The Outcry Part 27

"You mean--?" But he could only wonder--till, however, it glimmered upon him. "You gave up your protest?"

"I gave up my protest. I told him that--so far as I'm concerned!--he might do as he liked."

Her poor friend turned pale at the sharp little shock of it; but if his face thus showed the pang of too great a surprise he yet wreathed the convulsion in a gay grimace. "You leave me to struggle alone?"

"I leave you to struggle alone."

He took it in bewilderingly, but tried again, even to the heroic, for optimism. "Ah well, you decided, I suppose, on some new personal ground."

"Yes; a reason came up, a reason I hadn't to that extent looked for and which of a sudden--quickly, before he went--I _had_ somehow to deal with. So to give him my word in the dismal sense I mention was my only way to meet the strain." She paused; Hugh waited for something further, and "I gave him my word I wouldn't help you," she wound up.

He turned it over. "To _act_ in the matter--I see."

"To act in the matter"--she went through with it--"after the high stand I had taken."

Still he studied it. "I see--I see. It's between you and your father."

"It's between him and me--yes. An engagement not again to trouble him."

Hugh, from his face, might have feared a still greater complication; so he made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. "Ah, that was nice of you. And natural. _That's_ all right!"

"No"--she spoke from a deeper depth--"it's altogether wrong. For whatever happens I must now accept it."

"Well, say you must"--he really declined not to treat it almost as rather a "lark"--"if we can at least go on talking."

"Ah, we _can_ at least go on talking!" she perversely sighed. "I can say anything I like so long as I don't say it to _him_" she almost wailed.

But she added with more firmness: "I can still hope--and I can still pray."

He set free again with a joyous gesture all his confidence. "Well, what more _could_ you do, anyhow? So isn't that enough?"

It took her a moment to say, and even then she didn't. "Is it enough for _you_, Mr. Crimble?"

"What _is_ enough for me"--he could for his part readily name it--"is the harm done you at our last meeting by my irruption; so that if you got his consent to see me----!"

"I didn't get his consent!"--she had turned away from the searching eyes, but she faced them again to rectify: "I see you against his express command."

"Ah then thank G.o.d I came!"--it was like a bland breath on a _feu de joie_: he flamed so much higher.

"Thank G.o.d you've come, yes--for my deplorable exposure." And to justify her name for it before he could protest, "I _offered_ him here not to see you," she rigorously explained.

"'Offered him?"--Hugh did drop for it. "Not to see me--ever again?"

She didn't falter. "Never again."

Ah then he understood. "But he wouldn't let that serve----?"

"Not for the price I put on it."

"His yielding on the picture?"

"His yielding on the picture."

Hugh lingered before it all. "Your proposal wasn't 'good enough'?"

"It wasn't good enough."

"I see," he repeated--"I see." But he was in that light again mystified.

"Then why are you therefore not free?"

"Because--just after--you came back, and I _did_ see you again!"

Ah, it was all present. "You found you were too sorry for me?"

"I found I was too sorry for you--as he himself found I was."

Hugh had got hold of it now. "And _that_, you mean, he couldn't stomach?"

"So little that when you had gone (and _how_ you had to go you remember) he at once proposed, rather than that I should deceive you in a way so different from his own----"

"To do all we want of him?"

"To do all I did at least."

"And it was _then_," he took in, "that you wouldn't deal?"

"Well"--try though she might to keep the colour out, it all came straighter and straighter now--"those moments had brought you home to me as they had also brought _him_; making such a difference, I felt, for what he veered round to agree to."

"The difference"--Hugh wanted it so adorably definite--"that you didn't see your way to accepting----?"

"No, not to accepting the condition he named."

"Which was that he'd keep the picture for you if you'd treat me as too 'low'----?"

"If I'd treat you," said Lady Grace with her eyes on his fine young face, "as impossible."

He kept her eyes--he clearly liked so to make her repeat it. "And not even for the sake of the picture--?" After he had given her time, however, her silence, with her beautiful look in it, seemed to admonish him not to force her for his pleasure; as if what she had already told him didn't make him throb enough for the wonder of it. He _had_ it, and let her see by his high flush how he made it his own--while, the next thing, as it was but part of her avowal, the rest of that illumination called for a different intelligence. "Your father's reprobation of me personally is on the ground that you're all such great people?"

She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, his eagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the "ground" that his question laid bare the light veil of an evasion, "'Great people,' I've learned to see, mustn't--to remain great--do what my father's doing."

"It's indeed on the theory of their not so behaving," Hugh returned, "that we see them--all the inferior rest of us--in the grand glamour of their greatness!"

If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beauty in her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of the journey. "You won't see them in it for long--if they don't now, under such tests and with such opportunities, begin to take care."

This had given him, at a stroke, he clearly felt, all freedom for the closer criticism. "Lord Theign perhaps recognises some such canny truth, but 'takes care,' with the least trouble to himself and the finest short cut--does it, if you'll let me say so, rather on the cheap--by finding 'the likes' of me, as his daughter's trusted friend, out of the question."

"Well, you won't mind that, will you?" Lady Grace asked, "if he finds his daughter herself, in any such relation to you, quite as much so."

"Different enough, from position to position and person to person," he brightly brooded, "is the view that gets itself _most_ comfortably taken of the implications of Honour!"