Lady Grace let that question answer itself—she took the case up further on. “What I can’t make out is why this should so suit her!”

“And what I can’t!” said Lady Sandgate without gross honesty and turning away after having watched the girl a moment. She nevertheless presently faced her again to follow this speculation up. “Do you like him enough to risk the chance of Kitty’s being for once right?”

Lady Grace gave it a thought—with which she moved away. “I don’t know how much I like him!”

“Nor how little!” cried her friend, who evidently found amusement in the tone of it. “And you’re not disposed to take the time to find out? He’s at least better than the others.”

“The ‘others’?”—Lady Grace was blank for them.

“The others of his set.”

“Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult—by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.”

It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?”

This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying—with some people we don’t know—to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.”

Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?”

“No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.”

This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then—if one’s to meet him—who he is?”

“Oh, father knows—or ought to—that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship—which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner–”

Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.”

“It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity.

“Very good—though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me this—whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?”

The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?”

“So particularly to speak to you.”

“Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.”

“And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?”

“No, only to tell me that his friend—who’s off there—was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said—that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him—I assure you quite resignedly—in her hands.”

“She wants”—it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark—“to talk of you to him.”

“I don’t know what she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with—and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.”

“Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father—in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s—I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him—if you are to listen?”

“I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace—“it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!”

“On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked.

“I dare say the Duchess is!”

“But do you see the Duchess producing money—with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”—Lady Sandgate piled them up.

Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many—it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”

“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”

“Kitty goes free.”

“She has her creditor’s release?”

“For every shilling.”

“And if he only fails?”

“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”

“Poor father indeed!”—Lady Sandgate richly sighed it

It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes—but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”

“To the point, you mean”—for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder—“of really sacrificing you?”

The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I should be sacrificed if I married him?”

Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “Could you marry him?”

Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”

“For himself even—if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”

Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”

“Yes—but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”

“No—but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”

“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”

This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only wants me—which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”

To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed—for the general immaculate connection.”

The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we haven’t had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”

“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”—Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman—a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears—to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern.

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.”