The Outcry: -1911

Lord John took up her idea as with the air of something that had been working in him rather vehemently, though under due caution too, as a consequence of this exchange, during which he had apprehensively watched his elder. 'I don't think I quite see how, my dear Theign, the poor chap's letter was so offensive.'

In that case his dear Theign could tell him. 'Because it was a tissue of expressions that may pass current— over counters and in awful newspapers—in his extraordinary world or country, but that I decline to take time to puzzle out here.'

'If he didn't make himself understood,' Lord John took leave to laugh, 'it must indeed have been an unusual production for Bender.'

'Oh, I often, with the wild beauty, if you will, of so many of his turns, haven't a notion,' Lady Sandgate confessed with an equal gaiety, 'of what he's talking about.'

'I think I never miss his weird sense,' her younger guest again loyally contended—'and in fact as a general thing I rather like it!'

'I happen to like nothing that I don't enjoy,' Lord Theign rejoined with some asperity—'and so far as I do follow the fellow he assumes on my part an interest in his expenditure of purchase-money that I neither feel nor pretend to. He doesn't want—by what I spell out—the picture he refused at Dedborough; he may possibly want—if one reads it so—the picture on view in Bond Street; and he yet appears to make, with great emphasis, the stupid ambiguous point that these two 'articles' (the greatest of Morettos an 'article'!) haven't been 'by now' proved different: as if I engaged with him that I myself would so prove them!'

Lord John indulged in a pause—but also in a suggestion. 'He must allude to your hoping—when you allowed us to place the picture with Mackintosh—that it would show to all London in the most precious light conceivable.'

'Well, if it hasn't so shown'—and Lord Theign stared as if mystified—'what in the world's the meaning of this preposterous racket?'

'The racket is largely,' his young friend explained, 'the vociferation of the people who contradict each other about it.'

On which their hostess sought to enliven the gravity of the question. 'Some—yes—shouting on the housetops that's a Mantovano of the Mantovanos, and others shrieking back at them that they're donkeys if not criminals.'

'He may take it for whatever he likes,' said Lord Theign, heedless of these contributions, 'he may father it on Michael Angelo himself if he'll but clear out with it and let me alone!'

'What he'd like to take it for,' Lord John at this point saw his way to remark, 'is something in the nature of a Hundred Thousand.'

'A Hundred Thousand?' cried his astonished friend.

'Quite, I dare say, a Hundred Thousand'—the young man enjoyed clearly handling even by the lips so round a sum.

Lady Sandgate disclaimed however with agility any appearance of having gaped. 'Why, haven't you yet realised, Theign, that those are the American figures?'

His lordship looked at her fixedly and then did the same by Lord John, after which he waited a little. 'I've nothing to do with the American figures—which seem to me, if you press me, you know, quite intolerably vulgar.'

'Well, I'd be as vulgar as anybody for a Hundred Thousand!' Lady Sandgate hastened to proclaim.

'Didn't he let us know at Dedborough,' Lord John asked of the master of that seat, 'that he had no use, as he said, for lower values?'

'I've heard him remark myself,' said their companion, rising to the monstrous memory, 'that he wouldn't take a cheap picture—even though a 'handsome' one—as a present.'

'And does he call the thing round the corner a cheap picture?' the proprietor of the work demanded.

Lord John threw up his arms with a grin of impatience. 'All he wants to do, don't you see? is to prevent your making it one!'

Lord Theign glared at this imputation to him of a low ductility. 'I offered the thing, as it was, at an estimate worthy of it—and of me.'

'My dear reckless friend,' his young adviser protested, 'you named no figure at all when it came to the point——!'

'It didn't come to the point! Nothing came to the point but that I put a Moretto on view; as a thing, yes, perfectly'—Lord Theign accepted the reminding gesture—'on which a rich American had an eye and in which he had, so to speak, an interest. That was what I wanted, and so we left it—parting each of us ready but neither of us bound.'

'Ah, Mr. Bender's bound, as he'd say,' Lady Sand-gate interposed—''bound' to make you swallow the enormous luscious plum that your appetite so morbidly rejects!'

'My appetite, as morbid as you like'—her old friend had shrewdly turned on her—'is my own affair, and if the fellow must deal in enormities I warn him to carry them elsewhere!'

Lord John, plainly, by this time, was quite exasperated at the absurdity of him. 'But how can't you see that it's only a plum, as she says, for a plum and an eye for an eye—since the picture itself, with this huge ventilation, is now quite a different affair?'

'How the deuce a different affair when just what the man himself confesses is that, in spite of all the chatter of the prigs and pedants, there's no really established ground for treating it as anything but the same?' On which, as having so unanswerably spoken, Lord Theign shook himself free again, in his high petulance, and moved restlessly to where the passage to the other room appeared to offer his nerves an issue; all moreover to the effect of suggesting to us that something still other than what he had said might meanwhile work in him behind and beneath that quantity. The spectators of his trouble watched him, for the time, in uncertainty and with a mute but associated comment on the perversity and oddity he had so suddenly developed; Lord John giving a shrug of almost bored despair and Lady Sandgate signalling caution and tact for their action by a finger flourished to her lips, and in fact at once proceeding to apply these arts. The subject of her attention had still remained as in worried thought;