The Outcry: -1911

perfect army of reporter-wretches, close at his heels, are always talking for him and of him.'

Lord Theign spoke hereupon at last with the air as of an impulse that had been slowly gathering force. 'You talk for him, my dear chap, pretty well. You urge his case, my honour, quite as if you were assured of a commission on the job—on a fine ascending scale! Has he put you up to that proposition, eh? Do you get a handsome percentage and are you to make a good thing of it?'

The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry—whether from a good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but he otherwise showed a bold front, only bending his eyes a moment on his watch. 'As he's to come to you himself—and I don't know why the mischief he doesn't come!—he will answer you that graceful question.'

'Will he answer it,' Lord Theign asked, 'with the veracity that the suggestion you've just made on his behalf represents him as so beautifully adhering to?' On which he again quite fiercely turned his back and recovered his detachment, the others giving way behind him to a blanker dismay.

Lord John, in spite of this however, pumped up a tone. 'I don't see why you should speak as if I were urging some abomination.'

'Then I'll tell you why!'—and Lord Theign was upon him again for the purpose. 'Because I had rather give the cursed thing away outright and for good and all than that it should hang out there another day in the interest of such equivocations!'

Lady Sandgate's dismay yielded to her wonder, and her wonder apparently in turn to her amusement. ''Give it away,' my dear friend, to a man who only longs to smother you in gold?'

Her dear friend, however, had lost patience with her levity. 'Give it away—just for a luxury of protest and a stoppage of chatter—to some cause as unlike as possible that of Mr. Bender's power of sound and his splendid reputation: to the Public, to the Authorities, to the Thingumbob, to the Nation!'

Lady Sandgate broke into horror while Lord John stood sombre and stupefied. 'Ah, my dear creature, you've flights of extravagance——!'

'One thing's very certain,' Lord Theign quite heedlessly pursued—'that the thought of my property on view there does give intolerably on my nerves, more and more every minute that I'm conscious of it; so that, hang it, if one thinks of it, why shouldn't I, for my relief, do again, damme, what I like?—that is bang the door in their faces, have the show immediately stopped?' He turned with the attraction of this idea from one of his listeners to the other. 'It's my show—it isn't Bender's, surely!—and I can do just as I choose with it.'

'Ah, but isn't that the very point?'—and Lady Sandgate put it to Lord John. 'Isn't it Bender's show much more than his?'

Her invoked authority, however, in answer to this, made but a motion of disappointment and disgust at so much rank folly—while Lord Theign, on the other hand, followed up his happy thought. 'Then if it's Bender's show, or if he claims it is, there's all the more reason!' And it took his lordship's inspiration no longer to flower. 'See here, John—do this: go right round there this moment, please, and tell them from me to shut straight down!'

''Shut straight down'?' the young man abhorrently echoed.

'Stop it to-night—wind it up and end it: see?' The more the entertainer of that vision held it there the more charm it clearly took on for him. 'Have the picture removed from view and the incident closed.'

'You seriously ask that of me!' poor Lord John quavered.

'Why in the world shouldn't I? It's a jolly lot less than you asked of me a month ago at Dedborough.'

'What then am I to say to them?' Lord John spoke but after a long moment, during which he had only looked hard and—an observer might even then have felt—ominously at his taskmaster.

That personage replied as if wholly to have done with the matter. 'Say anything that comes into your clever head. I don't really see that there's anything else for you!' Lady Sandgate sighed to the messenger, who gave no sign save of positive stiffness.

The latter seemed still to weigh his displeasing obligation; then he eyed his friend significantly—almost portentously. 'Those are absolutely your sentiments?'

'Those are absolutely my sentiments'—and Lord Theign brought this out as with the force of a physical push.

'Very well then!' But the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. 'Not one more day?'

Lord Theign only waved him away. 'Not one more hour!'

He paused at the door, this reluctant spokesman, as if for some supreme protest; but after another prolonged and decisive engagement with the two pairs of eyes that waited, though differently, on his performance, he clapped on his hat as in the rage of his resentment and departed on his mission.

III

'He can't bear to do it, poor man!' Lady Sand-gate ruefully remarked to her remaining guest after Lord John had, under extreme pressure, dashed out to Bond Street.

'I dare say not!'—Lord Theign, flushed with the felicity of self-expression, made little of that. 'But he goes too far, you see, and it clears the air—pouah! Now therefore'—and he glanced at the clock—'I must go to Kitty.'

'Kitty—with what Kitty wants,' Lady Sandgate opined—'won't thank you for that! '

'She never thanks me for anything'—and the fact of his resignation clearly added here to his bitterness. 'So it's no great loss!'

'Won't you at any rate,' his hostess asked, 'wait for Bender?'

His lordship cast it to the winds. 'What have I to do with him now?'

'Why surely if he'll accept your own price—!'