CHAPTER IV
After Thomas had left the room with the demijohn, his master seemed relieved. He began to walk up and down his room and hum an air from the German opera. He wanted to forget the unpleasant occurrence. After all, he was glad the hateful, beautiful thing was broken. It was no one’s fault particularly, and now it was out of the way and would not need to be explained. He walked about, still humming and looking at his room, and still that picture seemed to follow and be a part of his consciousness wherever he went. It certainly was well hung, and gave the strong impression of being a part of the room itself. He looked at it critically from a new point of view, and as he faced it once more he was in the upper chamber and seemed to hear his Master saying, “Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more”; and he realized that he was in the presence of the scene of the end of his Master’s mission. He walked back to the fireplace seeking for something to turn his thoughts away, and passing the table where stood his elegantly mounted smoking set, he decided to smoke. It was about his usual hour for his bedtime smoke, anyway. He selected a cigar from those Thomas had set out and lighted it with one of the matches in the silver match safe, and for an instant turned with a feeling of lazy, delicious luxury in the use of his new room and all its appliances. Unconsciously he seated himself again before the fire in the great leather chair, and began to puff the smoke into dreamy shapes and let his thoughts wander as he closed his eyes.
Suppose, ah, suppose that some one, say the “ladye of high degree,” should be there, should belong there, and should come and stand behind his chair. He could see the graceful pose of her fine figure. She might reach over and touch his hair and laugh lightly. He tried to imagine it, but in spite of him the laugh rang out in his thoughts scornfully like a sharp, silver bell that belonged to some one else. He glanced over his shoulder at the imagined face, but it looked cold above the smoke. She did not mind smoke. He had seen her face behind a wreath of smoke several times. It seemed a natural setting. But the dream seemed an empty one. He raised his head and settled it back at a new angle. How rosy the light was as it played on the hearth and how glad he was to be at home again. That was enough for to-night. The “ladye of high degree” might stay in her home across the sea for this time. He was content. Then he raised his eyes to the picture above without knowing it, and there he was smoking at the supper table of the Lord. At least so he felt it to be. He had always been scrupulously careful never to smoke in or about a church. He used to give long, earnest lectures on the subject to some of the boys of the mission who would smoke cigarettes and pipes on the steps of the church before service. He remembered them now with satisfaction, and he also remembered a murmured, jeering sound that had arisen from the corner where the very worst boys sat, which had been suppressed by his friends, but which had cut at the time, and which he had always wondered over a little. He had seen no inconsistency in speaking so to the boys in view of his own actions. But now, as he looked at that picture he felt as though he were smoking in church with the service going on. The smoke actually hid his Master’s face. He took down his cigar and looked up with a feeling of apology, but this was involuntary. His irritation was rising again. The idea of a picture upsetting him so! He must be tired or his nerves unsettled. There was no more harm in smoking in front of that picture than before any other. “Confound that picture!” he said, as he rose and walked over to the bay window, “I’ll have it hung somewhere else to-morrow. I won’t have the thing around. No, it’ll have to be left here till after that reception, I suppose; but after that it shall go. Such a consummate nuisance!”
He stood looking out of the open window with a scowl. He reflected that it was a strange thing for him to be so affected by a picture, a mere imagination of the brain. He would not let it be so. He would overcome it. Then he turned and tramped deliberately up and down that room, smoking away as hard as he could, and when he thought his equilibrium was restored, he raised his eyes to the picture as he passed, just casually as any one might who had never thought of it before. His eyes fell and he went on, back and forth, looking every time at the picture, and every time the eyes of that central figure watched him with that same sad, loving look. At last he went to the window again and angrily threw up the screen, threw his half-smoked cigar far out into the shrubbery of the garden, saying as he did so, “Confound it all!”
It was the evening before the reception. It was growing toward nine o’clock, and John Stanley had retired to his wing to watch the fire and consider what a fool he was becoming. He had not smoked in that room since the first night of his return. He had not yielded to such weakness all at once nor with the consent of himself. He had thought at first that he really chose to walk in the garden or smoke on the side piazza, but as the days went by he began to see that he was avoiding his own new room. And it was all because of that picture. He glanced revengefully in the direction where it hung. He did not look at it willingly now if he could help it. His elegant smoking set was reposing in the chimney cupboard, locked there with a vicious click of the key by the hand of the young owner himself. And it was not only smoking, but other things that the picture affected. There for instance was the pack of cards he had placed upon the table in their unique case of dainty mosaic design. He had been obliged to put them elsewhere. They seemed out of place. Not that he felt ashamed of the cards. On the contrary he had expected to be quite proud of the accomplishment of playing well which he had acquired abroad, having never been particularly led in that direction by his surroundings before he had left home. Was this room becoming a church that he could not do as he pleased? Then there had been a sketch or two and a bit of statuary, which he had brought in his trunk because they had been overlooked in the packing of the other things. That morning he brought them down to his room, but the large picture refused to have them there. There was no harm in the sketches, only they did not fit into the same wall with the great picture, there was no harmony in their themes. The statuary was associated with heathenism and wickedness, ’tis true, but it was beautiful and would have looked wonderfully well on the mantel against the rich, dark red of the dull tiles, but not under that picture. It was becoming a bondage, that picture, and after to-morrow night he would banish it to—where? Not his bedroom, for it would work its spell there as well.
Just here there came a tap on the window-sill, followed by a hoarse, half-shy whisper:
“Mr. Stanley, ken we come in?”
He looked up startled. The voice had a familiar note in it, but he did not recognize the two tall, lank figures outside in the darkness, clad in cheap best clothes and with an air of mingled self-depreciation and self-respect.
“Who is it?” he asked sharply and suspiciously.