Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.
"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.
The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the returned prodigal.
"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last year, sir—"
Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does not explain.
"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.
"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while—" The butler had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.
"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.
The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy, soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed the canvas.
A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.