“It was understood. I told him I should exhibit the picture and that afterwards I’d hand it over to him.”
“When is he going to see it?”
“Why do you ask? Do you want to be here when he does?”
She did not answer. She was staring at the portrait, and now the hot colour had faded from her face.
“If you do you can be here. I don’t mind.”
“I don’t believe it,” she repeated slowly.
All that she had sometimes fancied, almost dimly, and feared about Arabian was expressed in Garstin’s portrait of him. The man was magnificent on the canvas, but he was horrible. Evil seemed to be subtly expressed all over him. That was what she felt. It looked out of his large brown eyes. But that was not all. Somehow, in some curious and terrible way, Garstin had saturated his mouth, his cheeks, his forehead, even his bare neck and shoulders with the hideous thing. Danger was everywhere, the warning that the living man surely did not give, or only gave now and then for a fleeting instant.
In Garstin’s picture Arabian was unmistakably a being of the underworld, a being of the darkness, of secret places and hidden deeds, a being of unspeakable craft, of hideous knowledge, of ferocious cynicism. And yet he was marvellously handsome and full of force, even of power. It could not be said that great intellect was stamped on his face, but a fiercely vital mentality was there, a mentality that could frighten and subdue, that could command and be sure of obedience. In the eyes of a tiger there is a terrific mentality. Miss Van Tuyn thought of that as she gazed at the portrait.
In her silence now she was trying to get a strong hold on herself. The first shock of astonishment, and almost of horror, had passed. She was more sharply conscious now of Garstin in connexion with herself. At last she spoke again.
“Of course you realize, Dick, that such a portrait as that is an outrage. It’s a master work, I believe, but it is an outrage. You cannot exhibit it.”