The Troll Garden and Selected Stories, Willa Cather [some good books to read txt] 📗

the evening, and the next morning went out to Kensington to find Treffinger’s studio. It lay in one of the perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the number he found on a door set in a high garden wall, the top of which was covered with broken green glass and over which a budding lilac bush nodded. Treffinger’s plate was still there, and a card requesting visitors to ring for the attendant. In response to MacMaster’s ring, the door was opened by a cleanly built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that had been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes of that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven except for the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks. He bore himself in a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort of trimness and alertness about him, despite the too-generous shoulders of his coat. In one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and in the other a copy of <i>Sporting Life</i>. While MacMaster was explaining the purpose of his call he noticed that the man surveyed him critically, though not impertinently. He was admitted into a little tank of a lodge made of whitewashed stone, the back door and windows opening upon a garden. A visitor’s book and a pile of catalogues lay on a deal table, together with a bottle of ink and some rusty pens. The wall was ornamented with photographs and colored prints of racing favorites.

“The studio is h’only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,” explained the man—he referred to himself as “Jymes”—“but of course we make exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling Treffinger ‘erself is on the Continent, but Sir ‘Ugh’s orders was that pynters was to ‘ave the run of the place.” He selected a key from his pocket and threw open the door into the studio which, like the lodge, was built against the wall of the garden.

MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed planks, painted a light green; cold and damp even on that fine May morning. The room was utterly bare of furniture—unless a stepladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such—and was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never seen so many of Treffinger’s paintings together. He knew the painter had married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of his pictures as he wished. These, with all of <i>182</i> his replicas and studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to the younger men of the school he had originated.

As soon as he was left alone MacMaster sat down on the edge of the model throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed was what he had come for; it rather paralyzed his receptivity for the moment, but gradually the thing found its way to him.

At one o’clock he was standing before the collection of studies done for <i>Boccaccio’s Garden</i> when he heard a voice at his elbow.

“Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to lunch. Are you lookin’ for the figure study of Boccaccio ‘imself?” James queried respectfully. “Lydy Elling Treffinger give it to Mr. Rossiter to take down to Oxford for some lectures he’s been agiving there.”

“Did he never paint out his studies, then?” asked MacMaster with perplexity. “Here are two completed ones for this picture. Why did he keep them?”

“I don’t know as I could say as to that, sir,” replied James, smiling indulgently, “but that was ‘is way. That is to say, ‘e pynted out very frequent, but ‘e always made two studies to stand; one in watercolors and one in oils, before ‘e went at the final picture—to say nothink of all the pose studies ‘e made in pencil before he begun on the composition proper at all. He was that particular. You see, ‘e wasn’t so keen for the final effect as for the proper pyntin’ of ‘is pictures. ‘E used to say they ought to be well made, the same as any other h’article of trade. I can lay my ‘and on the pose studies for you, sir.” He rummaged in one of the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings, “These three,” he continued, “was discarded; these two was the pose he finally accepted; this one without alteration, as it were.

“That’s in Paris, as I remember,” James continued reflectively. “It went with the <i>Saint Cecilia</i> into the Baron H–‘s collection. Could you tell me, sir, ‘as ‘e it still? I don’t like to lose account of them, but some ‘as changed ‘ands since Sir ‘Ugh’s death.”

“H–‘s collection is still intact, I believe,” replied MacMaster. “You were with Treffinger long?”

“From my boyhood, sir,” replied James with gravity. “I was a stable boy when ‘e took me.”

“You were his man, then?”

“That’s it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio. I always mixed ‘is colors and ‘e taught me to do a share of the varnishin’; ‘e said as ‘ow there wasn’t a ‘ouse in England as could do it proper. You ayn’t looked at the <i>Marriage</i> yet, sir?” he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his thumb the picture under the north light.

“Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler; that’s rather appalling, at first glance,” replied MacMaster.

“Well may you say that, sir,” said James warmly. “That one regular killed Sir ‘Ugh; it regular broke ‘im up, and nothink will ever convince me as ‘ow it didn’t bring on ‘is second stroke.”

When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus his mind was divided between two exultant convictions. He felt that he had not only found Treffinger’s greatest picture, but that, in James, he had discovered a kind of cryptic index to the painter’s personality—a clue which, if tactfully followed, might lead to much.

Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster wrote to Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London for some time and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an only sister of Lady Ellen Treffinger, the painter’s widow, and MacMaster had known her during one winter he spent at Nice. He had known her, indeed, very well, and Lady Mary, who was astonishingly frank and communicative upon all subjects, had been no less so upon the matter of her sister’s unfortunate marriage.

In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he found the drawing room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed, and her body stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigor of cast iron. This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands, her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face, which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.

“Really,” said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose glasses, “really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you altogether. It’s four years since I saw you at Nice, isn’t it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you.”

“I was in New York then.”

“It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?”

“Can you ask?” replied MacMaster gallantly.

Lady Mary smiled ironically. “But for what else, incidentally?”

“Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger’s studio and his unfinished picture. Since I’ve been here, I’ve decided to stay the summer. I’m even thinking of attempting to do a biography of him.”

“So that is what brought you to London?”

“Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I came. It’s his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me. The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined.”

“You’ll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny,” remarked Lady Mary dryly. “Isn’t there rather a surplus of books on that subject already?”

“Such as they are. Oh, I’ve read them all”—here MacMaster faced Lady Mary triumphantly. “He has quite escaped your amiable critics,” he added, smiling.

“I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on art,” said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. “We leave that to peoples who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you’ve come to us in a missionary spirit, we’ll tolerate you politely, but we’ll laugh in our sleeve, I warn you.”

“That really doesn’t daunt me, Lady Mary,” declared MacMaster blandly. “As I told you, I’m a man with a mission.”

Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. “Bravo! And you’ve come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?”

MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. “Not altogether for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon your discretion.”

“I think she would prefer to be consulted,” replied Lady Mary judicially. “I can’t understand how she endures to have the wretched affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious about this matter, insofar as her light goes,—which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and you can see her when she returns from Italy.”

“I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every way,” queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.

“No, I can’t say that she is. She has remained in much the same condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don’t recover from wounds of that sort—at least, not women of Ellen’s grain. They go on bleeding inwardly.”

“You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled,” MacMaster ventured.

“Oh I give him his dues. He was a colorist, I grant you; but that is a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger found it so.”

“But, my dear Lady Mary,” expostulated MacMaster, “and just repress me if I’m becoming too personal—but it must, in the first place, have been a marriage of choice on her part as well as on his.”

Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. “Ellen, my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person. She is quiet about it, but she runs deep. I never knew how deep until I came against her on the issue of that marriage. She was always discontented as a girl; she found things dull and prosaic, and the ardor of his courtship was agreeable to her. He met her during her first season in town. She is handsome, and there were plenty of other men, but I grant you your scowling brigand was the most picturesque of the lot. In his courtship, as in everything else, he was theatrical to the