第9章

When the porter's wife, who used to answer the house-bell, announced "A gentleman and a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days--the wish being father to the thought--an immediate vision of sitters.Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be;but not in the sense I should have preferred.There was nothing at first however to indicate that they mightn't have come for a portrait.The gentleman, a man of fifty, very high and very straight, with a moustache slightly grizzled and a dark grey walking-coat admirably fitted, both of which I noted professionally--I don't mean as a barber or yet as a tailor--would have struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking.

It was a truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public institution.A glance at the lady helped to remind me of this paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a "personality." Moreover one would scarcely come across two variations together.

Neither of the pair immediately spoke--they only prolonged the preliminary gaze suggesting that each wished to give the other a chance.They were visibly shy; they stood there letting me take them in--which, as I afterwards perceived, was the most practical thing they could have done.In this way their embarrassment served their cause.I had seen people painfully reluctant to mention that they desired anything so gross as to be represented on canvas; but the scruples of my new friends appeared almost insurmountable.Yet the gentleman might have said "I should like a portrait of my wife," and the lady might have said "I should like a portrait of my husband." Perhaps they weren't husband and wife--this naturally would make the matter more delicate.Perhaps they wished to be done together--in which case they ought to have brought a third person to break the news.

"We come from Mr.Rivet," the lady finally said with a dim smile that had the effect of a moist sponge passed over a "sunk" piece of painting, as well as of a vague allusion to vanished beauty.She was as tall and straight, in her degree, as her companion, and with ten years less to carry.She looked as sad as a woman could look whose face was not charged with expression; that is her tinted oval mask showed waste as an exposed surface shows friction.The hand of time had played over her freely, but to an effect of elimination.She was slim and stiff, and so well-dressed, in dark blue cloth, with lappets and pockets and buttons, that it was clear she employed the same tailor as her husband.The couple had an indefinable air of prosperous thrift--they evidently got a good deal of luxury for their money.If I was to be one of their luxuries it would behove me to consider my terms.

"Ah Claude Rivet recommended me?" I echoed and I added that it was very kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted landscape, this wasn't a sacrifice.

The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentleman looked round the room.Then staring at the floor a moment and stroking his moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on me with the remark: "He said you were the right one.""I try to be, when people want to sit."

"Yes, we should like to," said the lady anxiously.

"Do you mean together?"

My visitors exchanged a glance."If you could do anything with MEI suppose it would be double," the gentleman stammered.

"Oh yes, there's naturally a higher charge for two figures than for one.""We should like to make it pay," the husband confessed.

"That's very good of you," I returned, appreciating so unwonted a sympathy--for I supposed he meant pay the artist.

A sense of strangeness seemed to dawn on the lady."We mean for the illustrations--Mr.Rivet said you might put one in.""Put in--an illustration?" I was equally confused.

"Sketch her off, you know," said the gentleman, colouring.

It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivet had rendered me; he had told them how I worked in black-and-white, for magazines, for story-books, for sketches of contemporary life, and consequently had copious employment for models.These things were true, but it was not less true--I may confess it now; whether because the aspiration was to lead to everything or to nothing Ileave the reader to guess--that I couldn't get the honours, to say nothing of the emoluments, of a great painter of portraits out of my head.My "illustrations" were my pot-boilers; I looked to a different branch of art--far and away the most interesting it had always seemed to me--to perpetuate my fame.There was no shame in looking to it also to make my fortune but that fortune was by so much further from being made from the moment my visitors wished to be "done" for nothing.I was disappointed; for in the pictorial sense I had immediately SEEN them.I had seized their type--I had already settled what I would do with it.Something that wouldn't absolutely have pleased them, I afterwards reflected.

"Ah you're--you're--a -?" I began as soon as I had mastered my surprise.I couldn't bring out the dingy word "models": it seemed so little to fit the case.

"We haven't had much practice," said the lady.

"We've got to do something, and we've thought that an artist in your line might perhaps make something of us," her husband threw off.He further mentioned that they didn't know many artists and that they had gone first, on the off-chance--he painted views of course, but sometimes put in figures; perhaps I remembered--to Mr.

Rivet, whom they had met a few years before at a place in Norfolk where he was sketching.

"We used to sketch a little ourselves," the lady hinted.

"It's very awkward, but we absolutely must do something," her husband went on.

"Of course we're not so VERY young," she admitted with a wan smile.