they smote him with waves of pleasure that assaulted him, beat upon him,
washed over him deliciously, and drowned out all consciousness of what he
was doing with his brush. So there were six places in his canvas which
had to be done over again.
At last Gwendolen got some peace of mind by sending word to the
Thompsons, in the neighborhood, that she was coming there to dinner.
She wouldn’t be reminded, at that table, that there was an absentee who
ought to be a presentee–a word which she meant to look out in the
dictionary at a calmer time.
About this time the old earl dropped in for a chat with the artist, and
invited him to stay to dinner. Tracy cramped down his joy and gratitude
by a sudden and powerful exercise of all his forces; and he felt that now
that he was going to be close to Gwendolen, and hear her voice and watch
her face during several precious hours, earth had nothing valuable to add
to his life for the present.
The earl said to himself, “This spectre can eat apples, apparently.
We shall find out, now, if that is a specialty. I think, myself, it’s a
specialty. Apples, without doubt, constitute the spectral limit. It was
the case with our first parents. No, I am wrong–at least only partly
right. The line was drawn at apples, just as in the present case, but it
was from the other direction.” The new clothes gave him a thrill of
pleasure and pride. He said to himself, “I’ve got part of him down to
date, anyway.”
Sellers said he was pleased with Tracy’s work; and he went on and engaged
him to restore his old masters, and said he should also want him to paint
his portrait and his wife’s and possibly his daughter’s. The tide of the
artist’s happiness was at flood, now. The chat flowed pleasantly along
while Tracy painted and Sellers carefully unpacked a picture which he had
brought with him. It was a chromo; a new one, just out. It was the
smirking, self-satisfied portrait of a man who was inundating the Union
with advertisements inviting everybody to buy his specialty, which was a
three-dollar shoe or a dress-suit or something of that kind. The old
gentleman rested the chromo flat upon his lap and gazed down tenderly
upon it, and became silent and meditative. Presently Tracy noticed that
he was dripping tears on it. This touched the young fellow’s sympathetic
nature, and at the same time gave him the painful sense of being an
intruder upon a sacred privacy, an observer of emotions which a stranger
ought not to witness. But his pity rose superior to other
considerations, and compelled him to try to comfort the old mourner with
kindly words and a show of friendly interest. He said:
“I am very sorry–is it a friend whom–”
“Ah, more than that, far more than that–a relative, the dearest I had on
earth, although I was never permitted to see him. Yes, it is young Lord
Berkeley, who perished so heroically in the awful conflagration, what is
the matter?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing.
It was a little startling to be so suddenly brought face to face, so to
speak, with a person one has heard so much talk about. Is it a good
likeness?”
“Without doubt, yes. I never saw him, but you can easily see the
resemblance to his father,” said Sellers, holding up the chromo and
glancing from it to the chromo misrepresenting the Usurping Earl and back
again with an approving eye.
“Well, no–I am not sure that I make out the likeness. It is plain that
the Usurping Earl there has a great deal of character and a long face
like a horse’s, whereas his heir here is smirky, moon-faced and
characterless.”
“We are all that way in the beginning–all the line,” said Sellers,
undisturbed. “We all start as moonfaced fools, then later we tadpole
along into horse-faced marvels of intellect and character. It is by that
sign and by that fact that I detect the resemblance here and know this
portrait to be genuine and perfect. Yes, all our family are fools at