However, all’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare informs us. Jim Lascelles did not obtain a special license, but returned to his mother like a good son and, shall we say, a man of honor. For it would have been such a fatally easy and natural thing to marry the Goose Girl at Barne Moor parish church. If you came to think about it, why should she be offered for sacrifice? Dickie, of course, would be able to go to Sandhurst, and Milly would be able to go to the boarding school; but all the same, it was desperately hard on the Goose Girl.
CHAPTER XXXIII
EVERYTHING FOR THE BEST IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS
JIM LASCELLES returned to Balham exactly nine days after he had left that friendly but uninspired suburb. He had worked hard during his absence in Yorkshire; the picture of the fair Priscilla had made excellent progress, and there was a check for five hundred pounds in prospect on completion. Further, by the interest and undoubted talent for commerce of his friend Lord Cheriton, Mr. Crosby of the Foreign Office had been induced to rise to seven hundred and fifty pounds for the portrait of Mrs. Crosby and her children.
So far as the things of this world were concerned, Jim really returned to his mother in high feather. The progress he was making in his profession he felt was out of all proportion to his talent. But it is a great thing to have a friend at court. So much is done in that way. It is not always the best picture, or the best oratorio, or the best play, or the best novel that makes the most guineas in the market-square. It is one thing to create a masterpiece, and it is another to translate it into pounds, shillings, and pence. There can be no doubt that Jim Lascelles had made amazing strides in his art; but all the same, he was a lucky fellow to have a man like Cheriton to go round with a bell to call the attention of the picture-buying public to the quality of his work.
Jim Lascelles would have been less than human had he not been immensely grateful to Cheriton. And yet he would not have been human either had he not hated him very sorely. After all, what is the use of material prosperity if the man who confers it upon you robs you of the only girl in the world you feel you will ever be able to marry? Certainly he would now have the means to buy his mother a new frock or so in order to deprive her of her favorite excuse for not looking older. But life, even with professional success, was going to be a hollow business.
However, Jim Lascelles contrived in this crisis to behave with a discretion that was very creditable to his character. He had gone down to the depths of late, and, as is often the case with such divers in deep seas, he had brought up a few pearls. One of these was resolution. He finished the picture of Priscilla out of hand and drew his check; and although the season was November, he paid several visits to Eaton Square and did his best for Mrs. Crosby and her youthful family. And ever and anon he took his courage in his hands and spent an hour in further devotion to the masterpiece that was to make him famous.
It was not until early in January that Jim Lascelles made the announcement to his patron that the portrait of Miss Perry was complete. Thereupon quite a number of people interested in art found their way to the Acacias. They were by no means unanimous in their opinion regarding its intrinsic merit, but they all agreed that it was bound to prove one of the sensations of the year.
“An extraordinarily clever fake,” said a critic of the fine arts privately.
“Mr. Lascelles,” said a dealer, “I should like you to give me an option on all the work you produce during the next five years. I feel sure I could sell it.”
“We have a new Gainsborough here,” said a third person, who spoke in an unofficial capacity, “and that is all there is to be said about it.”