Coulston, who apparently concurred with him, gazed at the picture with a trace of astonishment. It showed a big cargo lancha lurching out, deep-loaded, through a fringe of tumbling surf with four men straining at the ponderous oars. The wet rags they wore clung about their limbs, and there was weariness in their grim, brown faces. Bent backs and set lips had their significance, and the sketch was stamped with the suggestion of endurance and endeavour. Yet, as those who saw it felt, there was triumph in it, too, for while the rollers came seething in to hurl her back the lancha was clawing off the shore.
"It's good!" said the navy man. "It's unusually good. Those fellows are played out, and they know if they slacken down for a moment she'll roll over with them or go up on the beach. The sea's running in against her—one finds out by trying it how hard it is to pull off against a surf—but they're driving her out. Presumably, that's what you call the motive of the thing."
The tourist nodded appreciatively. "Yes," he said. "In spite of certain faults in drawing, it's well worked out. What puzzles me is how the man who did the other one came to feel it as he evidently did. One could fancy he had had a revelation, and that in some respects he was a different man when he painted this. I'll offer you five guineas for it, Mr. Macallister."
"Then," said Macallister, promptly, "ye can have it. Eight guineas for the two, if ye would like the other one. There are two or three more of them here ye might care to look at." He stopped a moment, and added, as if in explanation: "I'm anxious to do what I can for Mr. Austin. Many's the time I've stole his wine and sold his clothes."
He undid a package, and, first of all, took out a photograph of a young girl with a comely English face, which Jacinta glanced at somewhat sharply. Then she became intent when there followed several rudimentary pencil and pastel sketches of herself, until Macallister handed Coulston a picture. He turned from it to Jacinta, and looked at her with a steadiness a young woman less accustomed to masculine criticism would probably have found disconcerting.
She lay smiling at him in the canvas lounge, very pretty and very dainty, with conventional indifference expressed even in her pose. She was, he fancied, a woman who knew her world thoroughly, and had the greater influence therein because she seldom asked too much from it. Then he glanced again at her portrait almost incredulously, for it showed the little shapely head held well erect, the red lips straightened and firmly closed, and the glow of a strenuous purpose in the eyes. Stooping, he laid the picture on her knees with a little smile.
Jacinta laughed softly. "Yes," she said, "of course, I know what you mean. I am essentially modern and frivolous, and not in the least like that. Still, you see, all of us have our serious moments now and then, although it is probably fortunate they don't last long."
"Ah," said Coulston, wilfully neglecting his opportunity, "I almost fancy a light breaks in on me. One could entitle this inspiration, and it is, you know, possible to transmit it occasionally. I wonder whether it would make the idea clearer if we placed the three pictures together. Mr. Macallister will permit me?"
He set up the first sketch of the steamboat skipper against the lifeboat skids, and gazed at it critically. "Assuming that a picture contains something of its painter's ego, you will observe how the idea of petty indulgence and his appreciation of sensual comfort is impressed on one," he said. "Now we will set up the other sketch of the sailormen. There you see restraint, tense effort, abnegation—and victory—in one sense a spiritual triumph over the body. It is an interesting question how the man who painted both could have been brought to grasp what Lieutenant Onslow calls the motive of the last one; but if we might venture to place another picture between."
Jacinta raised her head sharply, and there was an ominous sparkle in her eyes. "No," she said, with quiet incisiveness, "I would sooner you didn't. There are certainly men whose hobby, now and then, runs away with them. Macallister, will you put that portrait back again?"