Macallister took out a sketch in water-colour and held it up. It showed a strip of a steamer's deck, with the softened sunlight beating down through an awning upon a man in skipper's uniform who lay, cigar in hand, in a hammock that swung beneath the spars. He was, to judge from his expression, languidly contented with everything, and there was a big glass of amber-coloured liquid on the little table beside him, and a tier of bottles laid out upon the deck. Beneath it ran the legend, "For men must work."
"That," said Jacinta, "is, at least, what they tell their wives."
The tourist gazed at the drawing, and then turned to her. He was, as she had discovered already, a painfully didactic person.
"The conceit," he said, "is a somewhat happy one, though the sketch is, it seems to me, a little weak in technique. As we admitted, one difference between a photograph and a painting is that the artist records his own sensations in the latter, and stamps it with, at least, a trace of his individuality. In that respect the sketch is, I fancy, characteristic. The artist, one could imagine, was in full sympathy with his subject—the far niente—but I am, no doubt, getting prosy."
For no very apparent reason a little flush of colour crept into Jacinta's face, and Macallister, who saw it, chuckled as he took out another sketch.
"Well," he said, reflectively, "I never met a man who could do nothing more gracefully than Mr. Austin, but I'll let ye see the rest of them, since they're in my charge to sell. Mr. Austin, who wants the money, took a sudden notion he'd go to Africa, and, if they've had a quick run, he's now humping palm oil puncheons in a stranded steamer's hold. I'm thinking it will be a big change for him."
The naval officer laughed softly. "From what I know of the tropics I fancy you are right. In fact, it's rather difficult to imagine the man I met at the bull fight doing that kind of thing at all. Salvage work is necessarily hard under any circumstances, and anywhere, but the last place I would care to attempt it in is Western Africa. What sent—him—there?"
"Ye must not ask me," and a little twinkle, for which Jacinta longed to shake him, crept into Macallister's eyes. "Now, there are clever folks who will look at a man, or maybe talk to him awhile, and then label him, thinking they know just what to expect of him. It does him no great harm, and it pleases them, until one day he does something that astonishes them in spite of his label. Then they're apt to get angry with him. A man, ye see, is, after all, not that unlike an engine. Ye cannot tell what may be going on in the inside of him, and when the result's distressing it's most often the fault of injudicious handling."
Jacinta, to whom he apparently directed his observations, contrived to regard him with a little smile, and he proceeded to extricate another sketch, a canvas this time.
"This one is different," he said.