“Oh, there isn’t much!” said Matt, hastily. “I’ll bring you some little things next time. Only I don’t want your father to see them—they’re not for sale.”
“You’re quite right,” said Herbert. “Don’t show ’em to him. Hush!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Matt, turning his head.
“Talk of the—Old Gentleman,” said Herbert.
The brush dropped from the painter’s palsied fingers. He felt like one caught red-handed. He had already come in, somewhat surreptitiously, through the side door, in obedience to Herbert’s recommendation, and to be found using Herbert’s appliances and model would be the acme of guiltiness.
The alarm was false, but thenceforward “The Old Gentleman” indicated Matthew Strang the elder. For they had frequent occasion to fear his advent, since Matt came often, tempted from his gloomy back room to the beautiful light studio, where he was allowed not only to do bits of Herbert’s work while Herbert read or gossiped with the model, but occasionally to set up another easel and use the same model. But they were only detected together twice by the Vandyke beard and the velvet coat, and on one occasion Herbert had had time to resume the brush, and on another to pose Matt as a model.
“The Old Gentleman’s rather grumpy about you,” he admitted, with his customary candor. “I’ve had to tell the servant not to mention your coming so often. The mater’s mashed on you, and I suppose he’s a bit jealous. She wanted to ask you to our dinner-party last night—we had two Associates, and a Scotch Academician, and an American millionaire who buys any rot, and an art critic who praises it—but he said one didn’t give dinner-parties for one’s relations, but for strangers.”
As Matt had already dined once en famille, with Madame’s guileless homage at his side to put him at ease, he did not feel himself hardly used.
His position with “The Old Gentleman” was not improved by his demeanor on an occasion when, meeting him in the doorway, Herbert’s father, instead of raising remonstrant eyebrows, astonished him by asking if he would like to see the masterpieces he had in stock. Matt did not know that this generous offer was due to the death of a member of the Institute whose watercolors had been accumulating on Matthew Strang’s hands, and who now, even before his funeral, was showing signs of a posthumous “boom;” he replied eagerly that nothing could be a greater favor. The picture-dealer waved his jewelled hand with pompous geniality, and, mounting one flight of stairs, with the hand on Matt’s shoulder, ushered him into the holy of holies, a chamber religious with purple curtains and hushed with soft carpets, where the more precious pictures reposed behind baize veils that for possible purchasers were lifted with a reverent silence bespeaking a hundred extra guineas. Long habit of ritual awe made Matthew Strang’s hands pious even before his nephew.
But his nephew’s expected ecstasies were tempered by unexpected criticism. In an eminent Academician’s portrait of a lady, Matt pointed out that the eyes were wrong, that pupils should be round, not squashy, and that the hot shadows made by the Indian reds under the nose were inspired by Romney. He questioned the veracity of a landscape by a costly name, demurring to the light on the under sides of the leaves as impossible under the conditions depicted; and in a historical composition by an old English master he found a lack of subtlety in the legs, and a stringy feeling throughout.