Meanwhile Rose moved unconsciously before the long mirror, and removing her hat, slightly and deftly rearranged her beautiful and luxuriant hair as she answered him. “Why not?” she said banteringly; “you can’t believe that any one likes to pose for an hour—even to be made into one of your delightful pictures—but I’ll try to behave beautifully if you’ll answer all my questions, instead of going on with your painting, with a cigarette between your teeth and with the face of a sphinx, as you did the other day!”
“When you asked a dozen questions I couldn’t answer!” Allestree was selecting his brushes and contemplating the canvas on his easel with a despairing eye.
He had already outlined Rose’s figure and decided on the desired pose, but it seemed to him impossible to do justice to the exquisite charm of her beauty. It was a simple picture; he had endeavored to preserve what seemed to him the keynote of her personality, and had forborne to use any of those effects of brilliant color, rich draperies and elaborate accessories which a portrait painter commonly loves to lavish on a beautiful subject; instead, he had made her figure, with its superb poise, stand out in absolute simplicity. To Allestree she personified all the glorious possibilities of youth, with its buoyant hopes, its poignant truth, its magnificent faith in life, in the world, in itself. But when he looked from her to the canvas—where he had hoped to express something of all this—he felt deeply discouraged; his brush might be touched with the magic of a deep if unspoken passion, but it could never paint her as she appeared to him!
“I do not remember asking anything but the simplest questions,” she remarked, as she took her seat in the carved armchair which he had placed for her before a curtain of soft deep blue which seemed to suggest an April sky; “only you didn’t want to answer them. I warn you that I mean to be answered to-day! There’s nothing so abominable as your silences.”
Allestree smiled a little as he began to paint, with a slow and reluctant touch, feeling his way toward some achievement which might at least foreshadow success. “I fancied there was a virtue in silence; there’s a copy-book axiom to that effect,” he remarked; “besides, you would never come here at all punctually if you are not left in doubt on some mooted point. Mystery lures a woman as surely as magic.”
Rose gave him a reproachful glance. “And you think I like to sit here and listen to Mammy Hannah snore while you smoke and paint?” she said in a vexed tone, “for you always smoke and she always falls asleep.”
“Which is a special providence,” he retorted, “and the greatest virtue I ever met in a duenna.”
Without replying Rose looked absently around her, observing the details of his workshop more carefully than usual and noticing the harmonious effect of the colors, which he had grouped in his hangings. There was the high northern light concentrated on his subject, but beyond, in the corners, there were invitingly rich shadows, and here and there a bold, half finished sketch had been nailed to the walls. A well worn Turkey rug covered the portion of the floor occupied by his model, and a table in the window was set with a chafing-dish, a box of Egyptians and an odd shaped bronze tea-pot with some egg-shell cups which he had purchased in Japan. In a way Rose knew the history of everything in the room and almost the cost, but there was a touch of luxury about it which vaguely irritated her; it often seemed that Allestree was too well off to ever be a great artist,—he lacked the spur of necessity.
“Shall you paint for a living if you are ever poor?” she asked abruptly, resting her chin in her hand and contemplating him with a clear and impersonal gaze.
Allestree looked up, and observing the delicate hand with its tapering fingers and the jewelled chain which clasped her throat, smiled. “Shall you sing?” he asked, amused.