For Jacinta Part 29

She met the little lady's sympathetic gaze steadily. "Still, that is so very little, after all."

Mrs. Hatherly smiled rea.s.suringly. "My dear," she said, "I think you do not quite understand all that man is yet. In spite of the climate he and his comrade are going to be successful."

Then she turned, and Jacinta rose, for the Senora Anasona and Muriel were coming down the stairway.

CHAPTER XXI

THE PICTURES

Austin had been gone a fortnight when Jacinta and Muriel Gascoyne sat under the lee of the _Estremedura_'s deck-house one morning, on their way to Las Palmas. Above them the mastheads swung languidly athwart a cloudless sweep of blue, and the sea frothed in white incandescence about the lurching hull below as the little yacht-like steamer reeled eastwards with a rainbow in the spray that whirled about her bows.

Astern of her the Peak's white cone gleamed above its wrappings of fleecy mist, and ahead on the far horizon Grand Canary swam a purple cloud.

Jacinta was dressed ornately in the latest English mode, and it seemed to Muriel that she had put on conventional frivolity along with her attire. Indeed, Muriel had noticed a change in her companion during the last few days, one that was marked by outbreaks of flippancy and somewhat ironical humour. An English naval officer leaned upon the back of her chair, and a tourist of the same nationality stood balancing himself against the rolling with his hand on the rail that ran along the deck-house. The latter was looking down at Macallister, who sat upon the deck with a little box in front of him.

"I brought up the two or three sketches ye were asking for, Mr.

Coulstin," he said. "The saloon's full of jabbering Spaniards, and the messroom's over hot."

The tourist screwed the gla.s.s he wore more tightly into his eye. "If they're equal to the one I saw in the N. W. A. store I may be open to make a purchase," he said. "I think you told me you were acquainted with the artist, Miss Brown?"

"I believe I did," said Jacinta, who was conscious that Macallister was watching her languidly. "You will, however, no doubt be able to judge his pictures for yourself."

Coulston made a little humourous gesture. "I am not a painter, and I could scarcely venture to call myself a connoisseur. Still, I buy a picture or two occasionally, and the one I mentioned rather took my fancy. A sketch or two of that kind would make a pleasant memento."

"One would fancy that a good photograph would be more reliable, as well as cheaper," said the naval officer.

Coulston reproachfully shook his head. "I'm afraid we differ there," he said. "Leaving out the question of colour, a photograph is necessarily an artificial thing. It wants life and atmosphere, and you can never put that into a picture by a mechanical process. Only a man can feel, and trans.m.u.te his impressions into material. Accuracy of detail is, after all, by comparison, a secondary consideration, but perhaps I had better pull up before my hobby makes a bolt of it."

"I have heard of people riding a hobby uncomfortably hard," said Jacinta reflectively.

"That, I think, is, to be accurate, seldom what happens. If a man has a genuine hobby, it never needs spurring. It is, in fact, unpleasantly apt to run away with him on the smallest provocation. Are steamboat men addicted to making sketches, Mr. Macallister?"

"No," said Macallister, grinning. "At least its not the usual thing, but I once sailed with another of them who did. He was second engineer, and would draw the chief one day. It was very like him, so like that it cost the man his job, and a wife as well. Says he, 'How could ye expect me to idealise a man with a mouth like yon?'"

"But how did that affect his wife?" asked the officer.

Macallister grinned more broadly, but it was Jacinta he looked at.

"Ye see," he said, "he had not got one then. He was second engineer, and would have gone chief in a new boat if he'd stayed with that company.

The young woman was ambitious, and she told him she would not marry him until he was promoted, on principle. He was a long while over it after he lost that berth, and then--also on principle--he would not marry her."

Jacinta laughed, though Muriel fancied she had seen a momentary hardening of her face.

"She probably deserved it, though one can't help concluding that she wouldn't feel it much," she said. "That is one of the advantages of being a practical person; but hadn't you better get the drawings out?"

Macallister took out a sketch in water-colour and held it up. It showed a strip of a steamer's deck, with the softened sunlight beating down through an awning upon a man in skipper's uniform who lay, cigar in hand, in a hammock that swung beneath the spars. He was, to judge from his expression, languidly contented with everything, and there was a big gla.s.s of amber-coloured liquid on the little table beside him, and a tier of bottles laid out upon the deck. Beneath it ran the legend, "For men must work."

"That," said Jacinta, "is, at least, what they tell their wives."

The tourist gazed at the drawing, and then turned to her. He was, as she had discovered already, a painfully didactic person.

"The conceit," he said, "is a somewhat happy one, though the sketch is, it seems to me, a little weak in technique. As we admitted, one difference between a photograph and a painting is that the artist records his own sensations in the latter, and stamps it with, at least, a trace of his individuality. In that respect the sketch is, I fancy, characteristic. The artist, one could imagine, was in full sympathy with his subject--the far niente--but I am, no doubt, getting prosy."

For no very apparent reason a little flush of colour crept into Jacinta's face, and Macallister, who saw it, chuckled as he took out another sketch.

"Well," he said, reflectively, "I never met a man who could do nothing more gracefully than Mr. Austin, but I'll let ye see the rest of them, since they're in my charge to sell. Mr. Austin, who wants the money, took a sudden notion he'd go to Africa, and, if they've had a quick run, he's now humping palm oil puncheons in a stranded steamer's hold. I'm thinking it will be a big change for him."

