And the creepy feeling that it gave him, of a man missing,
grated on his sense of comfort and security-on his cosiness. Though he
could not have said why, it made him feel uneasy.
He looked now at the clock--a quarter to three! It would be all over in
a quarter of an hour. Where could the young fellow be?
It was only when Mr. Justice Bentham delivered judgment that he got over
the turn he had received.
Behind the wooden erection, by which he was fenced from more ordinary
mortals, the learned Judge leaned forward. The electric light, just
turned on above his head, fell on his face, and mellowed it to an orange
hue beneath the snowy crown of his wig; the amplitude of his robes grew
before the eye; his whole figure, facing the comparative dusk of the
Court, radiated like some majestic and sacred body. He cleared his
throat, took a sip of water, broke the nib of a quill against the desk,
and, folding his bony hands before him, began.
To James he suddenly loomed much larger than he had ever thought Bentham
would loom. It was the majesty of the law; and a person endowed with
a nature far less matter-of-fact than that of James might have been
excused for failing to pierce this halo, and disinter therefrom the
somewhat ordinary Forsyte, who walked and talked in every-day life under
the name of Sir Walter Bentham.
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