any blankness: “My tremendous Lawrence, don’t you know?—in her wedding-dress, down to her knees; with such extraordinarily speaking eyes, such lovely arms and hands, such wonderful flesh-tints: universally considered the masterpiece of the artist.”
Lord John seemed to look a moment not so much at the image evoked, in which he wasn’t interested, as at certain possibilities lurking behind it. “And are you going to sell the masterpiece of the artist?”
She held her head high. “I’ve indignantly refused—for all his pressing me so hard.”
“Yet that’s what he nevertheless pursues you to-day to keep up?”
The question had a little the ring of those of which the occupant of a witness-box is mostly the subject, but Lady Sandgate was so far as this went an imperturbable witness. “I need hardly fear it perhaps if—in the light of what you tell me of your arrangement with him—his pursuit becomes, where I am concerned, a figure of speech.”
“Oh,” Lord John returned, “he kills two birds with one stone—he sees both Sir Joshua and you.”
This version of the case had its effect, for the moment, on his fair associate. “Does he want to buy their pride and glory?”
The young man, however, struck on his own side, became at first but the bright reflector of her thought. “Is that wonder for sale?”
She closed her eyes as with the shudder of hearing such words. “Not, surely, by any monstrous chance! Fancy dear, proud Theign———!”
“I can’t fancy him—no!” And Lord John appeared to renounce the effort. “But a cat may look at a king and a sharp funny Yankee at anything.”
These things might be, Lady Sandgate’s face and gesture apparently signified; but another question diverted her. “You’re clearly a wonderful showman, but do you mind my asking you whether you’re on such an occasion a—well, a closely interested one?”
“ ‘Interested’?” he echoed; though it wasn’t to gain time, he showed, for he would in that case have taken more. “To the extent, you mean, of my little percentage?” And then as in silence she but kept a slightly grim smile on him: “Why do you ask if—with your high delicacy about your great-grandmother—you’ve nothing to place?”
It took her a minute to say, while her fine eye only rolled; but when she spoke that organ boldly rested and the truth vividly appeared. “I ask because people like you, Lord John, strike me as dangerous to the—how shall I name it?—the common weal; and because of my general strong feeling that we don’t want any more of our national treasures (for I 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 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