“The fellow who painted this tabletop didn’t spare his colours,” said the dealer half an hour later, “and that’s all the better for us. See, it comes off like a skin”—and he worked away tenderly with a soft flannel. “Well, I’m jiggered,” he went on, “if here isn’t another caterpillar higher up! No, it ain’t a caterpillar; but if it ain’t a caterpillar, what is it?”
There was indeed another wavy green line, but Westray knew what it was directly he saw it. “Be careful,” he said; “they aren’t caterpillars at all, but just part of a coat of arms—a kind of bars in an heraldic shield, you know. There will be another shorter green line lower down.”
It was as he said, and in a minute more there shone out the silver field and the three sea-green bars of the nebuly coat, and below it the motto Aut Fynes aut finis, just as it shone in the top light of the Blandamer window. It was the middle bar that Sophia had turned into a caterpillar, and in pure wantonness left showing through, when for her own purposes she had painted out the rest of the picture. Westray’s excitement was getting the better of him—he could not keep still; he stood first on one leg and then on another, and drummed on the table with his fingers.
The dealer put his hand on the architect’s arm. “For God’s sake keep quiet!” he said; “don’t excite yourself. You needn’t think you have found a gold mine. It ain’t a ten thousand-guinea Vandyke. We can’t see enough yet to say what it is, but I’ll bet my life you never get a twenty-pound note for it.”
But for all Westray’s impatience, the afternoon was well advanced before the head of the portrait was approached. There had been so few interruptions, that the dealer felt called upon to extenuate the absence of custom by explaining more than once that it was a very dull season. He was evidently interested in his task, for he worked with a will till the light began to fail. “Never mind,” he said; “I will get a lamp; now we have got so far we may as well go a bit further.”
It was a full-face picture, as they saw a few minutes afterwards. Westray held the lamp, and felt a strange thrill go through him, as he began to make out the youthful and unwrinkled brow. Surely he knew that high forehead—it was Anastasia’s, and there was Anastasia’s dark wavy hair above it. “Why, it’s a woman after all,” the dealer said. “No, it isn’t; of course, how could it be with a brown velvet coat and waistcoat? It’s a young man with curly hair.”
Westray said nothing; he was too much excited, too much interested to say a word, for two eyes were peering at him through the mist. Then the mist lifted under the dealer’s cloth, and the eyes gleamed with a startling brightness. They were light-grey eyes, clear and piercing, that transfixed him and read the very thoughts that he was thinking. Anastasia had vanished. It was Lord Blandamer that looked at him out of the picture.
They were Lord Blandamer’s eyes, impenetrable and observant as today, but with the brightness of youth still in them; and the face, untarnished by middle age, showed that the picture had been painted some years ago. Westray put his elbows on the table and his head between his hands, while he gazed at the face which had thus come back to life. The eyes pursued him, he could not escape from them, he could scarcely spare a glance even for the nebuly coat that was blazoned in the corner. There were questions revolving in his mind for which he found as yet no answer. There was some mystery to which this portrait might be the clue. He was on the eve of some terrible explanation; he remembered all kinds of incidents that seemed connected with this picture, and yet could find no thread on which to string them. Of course, this head must have been painted when Lord Blandamer was young, but how could Sophia Flannery have ever seen it? The picture had only been the flowers and the tabletop and caterpillar all through Miss Euphemia’s memory, and that covered sixty years. But Lord Blandamer was not more than forty; and as Westray looked at the face he found little differences for which no change from youth to middle age could altogether account. Then he guessed that this was not the Lord Blandamer whom he knew, but an older one—that octogenarian who had died three years ago, that Horatio Sebastian Fynes, gentleman, who had married Sophia Flannery.
“It ain’t a real first-rater,” the dealer said, “but it ain’t bad. I shouldn’t be surprised if ’twas a Lawrence, and, anyway, it’s a sight better than the flowers. Beats me to know how anyone ever came to paint such stuff as them on top of this respectable young man.”
Westray was back in Cullerne the next evening. In the press of many thoughts he had forgotten to tell his landlady that he was coming, and he stood charing while a maid-of-all-work tried to light the recalcitrant fire. The sticks were few and damp, the newspaper below them was damp, and the damp coal weighed heavily down on top of all, till the thick yellow smoke shied at the chimney, and came curling out under the worsted fringe of the mantelpiece into the chilly room. Westray took this discomfort the more impatiently, in that it was due to his own forgetfulness in having sent no word of his return.
“Why in the world isn’t the fire lit?” he said sharply. “You must have known I couldn’t sit without a fire on a cold evening like this;” and the wind sang dismally in the joints of the windows to emphasise the dreariness of the situation.
“It ain’t nothing to do with me,” answered the red-armed, coal-besmeared hoyden, looking up from
