There were a great many dingy performances of Mr. Kerstall senior; very classical, and extremely uninteresting; studies from the life, grey and chalky and muscular, with here and there a knotty-looking foot or a lumpy arm, in the most unpleasant phases of foreshortening. There were a good many portraits, gentlemanly to the last degree; but poor Laura looked in vain for the face she wanted to see—the hard cold face, as she fancied it must have been in youth.
There were portraits of elderly ladies with stately head-gear, and simpering young ladies with innocent short-waisted bodices and flowers held gracefully, in their white-muslin draperies; there were portraits of stern clerical grandees, and parliamentary non-celebrities, with popular bills rolled up in their hands, ready to be laid upon the speaker's table, and with a tight look about the lips, that seemed to say the member was prepared to carry his motion, or perish on the floor of the House.
There were only a few portraits of young men of military aspect, looking fiercely over regulation stocks, and with forked lightning and little pyramids of cannon-balls in the background.
Laura sighed heavily at last, for amongst all these portraits there was not one which in the least possible degree recalled the hard handsome face with which she was familiar.
"I'm afraid my father's picture has been lost or destroyed," she said, mournfully.
But Mr. Kerstall would not allow this.
I have said that it was Laura's peculiar privilege to bewitch everybody with whom she came in contact, and to transform them, for the nonce, into her willing slaves, eager to go through fire and water in the service of this beautiful creature, whose eyes and hair were like blue skies and golden sunshine, and carried light and summer wherever they went.
The black-bearded artist in the paint-smeared holland blouse was in no manner proof against Lady Jocelyn's fascinations.
He had well-nigh suffocated himself with dust half-a-dozen times already in her service, and was ready to inhale as much more dust if she desired him so to do.
"We won't give it up just yet, Lady Jocelyn," he said, cheerfully; "there's a couple of shelves still to examine. Suppose we try shelf number one, and see if we can find Mr. Henry Dunbar up there."