Gerald took not the slightest notice.
"It will have to be a pretty big one," he continued. "There is a good
lot of red ink to cover. I have been taking a look round the house, and
I must say the pictures you've got are a fairly mangy lot--aren't they,
Moke?"
The gentleman addressed coughed deprecatingly, and looked at me as much
as to say that, whatever he thought of my taste in art, he had eaten my
salt and would refrain from criticism.
"There's one that might do, though," continued Gerald. "It's hanging in
the billiard-room--a big steamer in a storm."
By this time Phillis and Robin had joined the conclave.
"I know," said Phillis, nodding her head; "a great beautiful boat in
some waves. I should fink it was a friend of the _Great Eastern's_," she
added, referring to an antiquated print of the early Victorian leviathan
which hung in the nursery.
"We could take it for a term or two, anyhow," continued Gerald, "until
we get something better. I'm expecting some really decent ones after
summer. Ainslie _major_ is leaving then, and he has promised to let me
have some of his cheap. Then you can have yours back, Adrian. That's the
scheme! Come on, Moke, we'll go and take it down now. Thanks very much,
old chap" (to me). "I'll tell Kitty that you've let us. We can jab it
off its hook with a billiard-cue, I should think, Moke. Come too, will
you, Mr Fordyce? You can stand underneath and catch it, in case it comes
down with a run. So long, Adrian!"
The whole pack of them swept from the room, leaving the door open.
When I looked in at the billiard-room on my way up to dress for dinner
an hour later, nothing remained to mark the spot hitherto occupied by a
signed and numbered proof of _An Ocean Greyhound_, by Michael Angelo
Mahlstaff, A.R.A. (a wedding gift to my wife and myself from the
artist), but the imprints of several hot hands on the wall, together
with a series of parallel perpendicular scars, apparently inflicted by a
full-sized harrow.
From which two chapters it will be gathered that Robert Chalmers Fordyce
was a man capable, in his ordinary working-day, of playing many parts.