The lawyer’s face fell.
‘I suppose it cannot be ready before then,’ he said, with a sigh.
The two drew up rather disconsolately to the fireside. The younger man’s eyes wandered round the room and lit upon one of those oil-paintings typical of the time, representing a coach-horse, dock-tailed, round-barrelled, and with a wonderfully long rein.
‘That is the only picture I have noticed in the house,’ he observed. ‘Are there no more—no portraits, I mean?’
‘To be sure there are,’ replied Barclay, ‘but they have been put in the garret, which we forgot to visit in our walk round. We will go up and see them if you wish. They are handsomely framed and will make a suitable show when we get them up on the walls.’
The garret was approached by a steep wooden stair, and, as they stood among the strange collection it contained in the way of furniture and cobwebs, Speid saw that the one vacant space of wall supported a row of pictures, which stood on the floor like culprits, their faces to the wainscot. Barclay began to turn them round. It irked the young man to see his fat hands twisting the canvases about, and flicking the dust from the row of faces which he regarded with a curious stirring of feeling. Nothing passed lightly over Gilbert.
He was relieved when his companion, whose heart was in the kitchen, and who was looking with some petulance at the dust which had fallen on his coat from the beams above, proposed to go down and push forward the preparations for dinner.
Speid stood absorbed before the line of vanished personalities which had helped to determine his existence, and they returned his look with all the intelligent and self-conscious gravity of eighteenth-century portraiture. Only one in the row differed in character from the others, and he took up the picture and carried it to the light. It represented a lady whose figure was cut by the oval frame just below the waist. Her hands were crossed in front of her, and her elbows brought into line with her sides, as were those of the other Speid ancestresses; there was something straight and virginal in her pose. Never had Gilbert seen such conventionality of attitude joined to so much levity of expression. She wore a mountain of chestnut hair piled high on her head and curling down one side of her neck. Her open bodice of warm cream colour suggested a bust rather fuller than might be expected from the youthful and upright stiffness of her carriage, and, over her arm, hung an India muslin spotted scarf, which had apparently slipped down round her waist. Her eyes were soft in shade and hard in actual glance, bold, bright, scornful, under strongly marked brows. The mouth was very red, and the upper lip fine; the lower lip protruded, and drooped a little in the middle. Her head was half turned to meet the spectator.
Her appearance interested him, and he searched the canvas for an inscription. Turning it round, he saw a paper stuck upon the back and covered with writing: ‘Clementina Speid, daughter of John Lauder, Esq., of Netherkails, and Marie La Vallance, his wife. 1767.’
The lady was his mother; and the portrait had been painted just after her marriage, three years before his own birth.