The broad low dado, composed of comparatively small water-colours, drawings, and bas-reliefs, was twice broken, each time by a glazed oil-painting, each time by the portrait of a woman.
To the left of the book-framed door, hung a painting of Penelope's mother, Lady Wantley.
At every period of her life Lady Wantley had been one of those women whom artists delight to paint, and the great artist whose work this was had often had the privilege. But perhaps owing to certain peculiar circumstances connected with this portrait, it was the one of them that he himself preferred. The painting had been a commission from the sitter herself; she had wished to give this portrait to her husband on his sixtieth birthday, and together she and the painter, her friend, who had once owed to her and to Lord Wantley much in the way of sympathy and encouragement, had desired to suggest in the composition something which would be symbolic of what had been an almost ideal wedded life.
Then, without warning, when the scheme had been scarcely sketched out, had come Lord Wantley's death away from home, and the portrait, scarcely begun, had been hastily put away, counted by the artist as among those half-finished things destined to remain tragic in their incompleteness. But some months later his old friend and patroness, clad in no widow's weeds, but in the curious black-and-white flowing draperies, and close Quakerish bonnet, which had become to her friends and acquaintances almost a portion of her identity, had come to see him, and he learnt that she wished her portrait should be finished.
'He always disliked the unfinished, the incomplete,' she had said rather wistfully; and the artist had carried out her wish, finding little to alter, though, perhaps, in the interval between the first and the second sitting the colourless skin of the sitter had lost something of its clearness, the heavy-lidded grey eyes had gained somewhat in dimness, and the hair from dark brown had become grey.
The painter himself substituted, for the lilies which were to have filled in part of the background, a sheaf of rosemary.
The other picture had a less intimate history; and the only two people who ever ventured to criticise Penelope had both, not in any concert with one another, suggested that another place might be found for the kitcat portrait, by Romney, of Mrs. Robinson's famous namesake, than that where it now hung in juxtaposition with that of Lady Wantley.
III
Beneath this last portrait, holding herself upright on the low white couch, a girl, Cecily Wake, sat waiting. She looked round the room with an affectionate appreciation of its special charm—a charm destined to be less apparent when seen as a frame to its brilliant mistress, who had the gift, so often the perquisite of beauty, of making places as well as people seem out of perspective. Cecily herself, all unconsciously, completed the low-toned picture by adding a delicious touch of fragrant youth.
Only Mrs. Robinson in all good faith considered Cecily Wake pretty. True, she had the abundant hair, the clear eyes, the white teeth, which seemed to Mr. Gumberg so essential to feminine loveliness; but beautiful she was not—indeed, none of her friends denied her those qualities which the plain are always being told count so much more than beauty; that is, abundant kindliness, a sterling honesty, and a certain fiery loyalty which both touched and diverted those who knew her.