Having greeted him with an explicitly gracious welcome and both hands
out, she had at once gone on: “You’ll of course have tea?--in the
saloon.”
But his mechanism seemed of the type that has to expand and revolve
before sounding. “Why; the very first thing?”
She only desired, as her laugh showed, to accommodate. “Ah, have it the
last if you like!”
“You see your English teas--!” he pleaded as he looked about him, so
immediately and frankly interested in the place and its contents that
his friend could only have taken this for the very glance with which he
must have swept Lady Lappington’s inferior scene.
“They’re too much for you?”
“Well, they’re too many. I think I’ve had two or three on the road--at
any rate my man did. I like to do business before--” But his sequence
dropped as his eye caught some object across the wealth of space.
She divertedly picked it up. “Before tea, Mr. Bender?”
“Before everything, Lady Sandgate.” He was immensely genial, but a
queer, quaint, rough-edged distinctness somehow kept it safe--for
himself.
“Then you’ve _come_ to do business?” Her appeal and her emphasis melted
as into a caress--which, however, spent itself on his large high person
as he consented, with less of demonstration but more of attention, to
look down upon her. She could therefore but reinforce it by an intenser
note. “To tell me you _will_ treat?”
Mr. Bender had six feet of stature and an air as of having received
benefits at the hands of fortune. Substantial, powerful, easy, he shone
as with a glorious cleanness, a supplied and equipped and appointed
sanity and security; aids to action that might have figured a pair of
very ample wings--wide pinions for the present conveniently folded, but
that he would certainly on occasion agitate for great efforts and spread
for great flights. These things would have made him quite an admirable,
even a worshipful, image of full-blown life and character, had not
the affirmation and the emphasis halted in one important particular.
Fortune, felicity, nature, the perverse or interfering old fairy at his
cradle-side--whatever the ministering power might have been--had simply
overlooked and neglected his vast wholly-shaven face, which thus showed
not so much for perfunctorily scamped as for not treated, as for neither
formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been
done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and
the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted
any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered
experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be
called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled “mug” rather
than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the
same time add that its wearer carried this featureless disk as with the
warranted confidence that might have attended a warning headlight or
a glaring motor-lamp. The object, however one named it, showed you at
least where he was, and most often that he was straight upon you. It
was fearlessly and resistingly across the path of his advance that Lady
Sandgate had thrown herself, and indeed with such success that he
soon connected her demonstration with a particular motive. “For your
grandmother, Lady Sandgate?” he then returned.
“For my grandmother’s _mother_, Mr. Bender--the most beautiful woman
of her time and the greatest of all Lawrences, no matter whose; as you
quite acknowledged, you know, in our talk in Bruton Street.”
Mr. Bender bethought himself further--yet drawing it out; as if the
familiar fact of his being “made up to” had never had such special
softness and warmth of pressure. “Do you want very, _very_ much----?”
She had already caught him up. “‘Very, very much’ for her? Well, Mr.
Bender,” she smilingly replied, “I think I should like her full value.”
“I mean”--he kindly discriminated--“do you want so badly to work her
off?”
“It would be an intense convenience to me--so much so that your telegram
made me at once fondly hope you’d be arriving to conclude.”
Such measure of response as he had good-naturedly given her was the
mere frayed edge of a mastering detachment, the copious, impatient range
elsewhere of his true attention. Somehow, however, he still seemed kind
even while, turning his back upon her, he moved off to look at one of
the several, the famous Dedborough pictures--stray specimens, by every
presumption, lost a little in the whole bright bigness. “‘Conclude’?” he
echoed as he approached a significantly small canvas. “You ladies want
to get there before the road’s so much as laid or the country’s safe! Do
you know what this _here_ is?” he at once went on.
“Oh, you can’t have _that!_” she cried as with full authority--“and
you must really understand that you can’t have everything. You mustn’t
expect to ravage Dedborough.”
He had his nose meanwhile close to the picture. “I guess it’s a bogus
Cuyp--but I know Lord Theign _has_ things. He won’t do business?”
