Left alone he had a moment’s meditation where he stood; it found issue in an articulate “Poor dear thing!”— an exclamation marked at once with patience and impatience, with resignation and ridicule. After which, waiting for his daughter, Lord Theign slowly and absently roamed, finding matches at last and lighting his cigarette — all with an air of concern that had settled on him more heavily from the moment of his finding himself alone. His luxury of gloom — if gloom it was — dropped, however, on his taking heed of Lady Grace, who, arriving on the scene through the other room, had had just time to stand and watch him in silence.
“Oh!” he jerked out at sight of her — which she had to content herself with as a parental greeting after separation, his next words doing little to qualify its dryness. “I take it for granted that you know I’m within a couple of hours of leaving England under a necessity of health.” And then as drawing nearer, she signified without speaking her possession of this fact: “I’ve thought accordingly that before I go I should — on this first possible occasion since that odious occurrence at Dedborough — like to leave you a little more food for meditation, in my absence, on the painfully false position in which you there placed me.” He carried himself restlessly even perhaps with a shade of awkwardness, to which her stillness was a contrast; she just waited, wholly passive — possibly indeed a trifle portentous. “If you had plotted and planned it in advance,” he none the less firmly pursued, “if you had acted from some uncanny or malignant motive, you couldn’t have arranged more perfectly to incommode, to disconcert and, to all intents and purposes, make light of me and insult me.” Even before this charge she made no sign; with her eyes now attached to the ground she let him proceed. “I had practically guaranteed to our excellent, our charming friend, your favourable view of his appeal — which you yourself too, remember, had left him in so little doubt of! — so that, having by your performance so egregiously failed him, I have the pleasure of their coming down on me for explanations, for compensations, and for God knows what besides.”
Lady Grace, looking up at last, left him in no doubt of the rigour of her attention. “I’m sorry indeed, father, to have done you any wrong; but may I ask whom, in such a connection, you refer to as ‘they’?”
“‘They’?” he echoed in the manner of a man who has had handed back to his more careful eye, across the counter, some questionable coin that he has tried to pass. “Why, your own sister to begin with — whose interest in what may make for your happiness I suppose you decently recognise; and his people, one and all, the delightful old Duchess in particular, who only wanted to be charming to you, and who are as good people, and as pleasant and as clever, damn it, when all’s said and done, as any others that are likely to come your way.” It clearly did his lordship good to work out thus his case, which grew more and more coherent to him and glowed with irresistible colour. “Letting alone gallant John himself, most amiable of men, about whose merits and whose claims you appear to have pretended to agree with me just that you might, when he presumed, poor chap, ardently to urge them, deal him with the more cruel effect that calculated blow on the mouth!”
It was clear that in the girl’s great gravity embarrassment had no share. “They so come down on you I understand then, father, that you’re obliged to come down on me?”
“Assuredly — for some better satisfaction than your just moping here without a sign!”
“But a sign of what, father?” she asked — as helpless as a lone islander scanning the horizon for a sail.
“Of your appreciating, of your in some degree dutifully considering, the predicament into which you’ve put me!”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you in the least that you’ve rather put me into one?”
He threw back his head as from exasperated nerves. “I put you certainly in the predicament of your receiving by my care a handsome settlement in life — which all the elements that would make for your enjoying it had every appearance of successfully commending to you.” The perfect readiness of which on his lips had, like a higher wave, the virtue of lifting and dropping him to still more tangible ground. “And if I understand you aright as wishing to know whether I apologise for that zeal, why you take a most preposterous view of our relation as father and daughter.”
“You understand me no better than I fear I understand you,” Lady Grace returned, “if what you expect of me is really to take back my words to Lord John.” And then as he didn’t answer, while their breach gaped like a jostled wound, “Have you seriously come to propose — and from him again,” she added —“that I shall reconsider my resolute act and lend myself to your beautiful arrangement?”
It had so the sound of unmixed ridicule that he could only, for his dignity, not give way to passion. “I’ve come, above all, for this, I may say, Grace: to remind you of whom you’re addressing when you jibe at me, and to make of you assuredly a plain demand — exactly as to whether you judged us to have actively incurred your treatment of our unhappy friend, to have brought it upon us, he and I, by my refusal to discuss with you at such a crisis the question of my disposition of a particular item of my property. I’ve only to look at you, for that matter,” Lord Theign continued — always with a finer point and a higher consistency as his rehearsal of his wrongs broadened —“to have my inquiry, as it seems to me, eloquently answered. You flounced away from poor John, you took, as he tells me, ‘his head off,’ just to repay me for what you chose to regard as my snub on the score of your challenging my entertainment of a possible purchaser; a rebuke launched at me, practically, in the presence of a most inferior person, a stranger and an intruder, from whom you had all the air of taking your cue for naming me the great condition on which you’d gratify my hope. Am I to understand, in other words,”— and his lordship mounted to a climax —“that you sent us about our business because I failed to gratify your hope: that of my knocking under to your sudden monstrous pretension to lay down the law for my choice of ways and means of raising, to my best convenience, a considerable sum of money? You’ll be so good as to understand, once for all, that I recognise there no right of interference from any quarter — and also to let that knowledge govern your behaviour in my absence.”
