After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of Señor Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose as the figure he was facing.
"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere resemblance of feature, he added: "But you—you, Jack, you're the dead spit of him!"
"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and, then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written on your tombstone!"
The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard of the canvas and another from Jack's side.
"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great institution, just as I am."
"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack, hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation, while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never have been a camp-follower."
"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"
"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final, mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!" There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.
"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back, painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I exhibited him in the store!"
"You—you—" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited him in the store!" he said.