Vard stood towering--in some infernal way he seemed literally to rise
to the situation--one hand in the bosom of his coat, in the attitude of
patriotism in bronze. I glanced at his daughter: she hung on him with a
drowning look. Suddenly she straightened herself; there was something
of Vard in the way she faced her fears--a kind of primitive calm we
drawing-room folk don’t have. She stepped to him and laid her hand on
his arm. The pause hadn’t lasted ten seconds.
“Father--” she said.
Vard threw back his head and swept the studio with a sovereign eye.
“The back way, Mr. Vard, the back way,” Cornley whimpered. “For God’s
sake, sir, don’t lose a minute.”
Vard transfixed his abject henchman.
“I have never yet taken the back way,” he enunciated; and, with a
gesture matching the words, he turned to me and bowed.
“I regret the disturbance”--and he walked to the door. His daughter was
at his side, alert, transfigured.
“Stay here, my dear.”
“Never!”
They measured each other an instant; then he drew her arm in his. She
flung back one look at me--a paean of victory--and they passed out with
Cornley at their heels.
I wish I’d finished the face then; I believe I could have caught
something of the look she had tried to make me see in him. Unluckily I
was too excited to work that day or the next, and within the week the
whole business came out. If the indictment wasn’t a put-up job--and
on that I believe there were two opinions--all that followed was. You
remember the farcical trial, the packed jury, the compliant judge, the
triumphant acquittal?... It’s a spectacle that always carries
conviction to the voter: Vard was never more popular than after his
“exoneration”...
I didn’t see Miss Vard for weeks. It was she who came to me at length;
came to the studio alone, one afternoon at dusk. She had--what shall I
say?--a veiled manner; as though she had dropped a fine gauze between
us. I waited for her to speak.
She glanced about the room, admiring a hawthorn vase I had picked up at
auction. Then, after a pause, she said:
“You haven’t finished the picture?”
“Not quite,” I said.
She asked to see it, and I wheeled out the easel and threw the drapery
back.
“Oh,” she murmured, “you haven’t gone on with the face?”