Lady Grace had thus for some minutes waited on his words — waited even as almost with anxiety for the safe conduct he might look to from some of the more extravagant of them. But he at least felt at the end — if it was an end — all he owed them; so that there was nothing for her but to accept as achieved his dreadful felicity. “You’re very angry with me, and I hope you won’t feel me simply ‘aggravating’ if I say that, thinking everything over, I’ve done my best to allow for that. But I can answer your question if I do answer it by saying that my discovery of your possible sacrifice of one of our most beautiful things didn’t predispose me to decide in favour of a person — however ‘backed’ by you — for whose benefit the sacrifice was to take place. Frankly,” the girl pushed on, “I did quite hate, for the moment, everything that might make for such a mistake; and took the darkest view, let me also confess, of every one, without exception, connected with it I interceded with you, earnestly, for our precious picture, and you wouldn’t on any terms have my intercession. On top of that Lord John blundered in, without timeliness or tact — and I’m afraid that, as I hadn’t been the least in love with him even before, he did have to take the consequence.”
Lord Theign, with an elated swing of his person, greeted this as all he could possibly want. “You recognise then that your reception of him was purely vindictive! — the meaning of which is that unless my conduct of my private interests, of which you know nothing whatever, happens to square with your superior wisdom you’ll put me under boycott all round! While you chatter about mistakes and blunders, and about our charming friend’s lack of the discretion of which you yourself set so grand an example, what account have you to offer of the scene you made me there before that fellow — your confederate, as he had all the air of being! — by giving it me with such effrontery that, if I had eminently done with him after his remarkable display, you at least were but the more determined to see him keep it up?”
The girl’s justification, clearly, was very present to her, and not less obviously the truth that to make it strong she must, avoiding every side-issue, keep it very simple, “The only account I can give you, I think, is that I could but speak at such a moment as I felt, and that I felt — well, how can I say how deeply? If you can really bear to know, I feel so still I care in fact more than ever that we shouldn’t do such things. I care, if you like, to indiscretion — I care, if you like, to offence, to arrogance, to folly. But even as my last word to you before you leave England on the conclusion of such a step, I’m ready to cry out to you that you oughtn’t, you oughtn’t, you oughtn’t!”
Her father, with wonder-moved, elevated brows and high commanding hand, checked her as in an act really of violence — save that, like an inflamed young priestess, she had already, in essence, delivered her message. “Hallo, hallo, hallo, my distracted daughter — no ‘crying out,’ if you please!” After which, while arrested but unabashed, she still kept her lighted eyes on him, he gave back her conscious stare for a minute, inwardly and rapidly turning things over, making connections, taking, as after some long and lamentable lapse of observation, a new strange measure of her: all to the upshot of his then speaking with a difference of tone, a recognition of still more of the odious than he had supposed, so that the case might really call for some coolness. “You keep bad company, Grace — it pays the devil with your sense of proportion. If you make this row when I sell a picture, what will be left to you when I forge a cheque?”
“If you had arrived at the necessity of forging a cheque,” she answered, “I should then resign myself to that of your selling a picture.”
“But not short of that!”
“Not short of that. Not one of ours.”
“But I couldn’t,” said his lordship with his best and coldest amusement, “sell one of somebody else’s!”
She was, however, not disconcerted. “Other people do other things — they appear to have done them, and to be doing them, all about us. But we have been so decently different — always and ever. We’ve never done anything disloyal.”
“‘Disloyal’?”— he was more largely amazed and even interested now.
Lady Grace stuck to her word. “That’s what it seems to me!”
“It seems to you”— and his sarcasm here was easy —“more disloyal to sell a picture than to buy one? Because we didn’t paint ’em all ourselves, you know!”
She threw up impatient hands. “I don’t ask you either to paint or to buy ——!”
“Oh, that’s a mercy!” he interrupted, riding his irony hard; “and I’m glad to hear you at least let me off such efforts! However, if it strikes you as gracefully filial to apply to your father’s conduct so invidious a word,” he went on less scathingly, “you must take from him, in your turn, his quite other view of what makes disloyalty — understanding distinctly, by the same token, that he enjoins on you not to give an odious illustration of it, while he’s away, by discussing and deploring with any one of your extraordinary friends any aspect or feature whatever of his walk and conve............