The Outcry Part 5

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 a.s.surance!"

"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 rea.s.surance, 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 'd.u.c.h.ess 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 pus.h.i.+ng dealer."

"And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn't a particularly pus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 lords.h.i.+p 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.