"Then," her father decreed, "your conversation will please to dispense with a ground; or you'll perhaps, better still—if that's the only way!—dispense with your conversation."
Lady Grace took a moment as if to examine this more closely. "You require of me not to communicate with Mr. Crimble at all?"
"Most assuredly I require it—since it's to that you insist on reducing me." He didn't look reduced, the master of Dedborough, as he spoke—which was doubtless precisely because he held his head so high to affirm what he suffered. "Is it so essential to your comfort," he demanded, "to hear him, or to make him, abuse me?"
"'Abusing' you, father dear, has nothing whatever to do with it!"—his daughter had fairly lapsed, with a despairing gesture, to the tenderness involved in her compassion for his perversity. "We look at the thing in a much larger way," she pursued, not heeding that she drew from him a sound of scorn for her "larger." "It's of our Treasure itself we talk—and of what can be done in such cases; though with a close application, I admit, to the case that you embody."
"Ah," Lord Theign asked as with absurd curiosity, "I embody a case?"
"Wonderfully, father—as you do everything; and it's the fact of its being exceptional," she explained, "that makes it so difficult to deal with."
His lordship had a gape for it. "'To deal with'? You're undertaking to 'deal' with me?"
She smiled more frankly now, as for a rift in the gloom. "Well, how can we help it if you will be a case?" And then as her tone but visibly darkened his wonder: "What we've set our hearts on is saving the picture."
"What you've set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight against me?"
But she persisted without heat. "What we've set our hearts on is working for England."
"And pray who in the world's 'England,'" he cried in his stupefaction, "unless I am?"
"Dear, dear father," she pleaded, "that's all we want you to be! I mean"—she didn't fear firmly to force it home—"in the real, the right, the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours."
"'Ours'?"—he couldn't but again throw back her word at her. "Isn't it, damn you, just in ours—?"
"No, no," she interrupted—"not in ours!" She smiled at him still, though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.
But he glared as at a senseless juggle. "What and who the devil are you talking about? What are 'we,' the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking—and riding!—straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs?" So he let her "have" the stout sound truth, as it were—and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have made her reel. "You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, God be thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly lot of us, take us together—make us numerous enough without any foreign aid or mixture: if that's what I understand you to mean!"
"You don't understand me at all—evidently; and above all I see you don't want to!" she had the bravery to add, "By 'our' sense of what's due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble's and mine—and nobody's else at all; since, as I tell you, it's only with him I've talked."
It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque measure of the scandal he faced. "So that 'you and Mr. Crimble' represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and duties of our house?"
Well, she was too earnest—as she clearly wished to let him see—to mind his perversion of it. "I express to you the way we feel."
"It's most striking to hear, certainly, what you express"—he had positively to laugh for it; "and you speak of him, with your insufferable 'we,' as if you were presenting him as your—God knows what! You've enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity." And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and rebutted nothing: "You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!"
"Yes, we're fellow-critics, father"—she accepted this opening. "I perfectly adopt your term." But it took her a minute to go further. "I saw Mr. Crim-ble here half an hour ago."
"Saw him 'here'?" Lord Theign amazedly asked. "He comes to you here—and Amy Sandgate has been silent?"
"It wasn't her business to tell you—since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect," Lady Grace then produced, "that he'll come again."
It brought down with a bang all her father's authority. "Then I simply exact of you that you don't see him."
The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a brimming cup. "Is that what you really meant by your condition just now—that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?"
"What I 'really meant' is what I really mean—that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether."
"Have nothing to do with him at all?"
"Have nothing to do with him at all."
"In fact"—she took it in—"give him wholly up."
He had an impatient gesture. "You sound as if I asked you to give up a fortune!" And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation—verily as if it had been in the balance for her—he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. "You're so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is like that sort of thing?"
Lady Grace took her time—but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him, what had gathered. "I like Mr. Crimble exceedingly, father—I think him clever, intelligent, good; I want what he wants—I want it, I think, really, as much; and I don't at all deny that he has helped to make me so want it. But that doesn't matter. I'll wholly cease to see him, I'll give him up forever, if—if—!" She faltered, however, she hung fire with a smile that anxiously, intensely appealed. Then she began and stopped again, "If—if—!" while her father caught her up with irritation.
"'If,' my lady? If what, please?"
"If you'll withdraw the offer of our picture to Mr. Bender—and never make another to any one else!"
He stood staring as at the size of it—then translated it into his own terms. "If I'll obligingly announce to the world that I've made an ass of myself you'll kindly forbear from your united effort—the charming pair of you—to show me up for one?"
Lady Grace, as if consciously not caring or attempting to answer this, simply gave the first flare of his criticism time to drop. It wasn't till a minute passed that she said: "You don't agree to my compromise?"
Ah, the question but fatally sharpened at a stroke the stiffness of his spirit. "Good God, I'm to 'compromise' on top of everything?—I'm to let you browbeat me, haggle and bargain with me, over a thing that I'm entitled to settle with you as things have ever been settled among us, by uttering to you my last parental word?"
"You don't care enough then for what you name?"—she took it up as scarce heeding now what he said.
"For putting an end to your odious commerce—? I give you the measure, on the contrary," said Lord Theign, "of how much I care: as you give me, very strangely indeed, it strikes me, that of what it costs you—!" But his other words were lost in the hard long look at her from which he broke off in turn as for disgust.
It was with an effect of decently shielding herself—the unuttered meaning came so straight—that she substituted words of her own. "Of what it costs me to redeem the picture?"
"To lose your tenth-rate friend"—he spoke without scruple now.
She instantly broke into ardent deprecation, pleading at once and warning. "Father, father, oh—! You hold the thing in your hands."