The Outcry. Генри ДжеймсЧитать онлайн книгу.
held out, opened, the telegram she had kept folded in her hand since her entrance. “He has sent me that—which, delivered to me ten minutes ago out there, has brought me in to receive him.”
The young man read out this missive. “‘Failing to find you in Bruton Street, start in pursuit and hope to overtake you about four.’” It did involve an ambiguity. “Why, he has been engaged these three days to coincide with myself, and not to fail of him has been part of my business.”
Lady Sandgate, in her demonstrative way, appealed to the general rich scene. “Then why does he say it’s me he’s pursuing?”
He seemed to recognise promptly enough in her the sense of a menaced monopoly. “My dear lady, he’s pursuing expensive works of art.”
“By which you imply that I’m one?” She might have been wound up by her disappointment to almost any irony.
“I imply—or rather I affirm—that every handsome woman is! But what he arranged with me about,” Lord John explained, “was that he should see the Dedborough pictures in general and the great Sir Joshua in particular—of which he had heard so much and to which I’ve been thus glad to assist him.”
This news, however, with its lively interest, but deepened the listener’s mystification. “Then why—this whole week that I’ve been in the house—hasn’t our good friend here mentioned to me his coming?”
“Because our good friend here has had no reason”—Lord John could treat it now as simple enough. “Good as he is in all ways, he’s so best of all about showing the house and its contents that I haven’t even thought necessary to write him that I’m introducing Breckenridge.”
“I should have been happy to introduce him,” Lady Sandgate just quavered—“if I had at all known he wanted it.”
Her companion weighed the difference between them and appeared to pronounce it a trifle he didn’t care a fig for. “I surrender you that privilege then—of presenting him to his host—if I’ve seemed to you to snatch it from you.” To which Lord John added, as with liberality unrestricted, “But I’ve been taking him about to see what’s worth while—as only last week to Lady Lappington’s Longhi.”
This revelation, though so casual in its form, fairly drew from Lady Sandgate, as she took it in, an interrogative wail. “Her Longhi?”
“Why, don’t you know her great Venetian family group, the What-do-you-call-’ems?—seven full-length figures, each one a gem, for which he paid her her price before he left the house.”
She could but make it more richly resound—almost stricken, lost in her wistful thought: “Seven full-length figures? Her price?”
“Eight thousand—slap down. Bender knows,” said Lord John, “what he wants.”
“And does he want only”—her wonder grew and grew—
“What-do-you-call-’ems’?”
“He most usually wants what he can’t have.” Lord John made scarce more of it than that. “But, awfully hard up as I fancy her, Lady Lappington went at him.”
It determined in his friend a boldly critical attitude. “How horrible—at the rate things are leaving us!” But this was far from the end of her interest. “And is that the way he pays?”
“Before he leaves the house?” Lord John lived it amusedly over. “Well, she took care of that.”
“How incredibly vulgar!” It all had, however, for Lady Sandgate, still other connections—which might have attenuated Lady Lappington’s case, though she didn’t glance at this. “He makes the most scandalous eyes—the ruffian!—at my great-grandmother.” And then as richly to enlighten any blankness: “My tremendous Lawrence, don’t you know?—in her wedding-dress, down to her knees; with such extraordinarily speaking eyes, such lovely arms and hands, such wonderful flesh-tints: universally considered the masterpiece of the artist.”
Lord John seemed to look a moment not so much at the image evoked, in which he wasn’t interested, as at certain possibilities lurking behind it. “And are you going to sell the masterpiece of the artist?”
She held her head high. “I’ve indignantly refused—for all his pressing me so hard.”
“Yet that’s what he nevertheless pursues you to-day to keep up?”
The question had a little the ring of those of which the occupant of a witness-box is mostly the subject, but Lady Sandgate was so far as this went an imperturbable witness. “I need hardly fear it perhaps if—in the light of what you tell me of your arrangement with him—his pursuit becomes, where I am concerned, a figure of speech.”
“Oh,” Lord John returned, “he kills two birds with one stone—he sees both Sir Joshua and you.”
This version of the case had its effect, for the moment, on his fair associate. “Does he want to buy their pride and glory?”
The young man, however, struck on his own side, became at first but the bright reflector of her thought. “Is that wonder for sale?”
She closed her eyes as with the shudder of hearing such words. “Not, surely, by any monstrous chance! Fancy dear, proud Theign–!”
“I can’t fancy him—no!” And Lord John appeared to renounce the effort. “But a cat may look at a king and a sharp funny Yankee at anything.”
These things might be, Lady Sandgate’s face and gesture apparently signified; but another question diverted her. “You’re clearly a wonderful showman, but do you mind my asking you whether you’re on such an occasion a—well, a closely interested one?”
“‘Interested’?” he echoed; though it wasn’t to gain time, he showed, for he would in that case have taken more. “To the extent, you mean, of my little percentage?” And then as in silence she but kept a slightly grim smile on him: “Why do you ask if—with your high delicacy about your great-grandmother—you’ve nothing to place?”
It took her a minute to say, while her fine eye only rolled; but when she spoke that organ boldly rested and the truth vividly appeared. “I ask because people like you, Lord John, strike me as dangerous to the—how shall I name it?—the common weal; and because of my general strong feeling that we don’t want any more of our national treasures (for I regard my great-grandmother as national) to be scattered about the world.”
“There’s much in this country and age,” he replied in an off-hand manner, “to be said about that,” The present, however, was not the time to say it all; so he said something else instead, accompanying it with a smile that signified sufficiency. “To my friends, I need scarcely remark to you, I’m all the friend.”
She had meanwhile seen the butler reappear by the door that opened to the terrace, and though the high, bleak, impersonal approach of this functionary was ever, and more and more at every step, a process to defy interpretation, long practice evidently now enabled her to suggest, as she turned again to her fellow-visitor a reading of it. “It’s the friend then clearly who’s wanted in the park.”
She might, by the way Banks looked at her, have snatched from his hand a missive addressed to another; though while he addressed himself to her companion he allowed for her indecorum sufficiently to take it up where she had left it. “By her ladyship, my lord, who sends to hope you’ll join them below the terrace.”
“Ah, Grace hopes,” said Lady Sandgate for the young man’s encouragement. “There you are!”
Lord John took up the motor-cap he had lain down on coming in. “I rush to Lady Grace, but don’t demoralise Bender!” And he went forth to the terrace and the gardens.
Banks looked about as for some further exercise of his high function. “Will you have tea, my lady?”
This appeared to strike her as premature. “Oh, thanks—when they all come in.”
“They’ll scarcely all,