“I don’t see why,” said Caroline, “my drawing-room should be turned into a painter’s studio.”
“It is quite a simple matter,” Cheriton explained. “A curtain can be rigged up and drawn across the canvas, and you won’t know it’s there.”
Caroline yielded with reluctance.
“There is a young fellow of the name of Lascelles,” said Cheriton, “whom I believe to be quite competent to make a respectable copy.”
“A Royal Academician?”
“God bless me, no! The young fellow is only a beginner.”
“I fail to see why I should grant the use of my drawing-room,” said Caroline, “to a person who is not a member of the Royal Academy. And what an inferior copy by some wretched dauber will profit you, I cannot imagine.”
“I am afraid,” said Cheriton, with the air of one imparting a state secret, “I am going Gainsborough mad. If I can’t have Grandmother Dorset at present for Cheriton House, I intend to have something as near to her as I can get. And, in my opinion, this young fellow Lascelles is the very man to make a faithful copy of the peerless original. He has had the best possible training for color, and, like myself, he is a Gainsborough enthusiast.”
Without further preface, James Lascelles found his way to Hill Street one fine spring morning. He was armed with the tools of his trade, and with a great piece of canvas some eighty-four inches by fifty.
Jim Lascelles was a cheery, healthy, young fellow, about six feet two, and undoubtedly a supremely attractive representative of the English nation. How a man of Cheriton’s cool penetration, who rejoiced in such a sound working knowledge of things as they are, should have fallen so easily and so blindly into the trap that had been laid for him is one of those matters upon which only the most inconclusive speculations can avail us. Doubtless he thought that a young fellow so obscure as Jim, who was as poor as a mouse, and in no way immodest in his ideas, could be trusted implicitly with such a trifling commission. And doubtless he could have been had those Persons Upstairs played the game. But of course they don’t always; and a man as wise as Cheriton ought to have known it.