第23章

'But not for pictures,' I rejoined.He paid no attention, staring at the ground and twisting one end of his moustache.

'The sun on those old marble tombs--broad sun and sand--'

'You mean somewhere about Delhi.'

'I couldn't get anywhere near it.' He was not at that moment anywhere near me.'But I have thought out a trick or two--I mean to have another go when it cools off again down there.' He returned with a smile, and I saw how delicate his face was.The smile turned down with a little gentle mockery in its lines.I had seen that particular smile only on the faces of one or two beautiful women.

It had a borrowed air upon a man, like a tiara or an earring.

'There's plenty to paint,' he said, looking at me with an air of friendly speculation.

'Indeed, yes.And it has never been done.We are sure it has never been done.'

'"We"--you mean people generally?'

'Not at all.I mean Miss Harris, Miss Harris and myself.'

'Your daughter?'

'My name is Philips,' I reminded him pleasantly, remembering that the intelligence of clever people is often limited to a single art.

'Miss Harris is the daughter of Mr.Edward Harris, Secretary of the Government of India in the Legislative Department.She is fond of pictures.We have a good many tastes in common.We have always suspected that India had never been painted, and when we saw your things at the Town Hall we knew it.'

His queer eyes dilated, and he blushed.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's only one interpretation.It all depends on what a fellow sees.No fellow can see everything.'

'Till you came,' I insisted, 'nobody had seen anything.'

He shook his head, but I could read in his face that this was not news to him.

'That is mainly what I came up to tell you,' I continued, 'to beg that you will go on and on.To hope that you will stay a long time and do a great deal.It is such an extraordinary chance that any one should turn up who can say what the country really means.'

He stuck his hands in his pockets with a restive movement.'Oh, don't make me feel responsible,' he said, 'I hate that;' and then suddenly he remembered his manners.'But it's certainly nice of you to think so,' he added.

There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me to ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover that he came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way of a few years in London and Paris.This accounted in a way for the effect of freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked him, and perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and experiment which sat so lightly in his unlined face.He came, one realized, out of the fermentation of new conditions; he never could have been the product of our limits and systems and classes in England.His surroundings, his 'things,' as he called them, were as old as the sense of beauty, but he seemed simply to have put them where he could see them, there was no pose in their arrangement.

They were all good, and his delight in them was plain; but he was evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of natural instinct.

Some of those he had picked up in India I could tell him about, but I had no impression that he would remember what I said.There was one Bokhara tapestry I examined with a good deal of interest.

'Yes,' he said, 'they told me I shouldn't get anything as good as that out here, so I brought it,' but I had to explain to him why it was anomalous that this should be so.

'It came a good many miles over desert from somewhere,' he remarked, as I made a note of inquiry as to the present direction of trade in woven goods from Persia, 'I had to pound it for a week to get the dust out.'

We spent an hour looking over work he had done down in the plains, and then I took my leave.It did not occur to me at the moment to ask Armour to come to the club or to offer to do anything for him;all the hospitality, all that was worth offering seemed so much more at his disposition than at mine.I only asked if I might come again, mentioning somewhat shyly that I must have the opportunity of adding, at my leisure, to those of his pictures that were already mine by transaction with the secretary of the Art Exhibition.Ileft him so astonished that this had happened, so plainly pleased, that I was certain he had never sold anything before in his life.

This impression gave me the uplifted joy of a discoverer to add to the satisfactions I had already drawn from the afternoon; and Ialmost bounded down the hill to the Mall.I left the pi dog barking in the veranda, and I met Mr.Rosario coming up, but in my unusual elation I hardly paused to consider either of them further.

The mare and her groom were waiting on the Mall, and it was only when I got on her back that the consciousness visited me of something forgotten.It was my mission--to propose to take Armour, if he were 'possible,' to call upon the Harrises.Oh, well, he was possible enough; I supposed he possessed a coat, though he hadn't been wearing it; and I could arrange it by letter.Meanwhile, as was only fair, I turned the mare in the direction of the drawing-room where I had reason to believe that Miss Dora Harris was quenching her impatience in tea.