The Hollow of Her Hand

by George Barr McCutcheon

"I love you, Pat," cried the painter, "in spite of the way you bark at me."

"It's a poor dog that don't know his own master," said Pat magnanimously. "Whin you're t'rough wid the magazines, I'll carry thim down to the cellar, sor."

"What's the matter with the attic?"

"Nothing at all, at all. I was only finking they'd be handier for you to get at in the cellar. And it's a dom sight cooler down there."

With that he departed, blinking slyly.

The young man drew a chair up to the table and began the task of working out the puzzle that now seemed more or less near to solution. He had a pretty clear idea as to the period he wanted to investigate. To the best of his recollection, the Studios published three or four years back held the key. He selected the numbers and began to run through them. One after another they were cast aside without result. In any other cause he would have tired of the quest, but in this his curiosity was so commanding that he stuck to the task without complaint. He was positive in his mind that what he desired was to be found inside the covers of one of these magazines. He was searching for a vaguely remembered article on one of the lesser-known English painters who had given great promise at the time it was published but who dropped completely out of notice soon afterward because of a mistaken notion of his own importance. If Booth's memory served him right, the fellow came a cropper, so to speak, in trying to ride rough shod over public opinion, and went to the dogs. He had been painting sensibly up to that time, but suddenly went in for the most violent style of impressionism. That was the end of him.

There had been reproductions of his principal canvases, with sketches and studies in charcoal. One of these pictures had made a lasting impression on Booth: the figure of a young woman in deep meditation standing in the shadow of a window casement from which she looked out upon the world apparently without a thought of it. A slender young woman in vague reds and browns, whose shadowy face was positively illuminated by a pair of wonderful blue eyes.

He came upon it at last. For a long time he sat there gazing at the face of Hetty Castleton, a look of half-wonder, half-triumph in his eyes. There could be no doubt as to the identity of the subject. The face was hers, the lovely eyes were hers: the velvety, dreamy, soulful eyes that had haunted him for years, as he now believed. In no sense could the picture be described as a portrait. It was a study, deliberately arranged and deliberately posed for in the artist's studio. He was mystified. Why should she, the daughter of Colonel Castleton, the grand-niece of an earl, be engaged in posing for what evidently was meant to be a commercial product of this whilom artist?

He remembered the painting itself as he had seen it in the exhibition at the National Academy when this fellow—Hawkright was his name—was at the top of his promise as a painter. He remembered going back to it again and again and marvelling at the subtle, delicate beauty of the thing. Now he knew that it was the face, and not the art of the painter that had affected him so enduringly. The fellow had shown other paintings, but he recalled that none of them struck him save this one. After all, it WAS the face that made the picture memorable.

Turning from this skilfully coloured full page reproduction, he glanced at first casually over the dozen or more sketches and studies on the succeeding pages. Many of them represented studies of women's heads and figures, with little or no attempt to obtain a likeness. Some were half-draped, showing in a sketchy way the long graceful lines of the half-nude figure, of bare shoulders and breasts, of gauze-like fabrics that but illy concealed impressive charms. Suddenly his eyes narrowed and a sharp exclamation fell from his lips. He bent closer to the pages and studied the drawings with redoubled interest.