For Jacinta

"I suppose you know why I have come to Laguna to-day?" she said.

"Yes," said Jacinta quietly. "Still, I hadn't the faintest notion a little while ago. I shall try to bear anything you may think fit to say to me. Mr. Austin, I understand, is a friend of yours."

The little lady smiled, for she saw that Jacinta was clever enough to make no excuses, and she appreciated her candour as well as her good sense.

"Well," she said, "I want you to tell me why you sent him to Africa."

"For one thing, because Muriel was once very kind to me. Mr. Jefferson was down with fever, and I fancied that, in any case, he could do a good deal more with a comrade there. Still, that was not all. There were other reasons."

"Naturally. It is gratifying to discover how far a man's devotion will carry him."

A little flash crept into Jacinta's eyes, but it faded again. "I suppose I deserve that, but you are wrong. It wasn't to soothe my vanity."

"No?" and there was a suggestion of incredulity in Mrs. Hatherly's smile. "Still, one may be excused for pointing out that it really looks very like it."

Jacinta made a little movement with her fan. "You can't think worse of me than I do of myself; but I scarcely fancy I did wrong in sending him. He was wasting his life here, and I thought I knew what there was in him. I wanted to rouse it – to waken him. You see, I am talking very frankly."

"In that case it must have cost you something to send him to Africa?"

The colour showed plainly in Jacinta's face. "I think that is another question. One, too, which you could scarcely expect me to answer you."

"I'm afraid it was not very delicate," and Mrs. Hatherly's eyes grew gentler. "Still, didn't you feel that you were presumptuous?"

"Of course; but I have always done what pleased me, and made others do it, too. It usually turned out well, you know. I have, however, come to grief this time, and it would almost be a relief if somebody would shake me."

Mrs. Hatherly smiled. "I fancy the feeling will do you good. Still, if you were right in sending Mr. Austin out, it is just a little incomprehensible."

"Then you don't know how I treated him?"

"No," said Mrs. Hatherly. "At least, not exactly. He only admitted that you did not seem very pleased to see him. Still, I am an old woman, and that naturally conveyed a good deal to me. Perhaps you do deserve shaking, but I want to be kind."

Jacinta turned to her with the colour in her cheeks and a haziness in her eyes.

"I taunted him with being a coward and finding the work too hard for him. The man was ill and jaded, but I had no mercy on him. He said nothing; he never told me he was going back. How was I to know? The night my father's message came I felt I could have struck him. If I had done so, he would probably not have felt it half so much as the bitterness I heaped upon him."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Hatherly. "It was, perhaps, natural under the circumstances, but there is a good deal that you are responsible for."

"What do you mean by under the circumstances?"

Mrs. Hatherly smiled. "I have not the slightest doubt that you quite understand, my dear. The question, however, is how you are going to set it right?"

Jacinta shivered a little. The colour had already ebbed from her face, which was a trifle more pallid than usual.

"It is a thing I may never be able to do," she said. "That is what makes it so hard. You see, a good many men go out to Africa, and so few come back again. If it hadn't been for that I don't think I should have admitted what I have done, but I feel I must have somebody's comprehension – if I can't expect sympathy."

"You have mine, my dear," and Mrs. Hatherly laid a beautiful thin hand gently upon her arm. "Besides, I think Mr. Austin will understand how it came about when he goes back to Africa."

Jacinta straightened herself slowly. "Well," she said, "that may happen, and in any case I know that I sent him, and he was glad to go."

She met the little lady's sympathetic gaze steadily. "Still, that is so very little, after all."

Mrs. Hatherly smiled reassuringly. "My dear," she said, "I think you do not quite understand all that man is yet. In spite of the climate he and his comrade are going to be successful."

Then she turned, and Jacinta rose, for the Señora Anasona and Muriel were coming down the stairway.

CHAPTER XXI

THE PICTURES

Austin had been gone a fortnight when Jacinta and Muriel Gascoyne sat under the lee of the Estremedura's deck-house one morning, on their way to Las Palmas. Above them the mastheads swung languidly athwart a cloudless sweep of blue, and the sea frothed in white incandescence about the lurching hull below as the little yacht-like steamer reeled eastwards with a rainbow in the spray that whirled about her bows. Astern of her the Peak's white cone gleamed above its wrappings of fleecy mist, and ahead on the far horizon Grand Canary swam a purple cloud.

