“Do you think you can clean off the top part without damaging the painting underneath?”
“Oh dear, yes,” the man said; “I’ve had many harder jobs. You leave it with me for a couple of days, and we’ll see what we can make of it.”
“Couldn’t it be done quicker than that?” Westray said. “I’m in rather a hurry. It is difficult for me to get up to London, and I should rather like to be by, when you begin to clean it.”
“Don’t make yourself anxious,” the other said; “you can leave it in my hands with perfect confidence. We’re quite used to this business.”
Westray still looked unsatisfied. The dealer gave a glance round the shop. “Well,” he said, “things don’t seem very busy this morning; if you’re in such a hurry, I don’t mind just trying a little bit of it now. We’ll put it on the table in the back-room. I can see if anyone comes into the shop.”
“Begin where the face ought to be,” Westray said; “let us see whose portrait it is.”
“No, no,” said the dealer; “we won’t risk the face yet. Let us try something that doesn’t matter much. We shall see how this stuff peels off; that’ll give us a guide for the more important part. Here, I’ll start with the table-top and caterpillar. There’s something queer about that caterpillar, beside the face some joker’s fitted it up with. I’m rather shy about the caterpillar. Looks to me as if it was a bit of the real picture left showing through, though I don’t very well see how a caterpillar would fit in with a portrait.” The dealer passed the nail of his forefinger lightly over the surface of the picture. “It seems as if ’twas sunk. You can feel the edges of this heavy daubing rough all round it.”
It was as he pointed out; the green caterpillar certainly appeared to form some part of the underlying picture. The man took out a bottle, and with a brush laid some solution on the painting. “You must wait for it to dry. It will blister and frizzle up the surface, then we can rub off the top gently with a cloth, and you’ll see what you will see.”
“The fellow who painted this table-top didn’t spare his colours,” said the dealer half an hour later, “and that’s all the better for us. See, it comes off like a skin”—and he worked away tenderly with a soft flannel. “Well, I’m jiggered,” he went on, “if here isn’t another caterpillar higher up! No, it ain’t a caterpillar; but if it ain’t a caterpillar, what is it?”
There was indeed another wavy green line, but Westray knew what it was directly he saw it. “Be careful,” he said; “they aren’t caterpillars at all, but just part of a coat of arms—a kind of bars in an heraldic shield, you know. There will be another shorter green line lower down.”