Chapter 12

Lady Sandgate turned sadly on this to her associate in patience, as if the case were now really beyond them. “Yes, how indeed can it ever _become_ his if Theign simply won’t let him pay for it?”

Her question was unanswerable. “It’s the first time in all my life I’ve known a man feel insulted, in such a piece of business, by happening _not_ to be, in the usual way, more or less swindled!”

“Theign is unable to take it in,” her ladyship explained, “that--as I’ve heard it said of all these money-monsters of the new type--Bender simply can’t _afford_ not to be cited and celebrated as the biggest buyer who ever lived.”

“Ah, cited and celebrated at my _expense_--say it at once and have it over, that I may enjoy what you all want to do to me!”

“The dear man’s inimitable--at his ‘expense’!” It was more than Lord John could bear as he fairly flung himself off in his derisive impotence and addressed his wail to Lady Sandgate.

“Yes, at my expense is exactly what I mean,” Lord Theign asseverated--“at the expense of my modest claim to regulate my behaviour by my own standards. There you perfectly _are_ about the man, and it’s precisely what I say--that he’s to hustle and harry me _because_ he’s a money-monster: which I never for a moment dreamed of, please understand, when I let you, John, thrust him at me as a pecuniary resource at Dedborough. I didn’t put my property on view that _he_ might blow about it------!”

“No, if you like it,” Lady Sandgate returned; “but you certainly didn’t so arrange”--she seemed to think her point somehow would help--“that you might blow about it yourself!”

“Nobody wants to ‘blow,’” Lord John more stoutly interposed, “either hot or cold, I take it; but I really don’t see the harm of Bender’s liking to be known for the scale of his transactions--actual or merely imputed even, if you will; since that scale is really so magnificent.”

Lady Sandgate half accepted, half qualified this plea. “The only question perhaps is why he doesn’t try for some precious work that somebody--less delicious than dear Theign--_can_ be persuaded on bended knees to accept a hundred thousand for.”

“‘Try’ for one?”--her younger visitor took it up while her elder more attentively watched him. “That was exactly what he did try for when he pressed you so hard in vain for the great Sir Joshua.”

“Oh well, he mustn’t come back to _that_--must he, Theign?” her ladyship cooed.

That personage failed to reply, so that Lord John went on, unconscious apparently of the still more suspicious study to which he exposed himself. “Besides which there _are_ no things of that magnitude knocking about, don’t you know?--they’ve _got_ to be worked up first if they’re to reach the grand publicity of the Figure! Would you mind,” he continued to his noble monitor, “an agreement on some such basis as _this_?--that you shall resign yourself to the biggest equivalent you’ll squeamishly consent to take, if it’s at the same time the smallest he’ll squeamishly consent to offer; but that, that done, you shall leave him free----”

Lady Sandgate took it up straight, rounding it off, as their companion only waited. “Leave him free to talk about the sum offered and the sum taken as practically one and the same?”

“Ah, you know,” Lord John discriminated, “he doesn’t ‘talk’ so much himself--there’s really nothing blatant or crude about poor Bender. It’s the rate at which--by the very way he’s ‘fixed’: an awful way indeed, I grant you!--a 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--!”

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 _agrément_ 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.”

“But how can I know _how_ much unless I find out what he’ll take?” The great collector’s spirit had, in spite of its volume, clearly not reached its limit of expansion. “Is he crazily waiting for the thing to be proved _not_ what Mr. Crimble claims?”

“No, he’s waiting for nothing--since he holds that claim demolished by Pappendick’s tremendous negative, which you wrote to tell him of.”

Vast, undeveloped and suddenly grave, Mr. Bender’s countenance showed like a barren tract under a black cloud. “I wrote to _report_, fair and square, on Pap-pendick, but to tell him I’d take the picture just the same, negative and all.”

“Ah, but take it in that way not for what it is but for what it isn’t.”

“We know nothing about what it ‘isn’t,’” said Mr. Bender, “after all that has happened--we’ve only learned a little better every day what it is.”

“You mean,” his companion asked, “the biggest bone of artistic contention----?”

“Yes,”--he took it from her--“the biggest that has been thrown into the arena for quite a while. I guess I can do with it for _that_.”

Lady Sandgate, on this, after a moment, renewed her personal advance; it was as if she had now made sure of the soundness of her main bridge. “Well, if it’s the biggest bone I won’t touch it; I’ll leave it to be mauled by my betters. But since his lordship has asked me to name a price, dear Mr. Bender, I’ll name one--and as you prefer big prices I’ll try to make it suit you. Only it won’t be for the portrait of a person nobody is agreed about. The whole world is agreed, you know, about my great-grandmother.”

“Oh, shucks, Lady Sandgate!”--and her visitor turned from her with the hunch of overcharged shoulders.

But she apparently felt that she held him, or at least that even if such a conviction might be fatuous she must now put it to the touch. “You’ve been delivered into my hands--too charmingly; and you won’t really pretend that you don’t recognise that and in fact rather like it.”

He faced about to her again as to a case of coolness unparalleled--though indeed with a quick lapse of real interest in the question of whether he had been artfully practised upon; an indifference to bad debts or peculation like that of some huge hotel or other business involving a margin for waste. He could afford, he could work waste too, clearly--and what was it, that term, you might have felt him ask, but a mean measure, anyway? quite as the “artful,” opposed to his larger game, would be the hiding and pouncing of children at play. “Do I gather that those uncanny words of his were just meant to put me off?” he inquired. And then as she but boldly and smilingly shrugged, repudiating responsibility, “Look here, Lady Sandgate, ain’t you honestly going to help me?” he pursued.

