The Outcry | Page 6

regard my great-grandmother as national) to be scattered about the
world."
"There's much in this country and age," he replied in an off-hand
manner, "to be said about that," The present, however, was not the time
to say it all; so he said something else instead, accompanying it with a
smile that signified sufficiency. "To my friends, I need scarcely remark
to you, I'm all the friend."
She had meanwhile seen the butler reappear by the door that opened to
the terrace, and though the high, bleak, impersonal approach of this
functionary was ever, and more and more at every step, a process to
defy interpretation, long practice evidently now enabled her to suggest,
as she turned again to her fellow-visitor a reading of it. "It's the friend
then clearly who's wanted in the park."
She might, by the way Banks looked at her, have snatched from his
hand a missive addressed to another; though while he addressed
himself to her companion he allowed for her indecorum sufficiently to
take it up where she had left it. "By her ladyship, my lord, who sends to
hope you'll join them below the terrace."
"Ah, Grace hopes," said Lady Sandgate for the young man's
encouragement. "There you are!"
Lord John took up the motor-cap he had lain down on coming in. "I
rush to Lady Grace, but don't demoralise Bender!" And he went forth to
the terrace and the gardens.

Banks looked about as for some further exercise of his high function.
"Will you have tea, my lady?"
This appeared to strike her as premature. "Oh, thanks--when they all
come in."
"They'll scarcely all, my lady"--he indicated respectfully that he knew
what he was talking about. "There's tea in her ladyship's tent; but," he
qualified, "it has also been ordered for the saloon."
"Ah then," she said cheerfully, "Mr. Bender will be glad--!" And she
became, with this, aware of the approach of another visitor. Banks
considered, up and down, the gentleman ushered in, at the left, by the
footman who had received him at the main entrance to the house. "Here
he must be, my lady." With which he retired to the spacious opposite
quarter, where he vanished, while the footman, his own office
performed, retreated as he had come, and Lady Sandgate, all hospitality,
received the many-sided author of her specious telegram, of Lord
John's irritating confidence and of Lady Lappington's massive cheque.

II
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