Thereat another mood came over him, and for the spate of surprising remarks which he had been pouring forth there was exchanged a frowning, brush-biting silence. This lasted another twenty minutes, and Philip, as thanks for his offerings on the altar of conversation, got only grunts, and once a laboriously polite request to stand still. But eventually he hit on a subject that produced a response.
“And Madge’s portrait?” he said. “Have you decided to yield to our ignorance perhaps, but anyhow our desire, and consider it finished?”
Evelyn stopped dead in the middle of a stroke, and a new and frightfully disconcerting mood suddenly appeared to possess him.
“How can you ask me if I yield,” he said hotly, “when you have told me I can’t have any more sittings? I yield as a man yields who is pinioned and hung. I only yield to force. As for the portrait, it is there, face to the wall. I will not send it to you, but you may fetch it away without opposition on my part. I never want to see it again. Oh! I make one condition—it must never be exhibited.”
“Ah! my dear fellow,” said Philip, “I cannot take it if you feel like that about it.”
“Leave it then.”
Philip was very deeply hurt somehow by this. Evelyn’s absolute insistence on his taking it as a present from him had much touched him, though he had tried to combat it. But this ending of the affair was intolerable. He could not leave matters like this. And now while he was debating what to do, Evelyn spoke again, resuming his painting with rapid, unerring strokes.
“I must say this, too,” he said. “I had an inspiration for that portrait quite unlike any I have ever had before. It is, even as it stands, my masterpiece, but you—you and Miss Ellington anyhow—have prevented me from completing what is my best, and would have been far better. Far better? It would have been on a different plane altogether. I am sorry if this hurts you, but it is only right you should know. I don’t say it is your fault; I don’t say it is anybody’s fault. But there the picture stands; I give it you with all the completeness with which I originally gave it you, and with all—all the best wishes.”
He paused a moment.
“But I won’t send it you,” he said, “since I don’t think it ought to be sent. Yet take it with my love, my best love, Philip. And I should be obliged if you would say no more at all about it. Turn your face a bit more to the left, there’s a good fellow; you have shifted slightly.”