He tiptoed his way out, and Nellie closed the door very cautiously behind him. At that moment, when she kissed him, she had given him all of the very best of her. She exulted in having done it, but assuredly virtue had gone out of her. Restless and unquiet in her bed, she thought over what was left for her.
CHAPTER VII
John Mainwaring had prepared his studio for the visit of Mrs. Wardour and Silvia next day with the utmost dramatic completeness, employing for their reception the scenery and the setting which suggested itself as being most likely to impress and astound. With this end in view he had littered the room with all possible properties, bringing down from the attics stacks of his own pictures, which he disposed in careless profusion round the walls. Sketch books and paint boxes littered the tables, lay figures peeped from behind easels, robes trailed over sofa-backs, and he, when his visitors were announced, had designed that he himself should be found, in his oldest velveteen coat and morocco slippers, at the top of the step-ladder which he had put into position again in front of the great canvas representing Satan odiously whispering to the German Emperor. There, absorbed in his inspired labours, he was to be giving the last, the crowning, the positively final terrific touch to it as his visitors (and, as he hoped, his victims) entered.
Since the work had actually been finished at least a month ago, and on that occasion had been toasted in glasses of port wine by himself, his wife and Peter, he had thought it prudent to inform her that more last touches were to be applied to it again to-day. Visitors, he had added, were dropping in that afternoon, and she would, no doubt, be sitting upstairs in the drawing-room when they arrived, with tea prepared for their refreshment. When the time came he would yodel for her, and she would come down, be presented to Mrs. Wardour and her daughter, and would scold him for keeping these ladies looking at his stupid pictures instead of bringing them up to tea....
Such was the general idea of the opening of a manœuvre from which he, with a quite incurable optimism, expected very gratifying results. Peter had already alluded to the surprising dawn of Mrs. Wardour on the town, and he himself, at the play the night before, had paved the way for a commission to execute a portrait of Silvia. He had no idea whether or not Mrs. Wardour inserted any of these golden tentacles with which, like an octopus, she appeared to be enveloping London, into the domain of art, but it was worth while hoping that her sense of completion would not be satisfied unless she had Silvia’s portrait painted. That, so he had ascertained, had not been done, and he had, so to speak, left a card “soliciting the favour of a call.” The call certainly was to be made that afternoon, and his imagination now, bit in teeth and wildly galloping, foresaw another possible commission in the portrait of Mrs. Wardour herself. Perhaps—here was the rosiest of the summits yet in view—he might profitably dispose of that great cartoon which Mrs. Wardour would so soon be privileged to see receiving its finishing touches. Farther than that his vision did not definitely project itself, but in sunlit and shining mists he could vaguely see himself working for all he was worth (and for much of what Mrs. Wardour was worth) at more of these stupendous canvases, and berthing each, as soon as possible, in the same remunerative harbourage.
The ring at the bell of the street door warned him to scamper up his step-ladder, and absorb himself in finishing touches at the top of the thundercloud of war. In due time the studio door opened and Burrows, announcing his visitors, had to raise her voice to the pitch of a vendor of street-wares and recite the names again before she was so fortunate as to attract his attention. Then Mr. Mainwaring turned slowly round with a dazed expression and, shading his eyes, perceived the expected presences. Then with brush in one hand and palette in the other, he gave an ecstatic cry of welcome (not to be confused with the yodelling summons for his wife), and came bounding down the step-ladder. Divesting himself of his palette and brush, he held out both hands.
“Ah, my dear friends,” he said, “but this is charming. I am ashamed of myself to be found in such dishevelment, but—well, we artists are like that, silly donkeys as we are, and I had forgotten, for the moment I had forgotten the advent of my delightful visitors.”
He held a hand of each of them for a moment, with pressure and expression, and then withdrew his left hand, holding it to his forehead.
“A finishing touch,” he said. “I was at that very moment putting the last touch of paint on to my canvas. Let me forget that: give me a moment to forget it. You are here, that is the great point.”
He made a splendid obeisance, and as he recovered thrust back his hair, and embarked on a period.