The Outcry: -1911

Lord Theign thought—he wondered; and then as if fairly amused at himself: 'Hanged if I know what is my own price!' After which he went for his hat. 'But there's one thing,' he remembered as he came back with it: 'where's my too, too unnatural daughter?'

'If you mean Grace and really want her I'll send and find out.'

'Not now'—he bethought himself. 'But does she see that chatterbox?'

'Mr. Crimble? Yes, she sees him.'

He kept his eyes on her. 'Then how far has it gone?'

Lady Sandgate overcame an embarrassment. 'Well, not even yet, I think, so far as they'd like.'

'They'd 'like'—heaven save the mark!—to marry?'

'I suspect them of it. What line, if it should come to that,' she asked, 'would you then take?'

He was perfectly prompt. 'The line that for Grace it's simply ignoble.'

The force of her deprecation of such language was qualified by tact. 'Ah, darling, as dreadful as that?'

He could but view the possibility with dark resentment. 'It lets us so down—from what we've always been and done; so down, down, down that I'm amazed you don't feel it!'

'Oh, I feel there's still plenty to keep you up!' she soothingly laughed.

He seemed to consider this vague amount—which he apparently judged, however, not so vast as to provide for the whole yearning of his nature. 'Well, my dear,' he thus more blandly professed, 'I shall need all the extra agrement that your affection can supply.'

If nothing could have been, on this, richer response, nothing could at the same time have bee more pleasing than her modesty. 'Ah, my affectionate Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always in flood; but in any more worldly element than that—as you've ever seen for yourself—a poor strand with my own sad affairs, a broken reed; not 'great' as they used so finely to call it! You are—with the natural sense of greatness and, for supreme support, the instinctive grand man doing and taking things.'

He sighed, none the less, he groaned, with his thoughts of trouble, for the strain he foresaw on these resolutions. 'If you mean that I hold up my head, on higher grounds, I grant that I always have. But how much longer possible when my children commit such vulgarities? Why in the name of goodness are such children? What the devil has got into them, and is it really the case that when Grace offers as a proof of her license and a specimen of her taste a son-in-law as you tell me I'm in danger of helplessly to swallow the dose?'

'Do you find Mr. Crimble,' Lady Sandgate as if there might really be something to say, 'so utterly out of the question?'

'I found him on the two occasions before I went away in the last degree offensive and outrageous; but even if he charged one and one's poor dear decent old defences with less rabid a fury everything about him would forbid that kind of relation.'

What kind of relation, if any, Hugh's deficiencies might still render thinkable Lord Theign was kept from going on to mention by the voice of Mr. Gotch, who had thrown open the door to the not altogether assured sound of 'Mr. Breckenridge Bender.' The guest in possession gave a cry of impatience, but Lady Sandgate said 'Coming up?'

'If his lordship will see him.'

'Oh, he's beyond his time,' his lordship pronounced—'I can't see him now!'

'Ah, but mustn't you—and mayn't I then?' She waited, however, for no response to signify to her servant 'Let him come,' and her companion could but exhale a groan of reluctant accommodation as if he wondered at the point she made of it. It enlightened him indeed perhaps a little that she went on while Gotch did her bidding. 'Does the kind of relation you'd be condemned to with Mr. Crimble let you down, down, down, as you say, more than the relation you've been having with Mr. Bender?'

Lord Theign had for it the most uninforming of stares. 'Do you mean don't I hate 'em equally both?'

She cut his further reply short, however, by a 'Hush!' of warning—Mr. Bender was there and his introducer had left them.

Lord Theign, full of his purpose of departure, sacrificed hereupon little to ceremony. 'I've but a moment, to my regret, to give you, Mr. Bender, and if you've been unavoidably detained, as you great bustling people are so apt to be, it will perhaps still be soon enough for your comfort to hear from me that I've just given order to close our exhibition. From the present hour on, sir'—he put it with the firmness required to settle the futility of an appeal.

Mr. Bender's large surprise lost itself, however, promptly enough, in Mr. Bender's larger ease. 'Why, do you really mean it, Lord Theign?—removing already from view a work that gives innocent gratification to thousands?'

'Well,' said his lordship curtly, 'if thousands have seen it I've done what I wanted, and if they've been gratified I'm content—and invite you to be.'

Mr. Bender showed more keenness for this richer implication. 'In other words it's I who may remove the picture?'

'Well—if you'll take it on my estimate.'

'But what, Lord Theign, all this time,' Mr. Bender almost pathetically pleaded, 'is your estimate?'

The parting guest had another pause, which prolonged itself, after he had reached the door, in a deep solicitation of their hostess's conscious eyes. This brief passage apparently inspired his answer. 'Lady Sandgate will tell you.' The door closed behind him.

The charming woman smiled then at her other friend, whose comprehensive presence appeared now to demand of her some account of these strange proceedings. 'He means that your own valuation is much too shockingly high.'