The Judgment Books

He stood away from the portrait and let her see it. He had strengthened the outline since she had been in at breakfast, and sketched in the background.

"Why, it's splendid!" she said. "That's exactly the way you loll on the edge of the table. Frank, it's awfully good. But why have you rubbed out the face?"

Frank looked up.

"Ah, yes; I rubbed it out directly after you left me, and made a sketch of what it was going to be like, and I forgot to put it in again. I'll do it now. There is a great deal of careful work about the hands, too."

"What are you doing?" asked Margery, examining them. "It looks as if you were smoothing out a crumpled piece of paper."

"Ah, you think that?" said Frank, absently. "I wondered if you would think I was crumpling a piece of paper up."

"Oh no," said she, confidently; "you are smoothing it out. What does it mean? What's the paper – a programme or something?"

"Yes, a programme or something."

He emphasized the faint lines on the face, and again stood aside.

"Look!"

"Oh, Frank, that won't do at all. You look as if you were a convict or something horrible, or as if that piece of paper in your hands was an unpaid bill which you were trying not to pay."

Frank laughed a little bitter laugh.

"My drawing has been very successful," he said.

Margery was still looking at the face.

"It is horrible," she said. "Yet I don't see where it is wrong. It's very like you, somehow."

She looked from the picture to her husband, and saw that his face was puzzled and anxious.

"I see what it is," she said. "You've been worrying and growling over it till your face really began to look something like what you were drawing. Oh, Frank, you haven't had breakfast yet. Sit down and have it at once. It all comes of having no breakfast."

"Is that all, do you think?" asked he. "Is that the face of a man who is only guilty of not eating his breakfast? It looks to me guilty, somehow."

"Yes, that's why it's guilty. Your face is guilty, too. When you've eaten your breakfast and smoked that horrid little black pipe of yours, it won't look guilty any more."

Frank was looking at what he had done with the air of a disinterested spectator.

"It seems to me that that brute there has done something worse than not eat his breakfast," he said.

"Nonsense. I'm going to get you some fresh tea because this is cold, and there's that sweet little cold grouse dying, so to speak, to be eaten. You begin on it while I get the tea."

Frank felt exhausted and hungry, and he sat down and proceeded to cut the "sweet little grouse" of which Margery had spoken. He had a strange sense of having just awakened from a dream, or else having just fallen asleep and begun dreaming. He could not tell which seemed the most real – the hours he had just spent before the canvas, or the present moment with Margery in his thoughts. He only knew that the two were quite distinct and different.

Suddenly he dropped his knife and fork with a crash, and turned to the picture again. Yes, there was no doubt about it. There was a curious look in the lines of the face, especially in the mouth, which suggested guilt; and yet, as Margery had said, it was very like him.

Margery's fears and doubts had returned to her for a moment with renewed force as she looked at the face Frank had drawn, but she had spent an hour out-of-doors, and the fresh autumn air had been hellebore to fantastic thoughts, and, by a violent effort, she had torn her vague disquiet out of her mind, and her manner to Frank had been perfectly natural. She soon returned with a teapot of fresh tea, and chatted to him while he breakfasted.

"What part of your personality has gone this morning?" she asked. "It seems to me that you are just as sulky as you always are when you are painting. That's unfortunate, because this afternoon we play tennis at the Fortescues', and if you are sulky, why, there'll be a pair of you – you and Mr. F. Oh, but what a dreadful man, Frank! I don't love him one bit more than one Christian is bound to love another, and he's a Presbyterian at that!"

"Oh, I can't go to the Fortescues'," said Frank. "I want to get on with this. I've been working very hard, yet I haven't finished drawing it yet."

"Don't interrupt," said Margery. "Then we come home after tea, and the Rev. Mr. Greenock dines with us, and the Rev. Mrs. – particularly the Rev. Mrs."

"There are some people," said Frank, "who make me feel as I imagine rabbits must feel when they find a ferret has been put into their burrow – I want to run away."

"Yes, dear, I know exactly what you mean. She's got plenty of personality."

Margery's presence was wonderfully soothing to Frank. She carried an atmosphere of sanity about with her which could not fail to make itself felt. He leaned back in his chair and thought no more of the portrait.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," she went on. "Mother wants us both to come over to the Lizard and stay with her a couple of nights. She leaves on Thursday, you know, and I've hardly seen her."

"I can't possibly go," said Frank. "I can't leave my painting when I've only just begun it."

"I wish you'd come," said Margery.

"Margery, how silly you are! I couldn't possibly. But – but there's no reason why you shouldn't go."

He suddenly sprang up.

"Margery, tell me not to go on with it," he said, "and if you'll do that I'll come. But I can't leave it."

"Frank, how silly you are. I shall do nothing of the kind. I wish you would leave it for a couple of days and come with me, but I know it's no use arguing with you. I shall go, I think, for one night, not for two; so if I start to-morrow morning I shall get back on Friday evening. I must see mother again before she leaves Cornwall."

Frank walked back to the easel.

"What's the matter with it?" he said, impatiently.

"You've only made yourself look very cross, dear," said Margery, placidly. "You often do look cross, you know, but I should not advise you to paint yourself as cross as you are. Oh, Frank, I've got a brilliant idea!"

"What's that?"

"Why, put all the crossness out of your personality into the picture, and then you'll never be cross any more. Oh, I'm so glad I thought of that!"

Frank had picked up the charcoal and put a few finishing lines to the face.

"I've drawn it in carefully and freely, as if it was a black-and-white sketch," he said. "There, that's what I saw all morning, except just when you were breakfasting here."

"Oh, Frank, you do look a brute!" said Margery. "I'm not going to stop in the room with that, nor are you, because you are coming for a little walk till lunch-time. You have to see Hooper about mending that gate down to the rocks, and tell him, when he marks out the tennis-court, he must do it according to measurement, and not as his own exuberant fancy prompts. It's about a hundred feet long. Come away out."

Frank turned from the easel.

"Yes, I'll come," he said. "I can't get on with that just now; I don't know why; but unless I paint it as I see it I can't paint it at all, and I see it like that."

"Well, nobody can say you've flattered yourself," said Margery, consolingly.

They strolled out through the sweet-smelling woods, full of scents after the night's rain, and already beginning to turn gold and russet. A light mist still hung over the edges of the estuary, and five miles away, at Falmouth Harbor, the tall masts of the ships seemed to prick the skein of vapor like needles. The tide was up, and covered more than half of the little iron steps below the gate which had to be repaired, and long, brown-fingered sea-weed swung to and fro in the gentle swell of the water, like the hands of some blind man groping upward for light. Color, air, and sound alike seemed subdued and mellow, and with Margery by him Frank's phantoms seemed to catch something of the prevailing tranquillity, and retired into the dim, aqueous mists, instead of hovering insistently round him, black-winged, scarlet-robed.