Part 29 (1/2)

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

Mrs. Hatherly smiled rea.s.suringly. ”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 Senora 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 gla.s.s 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 trans.m.u.te 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 gla.s.s 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.”