The Glory of Clementina Wing. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ to me. I’ve got you a commission.”

      “Who’s the fool?” asked Clementina.

      “It isn’t a fool,” said Tommy, buttoning the belt of his Norfolk jacket, as if to brace himself to the encounter. “It’s my uncle.”

      “Lord save us!” said Clementina.

      “I thought I would give you a surprise,” said Tommy.

      Clementina shrugged her shoulders and went on squeezing paint out of tubes.

      “He must have softening of the brain.”

      “Why?”

      “First for wanting to have his portrait painted at all, and secondly for thinking of coming to me. Go back and tell him I’m not a caricaturist.”

      Tommy planted a painting-stool in the middle of the floor and sat upon it, with legs apart.

      “Let us talk business, Clementina. In the first place, he has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want his portrait painted, bless you. It’s the other prehistoric fossils he foregathers with. I met chunks of them at dinner last night. They belong to the Anthropological Society, you know, they fool around with antediluvian stones and bones and bits of iron—and my uncle’s president. They want to have his portrait to hang up in the cave where they meet. They were talking about it at my end of the table. They didn’t know what painter to go to, so they consulted me. My uncle had introduced me as an artist, you know, and they looked on me as a sort of young prophet. I asked them how much they were prepared to give. They said about five hundred pounds—they evidently have a lot of money to throw about—one of them, all over gold chains and rings, seemed to perspire money, looked like a bucket-shop keeper. I think it’s he who is presenting the Society with the portrait. Anyway that’s about your figure, so I said there was only one person to paint my uncle and that was Clementina Wing. It struck them as a brilliant idea, and the end of it was that they told my uncle and requested me to sound you on the matter. I’ve sounded.”

      She looked at his confident boyish face, and uttered a grim sound, halfway between a laugh and a sniff, which was her nearest approach to exhibition of mirth, and might have betokened amusement or pity or contempt or any two of these taken together or the three combined. Then she turned away and, screwing up her eyes, looked out for a few moments into the sodden back garden.

      “Did you ever hear of a barber refusing to shave a man because he didn’t like the shape of his whiskers?”

      “Only one,” said Tommy, “and he cut the man’s throat from ear to ear with the razor.”

      He laughed loud at his own jest, and, going up to the window where Clementina stood with her back to him, laid a hand on her shoulder.

      “That means you’ll do it.”

      “Guineas, not pounds,” said Clementina, facing him. “Five hundred guineas. I couldn’t endure Ephraim Quixtus for less.”

      “Leave it to me, I’ll fix it up. So long.” He ran up the spiral staircase, in high good-humour. On the gallery he paused and leaned over the balustrade.

      “I say, Clementina, if the ugly young man calls to-day for that pretty Miss Etta, and you want any murdering done, send for me.”

      She looked up at him smiling down upon her, gay and handsome, so rich in his springtide, and she obeyed a sudden impulse.

      “Come down, Tommy.”

      When he had descended she unhooked from the wall over the fireplace a Della Robbia plaque—a child’s white head against a background of yellow and blue—a cherished possession—and thrust it into Tommy’s arms. He stared at her, but clutched the precious thing tight for fear of dropping it.

      “Take it. You can give it as a wedding present to your wife when you have one. I want you to have it.”

      He stammered, overwhelmed by her magnificent and unprecedented generosity. He could not accept the plaque. It was too priceless a gift.

      “That’s why I give it to you, you silly young idiot,” she cried impatiently. “Do you think I’d give you a pair of embroidered braces or a hymn-book? Take it and go.”

      What Tommy did then, nine hundred and ninety-nine young men out of a thousand would not have done. He held out his hand—“Rubbish,” said Clementina; but she held out hers—he gripped it, swung her to him and gave her a good, full, sounding, honest kiss. Then, holding the thing of beauty against his heart he leaped up the stairs and disappeared, with an exultant “Good-bye,” through the door.

      A dark flush rose on the kissed spot on Clementina’s cheek. Softness crept into her hard eyes. She looked at the vacant place on the wall where the cherished thing of beauty had hung. By some queer optical illusion it appeared even brighter than before.

      Tommy, being a young man of energy and enthusiasm with modern notions as to the reckoning of time, rushed the Anthropologists, who were accustomed to reckon time by epochs instead of minutes, off their leisurely feet. His uncle had said words of protest at this indecent haste; “My dear Tommy, if you were more of a reflective human being and less of a whirlwind, it would frequently add to your peace and comfort.” But Tommy triumphed. Within a very short period everything was settled, the formal letters had been exchanged, and Ephraim Quixtus found himself paying a visit, in a new character, to Clementina Wing.

      She received him in her prim little drawing-room—as prim and old-maidish as Romney Place itself—a striking contrast to the chaotically equipped studio which, as Tommy declared, resembled nothing so much as a show-room after a bargain-sale. The furniture was the stiffest of Sheraton, the innocent colour engravings of Tomkins, Cipriani, and Bartolozzi hung round the walls, and in a corner stood a spinning-wheel with a bunch of flax on the distaff. The room afforded Clementina perpetual grim amusement. Except when she received puzzled visitors she rarely sat in it from one year’s end to the other.

      “I haven’t seen you since the Deluge, Ephraim,” she said, as he bent over her hand in an old-fashioned un-English way. “How’s prehistoric man getting on?”

      “As well,” said he, gravely, “as can be expected.”

      Ephraim Quixtus, PhD., was a tall gaunt man of forty, with a sallow complexion, raven black hair thinning at the temples and on the crown of his head, and great, mild, china-blue eyes. A reluctant moustache gave his face a certain lack of finish. Clementina’s quick eye noted it at once. She screwed up her face and watched him.

      “I could make a much more presentable thing of you if you were clean shaven,” she said brusquely.

      “I couldn’t shave off my moustache.”

      “Why not?”

      He started in alarm.

      “I think the Society would prefer to have their President in the guise in which he presided over them.”

      “Umph!” said Clementina. She looked at him again, and with a touch of irony; “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sit down.”

      “Thank you,” said Quixtus, seating himself on one of the stiff Sheraton chairs. And then, courteously; “You have travelled far since we СКАЧАТЬ