Jacinta was dressed ornately in the latest English mode, and it seemed to Muriel that she had put on conventional frivolity along with her attire. Indeed, Muriel had noticed a change in her companion during the last few days, one that was marked by outbreaks of flippancy and somewhat ironical humour. An English naval officer leaned upon the back of her chair, and a tourist of the same nationality stood balancing himself against the rolling with his hand on the rail that ran along the deck-house. The latter was looking down at Macallister, who sat upon the deck with a little box in front of him.

"I brought up the two or three sketches ye were asking for, Mr. Coulstin," he said. "The saloon's full of jabbering Spaniards, and the messroom's over hot."

The tourist screwed the glass he wore more tightly into his eye. "If they're equal to the one I saw in the N. W. A. store I may be open to make a purchase," he said. "I think you told me you were acquainted with the artist, Miss Brown?"

"I believe I did," said Jacinta, who was conscious that Macallister was watching her languidly. "You will, however, no doubt be able to judge his pictures for yourself."

Coulston made a little humourous gesture. "I am not a painter, and I could scarcely venture to call myself a connoisseur. Still, I buy a picture or two occasionally, and the one I mentioned rather took my fancy. A sketch or two of that kind would make a pleasant memento."

"One would fancy that a good photograph would be more reliable, as well as cheaper," said the naval officer.

Coulston reproachfully shook his head. "I'm afraid we differ there," he said. "Leaving out the question of colour, a photograph is necessarily an artificial thing. It wants life and atmosphere, and you can never put that into a picture by a mechanical process. Only a man can feel, and transmute his impressions into material. Accuracy of detail is, after all, by comparison, a secondary consideration, but perhaps I had better pull up before my hobby makes a bolt of it."

"I have heard of people riding a hobby uncomfortably hard," said Jacinta reflectively.

"That, I think, is, to be accurate, seldom what happens. If a man has a genuine hobby, it never needs spurring. It is, in fact, unpleasantly apt to run away with him on the smallest provocation. Are steamboat men addicted to making sketches, Mr. Macallister?"

"No," said Macallister, grinning. "At least its not the usual thing, but I once sailed with another of them who did. He was second engineer, and would draw the chief one day. It was very like him, so like that it cost the man his job, and a wife as well. Says he, 'How could ye expect me to idealise a man with a mouth like yon?'"

"But how did that affect his wife?" asked the officer.

Macallister grinned more broadly, but it was Jacinta he looked at.

"Ye see," he said, "he had not got one then. He was second engineer, and would have gone chief in a new boat if he'd stayed with that company. The young woman was ambitious, and she told him she would not marry him until he was promoted, on principle. He was a long while over it after he lost that berth, and then – also on principle – he would not marry her."

Jacinta laughed, though Muriel fancied she had seen a momentary hardening of her face.

"She probably deserved it, though one can't help concluding that she wouldn't feel it much," she said. "That is one of the advantages of being a practical person; but hadn't you better get the drawings out?"

Macallister took out a sketch in water-colour and held it up. It showed a strip of a steamer's deck, with the softened sunlight beating down through an awning upon a man in skipper's uniform who lay, cigar in hand, in a hammock that swung beneath the spars. He was, to judge from his expression, languidly contented with everything, and there was a big glass of amber-coloured liquid on the little table beside him, and a tier of bottles laid out upon the deck. Beneath it ran the legend, "For men must work."

"That," said Jacinta, "is, at least, what they tell their wives."

The tourist gazed at the drawing, and then turned to her. He was, as she had discovered already, a painfully didactic person.

"The conceit," he said, "is a somewhat happy one, though the sketch is, it seems to me, a little weak in technique. As we admitted, one difference between a photograph and a painting is that the artist records his own sensations in the latter, and stamps it with, at least, a trace of his individuality. In that respect the sketch is, I fancy, characteristic. The artist, one could imagine, was in full sympathy with his subject – the far niente – but I am, no doubt, getting prosy."