The naval officer laughed softly. "From what I know of the tropics I fancy you are right. In fact, it's rather difficult to imagine the man I met at the bull fight doing that kind of thing at all. Salvage work is necessarily hard under any circ.u.mstances, and anywhere, but the last place I would care to attempt it in is Western Africa. What sent--him--there?"

"Ye must not ask me," and a little twinkle, for which Jacinta longed to shake him, crept into Macallister's eyes. "Now, there are clever folks who will look at a man, or maybe talk to him awhile, and then label him, thinking they know just what to expect of him. It does him no great harm, and it pleases them, until one day he does something that astonishes them in spite of his label. Then they're apt to get angry with him. A man, ye see, is, after all, not that unlike an engine. Ye cannot tell what may be going on in the inside of him, and when the result's distressing it's most often the fault of injudicious handling."

Jacinta, to whom he apparently directed his observations, contrived to regard him with a little smile, and he proceeded to extricate another sketch, a canvas this time.

"This one is different," he said.

Coulston, who apparently concurred with him, gazed at the picture with a trace of astonishment. It showed a big cargo lancha lurching out, deep-loaded, through a fringe of tumbling surf with four men straining at the ponderous oars. The wet rags they wore clung about their limbs, and there was weariness in their grim, brown faces. Bent backs and set lips had their significance, and the sketch was stamped with the suggestion of endurance and endeavour. Yet, as those who saw it felt, there was triumph in it, too, for while the rollers came seething in to hurl her back the lancha was clawing off the sh.o.r.e.

"It's good!" said the navy man. "It's unusually good. Those fellows are played out, and they know if they slacken down for a moment she'll roll over with them or go up on the beach. The sea's running in against her--one finds out by trying it how hard it is to pull off against a surf--but they're driving her out. Presumably, that's what you call the motive of the thing."

The tourist nodded appreciatively. "Yes," he said. "In spite of certain faults in drawing, it's well worked out. What puzzles me is how the man who did the other one came to feel it as he evidently did. One could fancy he had had a revelation, and that in some respects he was a different man when he painted this. I'll offer you five guineas for it, Mr. Macallister."

"Then," said Macallister, promptly, "ye can have it. Eight guineas for the two, if ye would like the other one. There are two or three more of them here ye might care to look at." He stopped a moment, and added, as if in explanation: "I'm anxious to do what I can for Mr. Austin. Many's the time I've stole his wine and sold his clothes."

He undid a package, and, first of all, took out a photograph of a young girl with a comely English face, which Jacinta glanced at somewhat sharply. Then she became intent when there followed several rudimentary pencil and pastel sketches of herself, until Macallister handed Coulston a picture. He turned from it to Jacinta, and looked at her with a steadiness a young woman less accustomed to masculine criticism would probably have found disconcerting.

She lay smiling at him in the canvas lounge, very pretty and very dainty, with conventional indifference expressed even in her pose. She was, he fancied, a woman who knew her world thoroughly, and had the greater influence therein because she seldom asked too much from it.

Then he glanced again at her portrait almost incredulously, for it showed the little shapely head held well erect, the red lips straightened and firmly closed, and the glow of a strenuous purpose in the eyes. Stooping, he laid the picture on her knees with a little smile.

Jacinta laughed softly. "Yes," she said, "of course, I know what you mean. I am essentially modern and frivolous, and not in the least like that. Still, you see, all of us have our serious moments now and then, although it is probably fortunate they don't last long."

"Ah," said Coulston, wilfully neglecting his opportunity, "I almost fancy a light breaks in on me. One could ent.i.tle this inspiration, and it is, you know, possible to transmit it occasionally. I wonder whether it would make the idea clearer if we placed the three pictures together. Mr. Macallister will permit me?"

He set up the first sketch of the steamboat skipper against the lifeboat skids, and gazed at it critically. "a.s.suming that a picture contains something of its painter's ego, you will observe how the idea of petty indulgence and his appreciation of sensual comfort is impressed on one,"

he said. "Now we will set up the other sketch of the sailormen. There you see restraint, tense effort, abnegation--and victory--in one sense a spiritual triumph over the body. It is an interesting question how the man who painted both could have been brought to grasp what Lieutenant Onslow calls the motive of the last one; but if we might venture to place another picture between."

Jacinta raised her head sharply, and there was an ominous sparkle in her eyes. "No," she said, with quiet incisiveness, "I would sooner you didn't. There are certainly men whose hobby, now and then, runs away with them. Macallister, will you put that portrait back again?"

She handed it him face downwards, for the others had not seen it, and Lieutenant Onslow turned to the tourist.

"I don't quite understand, but I fancy Miss Brown doesn't approve of vivisection any more than I do," he said. "It really isn't decent to turn anybody inside out."

"I wonder," said Coulston, ignoring him, "if you would mind my offering to buy the three?"

He was looking steadily at her, but Jacinta contrived for a moment to catch Macallister's eye. So swift was the flashed glance that the tourist did not notice it, but Jacinta could convey a good deal with a look, and the engineer was a man of considerable intelligence.

"That one is not for sale," he said.