PAGE 12
The Pot-Boiler
by
The room in which they met was momentarily empty, and there was nothing to intervene between the shock of their inter-changed glances. Caspar was flushed and bristling: his little body quivered like a machine from which the steam has just been turned off. Kate lifted a stricken glance. Stanwell read in it the reflexion of her brother’s tirade, but she held out her hand in silence.
For a moment Caspar was silent too; then, with a terrible smile: “My dear fellow, I congratulate you; Mungold will have to look to his laurels,” he said.
The shot delivered, he stalked away with his seven-league stride, and Kate moved tragically through the room in his wake.
V
SHEPSON took up his hat with a despairing gesture.
“Vell, I gif you up–I gif you up!” he said.
“Don’t–yet,” protested Stanwell from the divan.
It was winter again, and though the janitor had not forgotten the fire, the studio gave no other evidence of its master’s increasing prosperity. If Stanwell spent his money it was not upon himself.
He leaned back against the wall, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, while Shepson paced the dirty floor or halted impatiently before an untouched canvas on the easel.
“I tell you vat it is, Mr. Sdanwell, I can’t make you out!” he lamented. “Last vinter you got a sdart that vould have kept most men going for years. After making dat hit vith Mrs. Millington’s picture you could have bainted half the town. And here you are sitting on your divan and saying you can’t make up your mind to take another order. Vell, I can only say that if you take much longer to make it up, you’ll find some other chap has cut in and got your job. Mrs. Van Orley has been waiting since last August, and she dells me you haven’t even answered her letter.”
“How could I? I didn’t know if I wanted to paint her.”
“My goodness! Don’t you know if you vant three thousand tollars?”
Stanwell surveyed his cigarette. “No, I’m not sure I do,” he said.
Shepson flung out his hands. “Ask more den–but do it quick!” he exclaimed.
Left to himself, Stanwell stood in silent contemplation of the canvas on which the dealer had riveted his reproachful gaze. It had been destined to reflect the opulent image of Mrs. Alpheus Van Orley, but some secret reluctance of Stanwell’s had stayed the execution of the task. He had painted two of Mrs. Millington’s friends in the spring, had been much praised and liberally paid for his work, and then, declining several recent orders to be executed at Newport, had surprised his friends by remaining quietly in town. It was not till August that he hired a little cottage on the New Jersey coast and invited the Arrans to visit him. They accepted the invitation, and the three had spent together six weeks of seashore idleness, during which Stanwell’s modest rafters shook with Caspar’s denunciations of his host’s venality, and the brightness of Kate’s gratitude was tempered by a tinge of reproach. But her grief over Stanwell’s apostasy could not efface the fact that he had offered her brother the means of escape from town, and Stanwell himself was consoled by the reflection that but for Mrs. Millington’s portrait he could not have performed even this trifling service for his friends.
When the Arrans left him in September he went to pay a few visits in the country, and on his return, a month later, to the studio building he found that things had not gone well with Caspar. The little sculptor had caught cold, and the labour and expense of converting his gigantic off- spring into marble seemed to hang heavily upon him. He and Kate were living in a damp company of amorphous clay monsters, unfinished witnesses to the creative frenzy which had seized him after the sale of his group; and the doctor had urged that his patient should be removed to warmer and drier lodgings. But to uproot Caspar was impossible, and his sister could only feed the stove, and swaddle him in mufflers and felt slippers.