The Outcry: -1911

'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?'