“He’s not in the least, and can never be, in my tight place,” Lady
Sandgate replied; “but he’s as proud as he’s kind, dear man, and
as solid as he’s proud; so that if you came down under a different
impression--!” Well, she could only exhale the folly of his error with
an unction that represented, whatever he might think of it, all her
competence to answer for their host.
He scarce thought of it enough, on any side, however, to be diverted
from prior dispositions. “I came on an understanding that I should find
my friend Lord John, and that Lord Theign would, on his introduction,
kindly let me look round. But being before lunch in Bruton Street I
knocked at your door----”
“For another look,” she quickly interposed, “at my Lawrence?”
“For another look at _you_, Lady Sandgate--your great-grandmother wasn’t
required. Informed you were here, and struck with the coincidence of my
being myself presently due,” he went on, “I despatched you my wire, on
coming away, just to keep up your spirits.”
“You _don’t_ keep them up, you depress them to anguish,” she almost
passionately protested, “when you don’t tell me you’ll treat!”
He paused in his preoccupation, his perambulation, conscious evidently
of no reluctance that was worth a scene with so charming and so hungry
a woman. “Well, if it’s a question of your otherwise suffering torments,
may I have another interview with the old lady?”
“Dear Mr. Bender, she’s in the flower of her youth; she only yearns for
interviews, and you may have,” Lady Sandgate earnestly declared, “as
many as you like.”
“Oh, you must be there to protect me!”
“Then as soon as I return----!”
“Well,”--it clearly cost him little to say--“I’ll come right round.”
She joyously registered the vow. “Only meanwhile then, please, never a
word!”
“Never a word, certainly. But where all this time,” Mr. Bender asked,
“is Lord John?”
Lady Sandgate, as he spoke, found her eyes meeting those of a young
woman who, presenting herself from without, stood framed in the doorway
to the terrace; a slight fair grave young woman, of middle, stature and
simply dressed, whose brow showed clear even under the heavy shade of
a large hat surmounted with big black bows and feathers. Her eyes
had vaguely questioned those of her elder, who at once replied to the
gentleman forming the subject of their inquiry: “Lady Grace must know.”
At this the young woman came forward, and Lady Sandgate introduced the
visitor. “My dear Grace, this is Mr. Breckenridge Bender.”
The younger daughter of the house might have arrived in preoccupation,
but she had urbanity to spare. “Of whom Lord John has told me,” she
returned, “and whom I’m glad to see. Lord John,” she explained to his
waiting friend, “is detained a moment in the park, open to-day to a big
Temperance school-feast, where our party is mostly gathered; so that if
you care to go out--!” She gave him in fine his choice.
But this was clearly a thing that, in the conditions, Mr. Bender wasn’t
the man to take precipitately; though his big useful smile disguised his
prudence. “Are there any pictures in the park?”
Lady Grace’s facial response represented less humour perhaps, but more
play. “We find our park itself rather a picture.”
Mr. Bender’s own levity at any rate persisted. “With a big Temperance
school-feast?”
“Mr. Bender’s a great judge of pictures,” Lady Sandgate said as to
forestall any impression of excessive freedom.
“Will there be more tea?” he pursued, almost presuming on this.
It showed Lady Grace for comparatively candid and literal. “Oh, there’ll
be plenty of tea.”
This appeared to determine Mr. Bender. “Well, Lady Grace, I’m after
pictures, but I take them ‘neat.’ May I go right round here?”
“Perhaps, love,” Lady Sandgate at once said, “you’ll let me show him.”
“A moment, dear”--Lady Grace gently demurred. “Do go round,” she
conformably added to Mr. Bender; “take your ease and your time.
Everything’s open and visible, and, with our whole company dispersed,
you’ll have the place to yourself.”
He rose, in his genial mass, to the opportunity. “I’ll be in
clover--sure!” But present to him was the richest corner of the pasture,
which he could fluently enough name. “And I’ll find ‘The Beautiful
Duchess of Waterbridge’?”
She indicated, off to the right, where a stately perspective opened, the
quarter of the saloon to which we have seen Mr. Banks retire. “At the
very end of _those_ rooms.”
He had wide eyes for the vista. “About thirty in a row, hey?” And he was
already off. “I’ll work right through!”