This engaged her sincerity without affecting her gaiety. “Mr. Bender, Mr. Bender, I’ll help you if you’ll help _me!_”

“You’ll really get me something from him to go on with?”

“I’ll get you something from him to go on with.”

“That’s all I ask--to get _that_. Then I can move the way I want. But without it I’m held up.”

“You shall have it,” she replied, “if I in turn may look to _you_ for a trifle on account.”

“Well,” he dryly gloomed at her, “what do you call a trifle?”

“I mean”--she waited but an instant--“what you would feel as one.”

“That won’t do. You haven’t the least idea, Lady Sandgate,” he earnestly said, “_how_ I feel at these foolish times. I’ve never got used to them yet.”

“Ah, don’t you understand,” she pressed, “that if I give you an advantage I’m completely at your mercy?”

“Well, what mercy,” he groaned, “do you deserve?”

She waited a little, brightly composed--then she indicated her inner shrine, the whereabouts of her precious picture. “Go and look at her again and you’ll see.”

His protest was large, but so, after a moment, was his compliance--his heavy advance upon the other room, from just within the doorway of which the great Lawrence was serenely visible. Mr. Bender gave it his eyes once more--though after the fashion verily of a man for whom it had now no freshness of a glamour, no shade of a secret; then he came back to his hostess. “Do you call giving me an advantage squeezing me by your sweet modesty for less than I may possibly bear?”

“How can I say fairer,” she returned, “than that, with my backing about the other picture, which I’ve passed you my word for, thrown in, I’ll resign myself to whatever you may be disposed--characteristically!--to give for this one.”

“If it’s a question of resignation,” said Mr. Bender, “you mean of course what I may be disposed--characteristically!--_not_ to give.”

She played on him for an instant all her radiance. “Yes then, you dear sharp rich thing!”

“And you take in, I assume,” he pursued, “that I’m just going to lean on you, for what I want, with the full weight of a determined man.”

“Well,” she laughed, “I promise you I’ll thoroughly obey the direction of your pressure.”

“All right then!” And he stopped before her, in his unrest, monumentally pledged, yet still more massively immeasurable. “How’ll you have it?”

She bristled as with all the possible beautiful choices; then she shed her selection as a heaving fruit-tree might have dropped some round ripeness. It was for her friend to pick up his plum and his privilege. “Will you write a cheque?”

“Yes, if you want it right away.” To which, however, he added, clapping vainly a breast-pocket: “But my cheque-book’s down in my car.”

“At the door?” She scarce required his assent to touch a bell. “I can easily send for it.” And she threw off while they waited: “It’s so sweet your ‘flying round’ with your cheque-book!”

He put it with promptitude another way. “It flies round pretty well with _Mr_----!”

“Mr. Bender’s cheque-book--in his car,” she went on to Gotch, who had answered her summons.

The owner of the interesting object further instructed him: “You’ll find in the pocket a large red morocco case.”

“Very good, sir,” said Gotch--but with another word for his mistress. “Lord John would like to know--”

“Lord John’s there?” she interrupted.

Gotch turned to the open door. “Here he is, my lady.”

She accommodated herself at once, under Mr. Bender’s eye, to the complication involved in his lordship’s presence. “It’s he who went round to Bond Street.”

Mr. Bender stared, but saw the connection. “To stop the show?” And then as the young man was already there: “You’ve stopped the show?”

“It’s ‘on’ more than ever!” Lord John responded while Gotch retired: a hurried, flurried, breathless Lord John, strikingly different from the backward messenger she had lately seen despatched. “But Theign should be here!”--he addressed her excitedly. “I announce you a call from the Prince.”

“The Prince?”--she gasped as for the burden of the honour. “He follows you?”

Mr. Bender, with an eagerness and a candour there was no mistaking, recognised on behalf of his ampler action a world of associational advantage and auspicious possibility. “Is the Prince _after_ the thing?”

Lord John remained, in spite of this challenge, conscious of nothing but his message. “He was there with Mackintosh--to see and admire the picture; which he thinks, by the way, a Mantovano pure and simple!--and did me the honour to remember me. When he heard me report to Mackintosh in his presence the sentiments expressed to me here by our noble friend and of which, embarrassed though I doubtless was,” the young man pursued to Lady Sandgate, “I gave as clear an account as I could, he was so delighted with it that he declared they mustn’t think then of taking the thing off, but must on the contrary keep putting it forward for all it’s worth, and he would come round and congratulate and thank Theign and explain him his reasons.”

Their hostess cast about for a sign. “Why Theign is at Kitty’s, worse luck! The Prince calls on him _here?_”

“He calls, you see, on _you_, my lady--at five-forty-five; and graciously desired me so to put it you.”

“He’s very kind, but”--she took in her condition--“I’m not even _dressed!_”

“You’ll have time”--the young man was a comfort--“while I rush to Berkeley Square. And pardon me, Bender--though it’s so near--if I just bag your car.”

“That’s, that’s it, take his car!”--Lady Sandgate almost swept him away.

“You may use my car all right,” Mr. Bender contributed--“but what I want to know is what the man’s _after_.”

“The man? what man?” his friend scarce paused to ask.

“The Prince then--if you allow he _is_ a man! Is he after my picture?”

Lord John vividly disclaimed authority. “If you’ll wait, my dear fellow, you’ll see.”

“Oh why should he ‘wait’?” burst from their cautious companion--only to be caught up, however, in the next breath, so swift her gracious revolution. “Wait, wait indeed, Mr. Bender--I won’t give you up for any Prince!” With which she appealed again to Lord John. “He wants to ‘congratulate’?”

“On Theign’s decision, as I’ve told you--which I announced to Mackintosh, by Theign’s extraordinary order, under his Highness’s nose, and which his Highness, by the same token, took up like a shot.”