The Outcry: -1911

I've got my snub. But I don't in the least knock under.'

'Only the first authority in Europe doesn't care, I suppose, whether you do or not!'

'He isn't the first authority in Europe, thank God,' the young man returned—'though he is, I admit, one of the three or four first. And I mean to appeal—I've another shot in my locker,' he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. 'I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi.'

'Bardi of Milan?'—she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father's presence.

It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. 'You know of him?—how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel,' he quickly explained, 'he must have most the instinct—and it has come over me since that he'd have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture.'

She had fairly hung on his lips. 'But does he know ours?'

'No—not ours yet. That is'—he consciously and quickly took himself up—'not yours! But as Pap-pendick went to Verona for us I've asked Bardi to do us the great favour to come here—if Lord Theign will be so good,' he said, bethinking himself with a turn, 'as to let him examine the Moretto.' He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly 'elected,' as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. 'It's not at all impossible—for such curious effects have been!—that the Dedborough picture seen after the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough.'

'And so awfully long after—wasn't it?' Lady Grace asked.

'Awfully long after—it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible.'

'Oh of course we don't see every one!'—she heroically kept it up.

'You don't see every one,' Hugh bravely laughed, 'and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi,' he pursued, 'to go again to Verona——'

'The last thing before coming here?'—she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. 'How happy they should like so to work for you!'

'Ah, we're a band of brothers,' he returned—''we few, we happy few'—from country to country'; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: 'though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping interest of it all; since,' he developed and explained, for his elder friend's benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, 'when we're really 'hit' over a case we'll do almost anything in life.'

Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. 'It must be so lovely to feel so hit!'

'It does spoil one,' Hugh laughed, 'for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance—putting it at the merest chance—of Bardi's own wet blanket! But that's again so very small— though,' he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, 'you'll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick's veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you'll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!' he sublimely insisted.

'How can we prevent your using it?' Lady Grace again interrupted; 'or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst—'

'The thing'—he at once pursued—'will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah,' he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, 'the worst sha'n't come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express'—and he faced Lord Theign again—'for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!'

Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene—so that it was of this full view his participation had effectively consisted, 'I haven't the least idea, sir, what you're talking about!' And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had passed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.

There ensued upon his words and movement a vivid mute passage, the richest of commentaries, between his companions; who, deeply divided by the width of the ample room, followed him with their eyes and then used for their own interchange these organs of remark, eloquent now over Hugh's unmistakable dismissal at short order, on which obviously he must at once act. Lady Grace's young arms conveyed to him by a despairing contrite motion of surrender that she had done for him all she could do in his presence and that, however sharply doubtful the result, he was to leave the rest to herself. They communicated thus, the strenuous pair, for their full moment, without speaking; only with the prolonged, the charged give and take of their gaze and, it might well have been imagined, of their passion. Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation—of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance. It was the girl's raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter on the spot from which she had not moved. It presently ended in his lordship's turn about as if inferring by the silence that the intruder had withdrawn.

'Is that young man your lover?' he said as he drew again near.

Lady Grace waited a little, but spoke as quietly as if she had been prepared. 'Has the question a bearing on the promise you a short time ago demanded of me?'

'It has a bearing on the so extraordinary appearance of your intimacy with him!'

'You mean that if he should be—what you ask me about—your exaction would then