“Then I hope you’ve ground for believing that if I go the right way about it he’s likely to listen to me.”
Lady Sandgate measured her ground—which scarce seemed extensive. “The person he most listens to just now—and in fact at any time, as you must have seen for yourself—is that arch-tormentor, or at least beautiful wheedler, his elder daughter.”
“Lady Imber’s here?” Lord John alertly asked.
“She arrived last night and—as we’ve other visitors—seems to have set up a side-show in the garden.”
“Then she’ll ‘draw’ of course immensely, as she always does. But her sister won’t be in that case with her,” the young man supposed.
“Because Grace feels herself naturally an independent show? So she well may,” said Lady Sandgate, “but I must tell you that when I last noticed them there Kitty was in the very act of leading her away.”
Lord John figured it a moment. “Lady Imber”—he ironically enlarged the figure—“can lead people away.”
“Oh, dear Grace,” his companion returned, “happens fortunately to be firm!”
This seemed to strike him for a moment as equivocal. “Not against me, however—you don’t mean? You don’t think she has a beastly prejudice——?”
“Surely you can judge about it; as knowing best what may—or what mayn’t—have happened between you.”
“Well, I try to judge”—and such candour as was possible to Lord John seemed to sit for a moment on his brow. “But I’m in fear of seeing her too much as I want to see her.”
There was an appeal in it that Lady Sandgate might have been moved to meet “Are you absolutely in earnest about her?”
“Of course I am—why shouldn’t I be? But,” he said with impatience, “I want help.”
“Very well then, that’s what Lady Imber’s giving you.” And as it appeared to take him time to read into these words their full sense, she produced others, and so far did help him—though the effort was in a degree that of her exhibiting with some complacency her own unassisted control of stray signs and shy lights. “By telling her, by bringing it home to her, that if she’ll make up her mind to accept you the Duchess will do the handsome thing. Handsome, I mean, by Kitty.”
Lord John, appropriating for his convenience the truth in this, yet regarded it as open to a becoming, an improving touch from himself. “Well, and by me.” To which he added with more of a challenge in it: “But you really know what my mother will do?”
“By my system,” Lady Sandgate smiled, “you see I’ve guessed. What your mother will do is what brought you over!”
“Well, it’s that,” he allowed—“and something else.”
“Something else?” she derisively echoed. “I should think ‘that,’ for an ardent lover, would have been enough.”
“Ah, but it’s all one Job! I mean it’s one idea,” he hastened to explain—“if you think Lady Imber’s really acting on her.”
“Mightn’t you go and see?”
“I would in a moment if I hadn’t to look out for another matter too.” And he renewed his attention to his watch. “I mean getting straight at my American, the party I just mentioned———”
But she had already taken him up. “You too have an American and a ‘party,’ and yours also motors down——?”
“Mr. Breckenridge Bender.” Lord John named him with a shade of elation.
She gaped at the fuller light “You know my Breckenridge?—who I hoped was coming for me!”
Lord John as freely, but more gaily, wondered. “Had he told you so?”
She 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