CHAPTER XVII
There was a ceaseless hum of voices in the labyrinth of brilliant rooms, with their atmosphere of transient spring sunshine and permeating, faint odour of fresh paint. Few people came to see the pictures, which covered the walls with a crude patchwork of seas and goddesses, portraits and landscapes: all that by popular repute were worth seeing had been exhibited already to the people who were now invited to view them,—at the studios on Show Sunday, and on the Outsiders' Day. One entered the gloomy gates of Burlington House on the yearly occasion of the Private View because it was, socially, a great public function, in order to see the celebrities, who were sure to be there, from the latest actress to the newest bishop. In one corner a belated critic endeavoured to scratch hasty impressions on his shirt-cuff or the margin of a little square catalogue; in another an interested dealer used his best endeavours to rivet a patron's attention on the merits of his speculative purchase. The providers of the feast were not so much in evidence as their wives and daughters; the artist often affects to despise the occasion, and contents himself with a general survey—frequently limited to his own pictures—on Varnishing Day.
The Hanging Committee had dealt kindly with Lightmark's Academy picture. When it was passed in review before these veterans, after a long procession of inanely smiling portraits, laboured, wooden landscapes, and preternaturally developed heroes, the expression of satiated boredom and damnation of draughts, which variously pervaded the little row of arbitrators, was for a moment dissipated. There was a movement of chairs, followed by an exchange of complimentary murmurs; and the picture was finally niched into a space which happened to fit it between two life-size portraits on the line in one of the smaller rooms.
On the fashionable afternoon Lightmark's work was never without the little admiring crowd which denotes a picture of more than usual interest. The canvas, which had loomed so large in the new studio in Grove Road, was smaller than many of its neighbours, but its sombre strength of colour, relieved by the pale, silvery gold of its wide frame, and the white dresses of the ladies portrayed in the pictures on either side, made it at once noticeable.
The critics next day referred to it as a nocturne in black and gold, and more than one of the daily journals contained an enthusiastic description of the subject—an ocean-steamer entering a Thames graving-dock at night-time, with torch-light effects; and a mist on the river.
Eve fluttered delightedly from room to room with her mother, recurring always to the neighbourhood of her husband's picture, and receiving congratulations by the score. It had been a disappointment to her when her husband, at the eleventh hour, expressed his inability to be present; but even Mrs. Sylvester's remonstrances had failed to move him, and the two ladies had come under the Colonel's escort.
"I didn't know your husband was so nervous," said Mrs. Dollond sceptically. "Is this the effect of matrimony?… Oh, Mrs. Lightmark, do look at that creature in peacock blue! Did you ever see such a gown? Have you seen my husband's pictures? He's got one in every room, nearly. Between you and me, they're all of them pretty bad; but so long as people don't know any better, and buy them, what does it matter? Ah, Colonel Lightmark, how do you do? Of course I've seen your nephew's picture. I've been saying all sorts of nice things about it to Mrs. Lightmark."
"It's pretty good, I suppose," suggested the Colonel radiantly. "Have you seen the Outcry this week? There's no end of a good notice about it, and about your husband's pictures, too."
"Really? I wonder who wrote it. I must ask him to dinner, if he's respectable. We never read critiques nowadays. They're so dreadfully rude to Academicians, you know—always talking about 'pot-boilers,' and suggesting that they ought to retire on their laurels. As if laurels were any good! One can't keep a carriage on laurels."
"No, by Jove! it wouldn't be good for the horses. I say, though,
Mrs. Dollond, is one supposed to go through all the rooms?"
"Oh yes," replied the lady composedly; "all except the water-colours, and sculpture, and architecture. One only goes there to flirt, as a rule. Personally, I always get up the pictures from 'Academy Notes,' when I haven't seen them at the studios, you know. Yes; I should like some tea, please, since Mrs. Lightmark has deserted you. Is that Lady Garnett with her? What lovely white hair! I wonder where she gets it."
Lady Garnett shrugged her shoulders a little petulantly after she had made the ghost of a return to Mrs. Dollond's airy greeting.
"My dear," she said, turning to Eve confidentially, "may I confess to you that I am not altogether too fond of that woman? Is she a great friend of yours, or don't you know her well enough to abuse her? I like the husband; he amuses me, though he is rather a bear. Otherwise, I should not see very much of Mrs. Dollond, I promise you."
Eve smiled at the thought of Mr. Dollond's eccentricities, and then her face grew rather grave.
"Shall we go into the lecture-room?" she suggested. "It is cooler there among the statues, and perhaps we shall be able to sit down."
The old lady assented with alacrity.
"Yes," she said; "by all means let us leave these painty pictures, and we will have a chat; you shall tell me of your wanderings. Apropos, did you see anything of our friend Philip? His last letter—a long time ago; he is becoming a bad correspondent—struck me as rather triste, even for him. I'm afraid he is not well."
"Yes," said Eve slowly; "we went over to Bordighera one day while we were at Cannes, and we stayed a night at the hotel, but we didn't see Mr. Rainham. He had gone over to Monte Carlo."
"Ah, poor fellow, what an idea! I wonder what dragged him there."
Eve looked at the old lady questioningly for a minute.
"I think he went with the Dollonds," she answered gravely.
"Ah, my dear, no wonder his letter was dull! Then you didn't see him? Well, I suppose he will come back soon. You mustn't be jealous of him, you know. He is very much lié with your husband, isn't he?"
