“Oh, do! do!” she grasped at his friendly tender. “Find a little cheerful one, if you can. I shall love to have it.”
He selected a small panel of a single tall, palely expanding garden poppy, more gray than violet, against a background of shade. Flower though it was, it still affected one like the portrait of a lady wronged and suffering.
In the drawing-room to which they returned Giovanna had lighted a lamp. The fire had properly caught and was burning more brightly; the place looked rosy and warm, after the winter twilight filling the other room and the chill that reigned there.
Aurora returned to the tea-table; with a disengaged air she reached for plum-cake. She ascertained with comfort that Mrs. Foss did not look sad or Estelle ill used; that the abbé was as serene as ever and Miss Seymour, after her talk with Mrs. Foss, rather serener than usual. Gerald was far jollier than any of his portraits. To make sure that she was no depressing object herself, she smiled the warmest, sunniest smile she was capable of.
“Do come and talk a little bit with me, before I have to go home!” she unexpectedly called out to the abbé.
177When at the end of the long evening spent together smoking and talking the two friends separated for the night, Gerald went to his room as did Vincent to his. But Gerald had no more than pulled off his necktie when he changed his mind, went back to the drawing-room, crossed the tobacco-scented space where something seemed to linger of the warmth of goodfellowship, and entered the farther room.
A doubt had risen in his mind. He could not wait till morning to see his work with a fresh eye, an eye as fresh as Mrs. Hawthorne’s, and satisfy himself as to whether he, so careful of truth, had unconsciously come to exaggerating, falsifying his impressions, grown guilty of hollow mannerisms.
Whatever he had said, he had been stung by Mrs. Hawthorne’s liking his paintings so little. It was easy to console oneself remembering the poor lady’s ignorance of art. The truth might be that something was wrong with the pictures, which suspicion had driven the artist to go and have a dispassionate look at them in the frigid hour between twelve and one of the night. If a person is on the way to becoming a morbid ass he cannot find it out too soon.
Gerald’s dogma was that the first duty of a picture is to be beautiful. His critics did not give sufficient attention to that aspect of his work, he privately thought; they were put off by what they mistakenly called its queerness, its mere difference from the academic, the conventional. This was bitter, because he had always so loved beautiful lines, beautiful tints, had insisted that the very texture, of his painting should have the beauty of fine-grained skin.
He was no conspicuous colorist, of course, he did not by 178temperament revel in the glow of rich, bold, endlessly varied tints. It was a limitation, which his work naturally reflected. This was marked in fact by modesty and melancholy of color-scheme. But that did not interfere with beauty, he maintained. He had been thrilled by the discovery in the Siena gallery of an old master with the same predilections as he, an antipathy apparently to the vivid, crying, self-assertive colors, which he accordingly with admirable simplicity left out, and interpreted the world all in blues and greens, grays and violets, whites of many degrees and tones and meanings.