words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we haven’t had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”
“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”—Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman—a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears—to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern.
IV
Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you—in the midst of the great doings I noticed—to have found a beautiful minute for me.”
“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”
It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose—with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed—and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face—quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process—kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender—though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation—the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”
“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical—‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”
“Then you made it doubtless bleak for him, let us say. I couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about this—it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye—and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke—characteristically, you would have been sure—into a great free gaiety of recognition.
“Oh, we’ve nothing particular in the hall,” Lady Grace amiably objected.
“Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I’m an ogre,” he said—“before a new and rare feast!”
She happily took up his figure. “Then won’t you begin—as a first course—with tea after your ride? If the other, that is—for there has been an ogre before you—has left any.”
“Some tea, with pleasure”—he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous table d’hôte.”
“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon—the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”
Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles—the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious—of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we all can play!”
“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”
The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm—of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of this order—which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”
“We’ve had great luck,” she granted—“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town—about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live—I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”
Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”
“The rich American who’s going round.”
It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”
Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”
Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. “Rather—the scoundrel. He offered his infernal eight thousand down.”
“Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!”
“I wish he had—he could then have been collared.”
“Well,” Lady Grace peacefully smiled, “it’s no use his offering us eight thousand—or eighteen or even eighty!”
Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance, almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one would have indecently made. “Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man surely doesn’t suppose you’d traffic.”
She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the friendly horror she produced. “I don’t quite know what he supposes. But people have trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round.”
“Ah,”