"I don't suppose he will see quite so much of him now."
There seemed to be a trace of weariness in the girl's voice as she answered, and Lady Garnett glanced at her sharply before she let her eyes continue their task of wandering in a kind of absent scrutiny of the sculptured exhibits in the room.
"But of course not…. How terrible all these great plaster figures are, and the busts, too! They are so dreary, they have the air of being made for a cemetery. Don't they make you think of tombstones and mausoleums?"
Eve looked at her a little wonderingly.
"Are they very bad? Do you know, I rather like them. Not so much as the pictures, of course; but still I think some of them are charming, though I am rather glad Dick isn't a sculptor. Don't you like that? What is it—Bacchus on a panther?"
"My dear, you are quite right," said the old lady decisively, dropping her tortoise-shell lorgnon into her lap, and suppressing a yawn. "Only, it is you who are charming! I must go to the Grosvenor as soon as it opens to see if your clever husband, who seems to be able to paint everything and everybody, has done you justice…. But you mustn't sit talking to an old grumbler like me any longer. Go back to your picture; Mr. Dollond will pilot you. And if you encounter Mary on the way, tell her that a certain discontented old lady of her acquaintance wants to be taken home. Au revoir."
About five minutes later Mary Masters found her aunt half asleep. The paint had made her stupid, she said. She could understand now why painters did not improve as they grew older; it was the smell of the paint.
"Ah," she said, as they passed out into the busy whirl of Piccadilly, "how glad I shall be to get back to my Masons and Corots. Though I like that pretty little Mrs. Lightmark…. Poor Philip! Now tell me whom you saw. Charles Sylvester, of course? But no, I am too sleepy now; you shall tell me all about it after dinner."
It was six o'clock before the Colonel was able to deposit his bulky, military person rather stiffly on a cushioned seat, and to remove his immaculate silk hat, with an expression of weary satisfaction. He had devoted all the sunny spring afternoon, (when he might have been at Hurlingham, or playing whist at the "Rag"), to making his way, laboriously and apologetically, from room to room in search of friends and acquaintances, whom, when found, he would convoy strategically into the immediate vicinity of No. 37 in the First Room.
"My nephew's picture," he explained; "nice thing! I don't know much about painting" (he called it paintin') "and art, and all that sort of thing, but I believe it's about as good as they make them."
He had accepted all the inconsistent, murmured criticism almost as a personal tribute; and for the greater part at least of the afternoon his beaming face had completely belied the discomfort occasioned by his severe frock-coat and tightly-fitting patent-leather boots; and his yearning for a comfortable chair, with a box of cigars and a whisky-and-seltzer at his elbow, had been suppressed, rigidly and heroically.
"I suppose it's devilish good," he thought, as he sat waiting for the rest of his party. "People seem to admire those splashes of yellow and black, and all those dirty colours. Personally, I think I prefer the girl in white next door. Hullo, there's Eve!"
"Don't get up, Colonel," said Mrs. Sylvester; "we want to sit here for a little and hear what people say about Richard's picture. They make such amusing remarks sometimes! Not always complimentary; but, then, they often don't know anything about art."
"Yes," said Eve, seating herself, with a delicate consideration for the new dress, which the occasion had demanded, between the Colonel and her mother; "we heard someone say that the flesh in that big Roman picture with the temple, you know—I can't pronounce the name—was like cotton wool—pink cotton wool! Oh, and that the girl in black, with the yellow fan, whose portrait is in the big room, must be at least eight feet high!"
"Now, how the dickens could he tell that!" interposed the Colonel.
"Oh, he was talking very learnedly, about heads and things. How provoking of that old gentleman in the gold spectacles! Standing just in front of Dick's picture with his back to it. He looks just exactly like a millionaire, and he won't look, and he's preventing other people from looking! Do turn him round, uncle, or move him on, or something!"
"Do you see that man there?" whispered Mrs. Sylvester presently, "the tall man with the sandy hair and beard? I think he's a painter. He said just now that Richard's picture was amazingly good, and that he thought he knew where he got the idea from."
"Why, of course," said the Colonel carelessly; "Dick got the idea from that beggar what's-his-name's dock—and a thundering good idea too! I wonder what time they close? Perhaps——"
"Yes," said Mrs. Sylvester, buttoning her gloves, "I suppose we had better go."
The room was nearly empty when McAllister passed before his friend's picture again, after a satisfactory interview with a gentleman from Bond Street on the subject of one of his own. McAllister, whose criticism Mrs. Sylvester had overheard and reported, had recently been elected Associate, owing the honour, according to some malicious people, more to his nationality than to his merit as a painter of cattle and landscapes. The Outcry, indeed, with reference to this promotion, and the continued neglect of older artists of greater public repute, had suggested, with its usual impertinence, that the motto of Lasciate ogni speranza, which was reported in certain circles to be almost visibly inscribed over the door of the Academicians' Committee-room, should be supplemented by the legend, "No English need apply."
"It's good," he said reflectively, as he stopped in front of the picture, with something like a chuckle on his lips, and a twinkle in his shrewd, gray eyes. "More than good. You can see the clever French trick in every line of it, and they'll call it one of the pictures of the year. So it is, though there are dozens in the vaults downstairs worth two of it. But I thought this was Oswyn's subject? He was always talking about it. Well, I should like to see what he would have made of it!"