“The exhibition opens in ten days,” said Miss Clifford.
“Certainly then, I shall be charmed,” he said. “It will only be a sketch, you know, but you shall have it this week. Shall I send it to your house?”
Miss Clifford was overwhelmed with gratitude. She looked round, indeed, apprehensively at Mrs. Collingwood, but neither she nor the Canon appeared to have thought her request unmaidenly. The triumph of having secured a sketch by Jack was so great that even Phœbe would probably be lenient.
Jack had come to Wroxton nominally for a holiday, but as soon as Miss Clifford had left he began working at his sketch. He found, as he had hoped, that the scene of the afternoon was very clearly visualized, and by dinner-time he had sketched it out as he meant it to be. He felt an extraordinary delight in the work, and as he progressed with it it became more and more capable of becoming a picture. In fact, before dinner his promised sketch, which he had intended to be an eighteen-inch water-colour, had so changed in scheme that he determined to make an oil picture of it, three feet by two. Whether or not it would be finished in the three days in which he had promised that Miss Clifford should have it was more than doubtful, but he had forgotten Miss Clifford. All he knew was that a picture was in his head.
The face he had drawn with great minuteness, and as he found himself reproducing, with a faithfulness for which he had scarcely dared to hope, the laughing anguish of the girl, it crossed his mind, but for one moment only, that he was doing rather a questionable thing. He had no idea who his subject was. She might or might not be a resident in Wroxton, she might or might not come to the picture exhibition, and then find a portrait of herself; and how she would take it if she did was equally problematical. Jack confessed to himself that he knew nothing whatever of her. All he had seen was her laugh; she might be able to frown; he did not know.
But the scruple lasted so short a time, and was in itself of so slight a nature, that it never reoccurred. Artists, it is said, do their work in a sort of somnambulism; it seemed to Jack that he worked in a state of intoxication. He lived riotously when the brush was in his hand, his mind sang and shouted as he worked.
Certainly as he progressed with it—and day by day it continued to prosper and live on the canvas—he was frankly surprised at the vividness with which the moment had been impressed upon him. The girl had a moonstone brooch on, the dog a silver collar; the sunlight caught some outlying hairs on her head, and though they were black, it turned them into gold. All these things and a hundred like them he had hardly been conscious of seeing until he began to record them.
On the fourth day it was finished, and as soon as it was dry he sent it to Miss Clifford. The day after he was leaving himself and going back to work, and he seemed to himself to have had no holiday at all. Yet he did not regret it; somehow his occupation had taken hold of his mind, and when he looked at the finished thing he knew that conscious humble pride which alone is sufficient reward to the artist for what he has done.
“It is good,” he said to himself. “I wish I had seen that girl again,” he added.