“I like what I’ve seen of him,” said Michael.
Mr. Longvale accepted the introduction all over again.
“I fear there will not be sufficient room in my dining-room for the whole company. I have had a little table laid in my study. Perhaps you and your friends would like to have your tea there?”
“Why, that’s very kind of you, Mr. Longvale. You have met Mr. Brixan?”
The old man smiled and nodded.
“I have met him without realizing that I’ve met him. I never remember names—a curious failing which was shared by my great-great-uncle Charles, with the result that he fell into extraordinary confusion when he wrote his memoirs, and in consequence many of the incidents he relates have been regarded as apocryphal.”
He showed them into a narrow room that ran from the front to the back of the house. Its ceilings were supported by black rafters; the open wainscoting, polished and worn by generations of hands, must have been at least five hundred years old. There were no swords over this mantelpiece, thought Michael with an inward smile. Instead, there was a portrait of a handsome old gentleman, the dignity of whose face was arresting. There was only one word with an adequate description: it was majestic.
He made no comment on the picture, nor did the old man speak of it till later. The meal was hastily disposed of, and, sitting on the wall, Michael watched the last daylight scene shot, and was struck by the plastic genius of the girl. He knew enough of motion pictures and their construction to realize what it meant to the director to have in his hands one who could so faithfully reproduce the movements and the emotions which the old man dictated.
In other circumstances he might have thought it grotesque to see Jack Knebworth pretending to be a young girl, resting his elderly cheek coyly upon the back of his clasped hand, and walking with mincing steps from one side of the picture to the other. But he knew that the American was a mason who was cutting roughly the shape of the sculpture and leaving it to the finer artiste to express in her personality the delicate contours that would delight the eye of the picture-loving world. She was no longer Adele Leamington; she was Roselle, the heiress to an estate of which her wicked cousin was trying to deprive her. The story itself he recognized; a half-and-half plagiarism of “The Cat and the Canary,” with which were blended certain situations from “The Miracle Man.” He mentioned this fact when the scene was finished.
“I guess it’s a steal,” said Jack Knebworth philosophically, “and I didn’t inquire too closely into it. It’s Foss’s story, and I should be pained to discover there was anything original in it.”