“Father, will you come up into my sanctum, and look at my new sketches? I’ve arranged them now.”
“I’m getting terrible stiff in the joints, Phil, for climbing those stairs of yours,” said Wakem, looking kindly at his son as he laid down his paper. “But come along, then.”
“This is a nice place for you, isn’t it, Phil?—a capital light that from the roof, eh?” was, as usual, the first thing he said on entering the painting-room. He liked to remind himself and his son too that his fatherly indulgence had provided the accommodation. He had been a good father. Emily would have nothing to reproach him with there, if she came back again from her grave.
“Come, come,” he said, putting his double eye-glass over his nose, and seating himself to take a general view while he rested, “you’ve got a famous show here. Upon my word, I don’t see that your things aren’t as good as that London artist’s—what’s his name—that Leyburn gave so much money for.”
Philip shook his head and smiled. He had seated himself on his painting-stool, and had taken a lead pencil in his hand, with which he was making strong marks to counteract the sense of tremulousness. He watched his father get up, and walk slowly round, good-naturedly dwelling on the pictures much longer than his amount of genuine taste for landscape would have prompted, till he stopped before a stand on which two pictures were placed,—one much larger than the other, the smaller one in a leather case.
“Bless me! what have you here?” said Wakem, startled by a sudden transition from landscape to portrait. “I thought you’d left off figures. Who are these?”
“They are the same person,” said Philip, with calm promptness, “at different ages.”
“And what person?” said Wakem, sharply fixing his eyes with a growing look of suspicion on the larger picture.
“Miss Tulliver. The small one is something like what she was when I was at school with her brother at King’s Lorton; the larger one is not quite so good a likeness of what she was when I came from abroad.”
Wakem turned round fiercely, with a flushed face, letting his eye-glass fall, and looking at his son with a savage expression for a moment, as if he was ready to strike that daring feebleness from the stool. But he threw himself into the armchair again, and thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, still looking angrily at his son, however. Philip did not return the look, but sat quietly watching the point of his pencil.