The Coming of Bill Part 28

Ruth went to the telephone. After a short conversation she turned to Kirk with sparkling eyes and the air of one with news to impart.

"Kirk! She wants you to paint her portrait!"

"What!"

"She's engaged to Bailey! Just got engaged! And the first thing she does is to insist on his letting her come to you for her portrait,"

Ruth bubbled with laughter. "It's to be a birthday present for Bailey, and Bailey has got to pay for it. That's so exactly like Sybil."

"I hope the portrait will be. She's taking chances."

"I think it's simply sweet of her. She's a real friend."

"At fairly long intervals, apparently. Did you say you had not seen her for two years?"

"She is an erratic little thing with an awfully good heart. I feel touched at her remembering us. Oh, Kirk, you must do a simply wonderful portrait, something that everybody will talk about, and then our fortune will be made! You will become the only painter that people will go to for their portraits."

Kirk did not answer. His experiences of late had developed in him an unwonted mistrust of his powers. To this was added the knowledge that, except for an impressionist study of Ruth for private exhibition only, he had never attempted a portrait. To be called upon suddenly like this to show his powers gave him much the same feeling which he had experienced when called upon as a child to recite poetry before an audience. It was a species of stage fright.

But it was certainly a chance. Portrait-painting was an uncommonly lucrative line of business. His imagination, stirred by Ruth's, saw visions of wealthy applicants turned away from the studio door owing to pressure of work on the part of the famous man for whose services they were bidding vast sums.

"By Jove!" he said thoughtfully.

Another aspect of the matter occurred to him.

"I wonder what Bailey thinks about it!"

"Oh, he's probably so much in love with her that he doesn't mind what she does. Besides, Bailey likes you."

"Does he?"

"Oh, well, if he doesn't, he will. This will bring you together."

"I suppose he knows about it?"

"Oh, yes. Sybil said he did. It's all settled. She will be here to-morrow for the first sitting."

Kirk spoke the fear that was in his mind.

"Ruth, old girl, I'm horribly nervous about this. I am taken with a sort of second sight. I see myself making a ghastly failure of this job and Bailey knocking me down and refusing to come across with the cheque."

"Sybil is bringing the cheque with her to-morrow," said Ruth simply.

"Is she?" said Kirk. "Now I wonder if that makes it worse or better.

I'm trying to think!"

Sybil Wilbur fluttered in next day at noon, a tiny, restless creature who darted about the studio like a humming-bird. She effervesced with the joy of life. She uttered little squeaks of delight at everything she saw. She hugged Ruth, beamed at Kirk, went wild over William Bannister, thought the studio too cute for words, insisted on being shown all over it, and talked incessantly.

It was about two o'clock before she actually began to sit, and even then she was no statue. A thought would come into her small head and she would whirl round to impart it to Ruth, destroying in a second the pose which it had taken Kirk ten painful minutes to fix.

Kirk was too amused to be irritated. She was such a friendly little soul and so obviously devoted to Ruth that he felt she was ent.i.tled to be a nuisance as a sitter. He wondered more and more what weird principle of selection had been at work to bring Bailey and this b.u.t.terfly together. He had never given any deep thought to the study of his brother-in-law's character; but, from his small knowledge of him, he would have imagined some one a trifle more substantial and serious as the ideal wife for him. Life, he conceived, was to Bailey a stately march. Sybil Wilbur evidently looked on it as a mad gallop.

Ruth felt the same. She was fond of Sybil, but she could not see her as the fore-ordained Mrs. Bailey.

"I suppose she swept him off his feet," she said. "It just shows that you never really get to know a person even if you're their sister.

Bailey must have all sorts of hidden sides to his character which I never noticed--unless _she_ has. But I don't think there is much of that about Sybil. She's just a child. But she's very amusing, isn't she? She enjoys life so furiously."

"I think Bailey will find her rather a handful. Does she ever sit still, by the way? If she is going to act right along as she did to-day this portrait will look like that cubist picture of the 'Dance at the Spring'."

As the sittings went on Miss Wilbur consented gradually to simmer down and the portrait progressed with a fair amount of speed. But Kirk was conscious every day of a growing sensation of panic. He was trying his very hardest, but it was bad work, and he knew it.

His hand had never had very much cunning, but what it had had it had lost in the years of his idleness. Every day showed him more clearly that the portrait of Miss Wilbur, on which so much depended, was an amateurish daub. He worked doggedly on, but his heart was cold with that chill that grips the artist when he looks on his work and sees it to be bad.

At last it was finished. Ruth thought it splendid. Sybil Wilbur p.r.o.nounced it cute, as she did most things. Kirk could hardly bear to look at it. In its finished state it was worse than he could have believed possible.

In the old days he had been a fair painter with one or two bad faults.

Now the faults seemed to have grown like weeds, choking whatever of merit he might once have possessed. This was a horrible production, and he was profoundly thankful when it was packed up and removed from the studio. But behind his thankfulness lurked the feeling that all was not yet over, that there was worse to come.

It came.

It was heralded by a tearful telephone call from Miss Wilbur, who rang up Ruth with the agitated information that "Bailey didn't seem to like it." And on the heels of the message came Bailey in person, pink from forehead to collar, and almost as wrathful as he had been on the great occasion of his first visit to the studio. His annoyance robbed his speech of its normal stateliness. He struck a colloquial note unusual with him.

"I guess you know what I've come about," he said.

He had found Kirk alone in the studio, as ill luck would have it. In the absence of Ruth he ventured to speak more freely than he would have done in her presence.

"It's an infernal outrage," he went on. "I've been stung, and you know it."

Kirk said nothing. His silence infuriated Bailey.

"It's the portrait I'm speaking about--the portrait, if you have the nerve to call it that, of Miss Wilbur. I was against her sitting to you from the first, but she insisted. Now she's sorry."

"It's as bad as all that, is it?" said Kirk dully. He felt curiously indisposed to fight. A listlessness had gripped him. He was even a little sorry for Bailey. He saw his point of view and sympathized with it.

"Yes," said Bailey fiercely. "It is, and you know it."

Kirk nodded. Bailey was quite right. He did know it.

"It's a joke," went on Bailey shrilly. "I can't hang it up. People would laugh at it. And to think that I paid you all that money for it.

I could have got a real artist for half the price."

"That is easily remedied," said Kirk. "I will send you a cheque to-morrow."

Bailey was not to be appeased. The venom of more than three years cried out for utterance. He had always held definite views upon Kirk, and Heaven had sent him the opportunity of expressing them.

"Yes, I dare say," he said contemptuously. "That would settle the whole thing, wouldn't it? What do you think you are--a millionaire? Talking as if that amount of money made no difference to you? Where does my sister come in? How about Ruth? You sneak her away from her home and then-----"

Kirk's lethargy left him. He flushed.